Lifeboat Foundation

New genetic technologies like CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and synthetic biology are leading us to entirely new definitions of disease. Now “patients” include people who want children who lack some of their own genes, or have additional ones that they themselves lack. Also among the new patients are people who in the past were too old to have children as well some women who get sick from pregnancy and childbirth, or even the idea of them. Technological advances on the horizon may eventually offer treatment for such conditions.

In February 2015 the British Parliament approved production of “three-parent” children by transferring the nucleus of one woman’s egg into the nucleus-less (“enucleated”) egg of a second woman to avoid the propagation of certain rare “mitochondrial” diseases, Though there were acknowledged risks of the unprecedented procedure (including the possibility of producing novel birth defects), the argument that prevailed was that some mitochondrial diseases are so devastating that it should be tried in the narrowly defined group of prospective mothers carrying defective mitochondria.

Not long afterward, news articles began to appear discussing use of the technique for an entirely different purpose. The procedure’s inventor, the Oregon Health & Science University biologist Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, was now proposing to treat infertility in older women by transferring their egg nuclei into the enucleated eggs of younger women.

Continue reading “Human Babies from CRISPR Pigs” »

Computer illustration of the mimivirus particle. Credit Jose Antonio Penas. Mimiviruses are viruses so big they can actually be seen with the naked eye. European.

More great news on Quantum Networks; some banks in Europe are leveraging the technology to communicate among themselves.

Light is everywhere. Even the darkest of rooms in our homes contain a handful of blinking LEDs. But what is light? Few of us ever stop to think about this question. Around a hundred years ago scientists discovered that light comes in granules, much like the sand on a beach, which we now call photons.

These are truly bizarre objects that obey the rules of the quantum world. The rules allow some pairs of photons to share a property called entanglement. After being entangled, two photons behave as one object. Changing one photon will affect the other at exactly the same time, no matter how far apart they are.

Continue reading “Sharing secrets with light” »

“Kaspersky admits that targeted attacks represent less than one percent of the entire threat landscape”;

Hmmm (wonder how much it cost to develop and deploy?) At least it’s a start.

https://lnkd.in/bzjHfzF

Continue reading “Kaspersky Labs rolls out targeted threat detection platform for enterprises” »

This has been around for a really, really long time. I remember many years ago one could go online without too much hassel and locate software code that the hacking network shared to teach folks their trade. I actually tested some of it for a firm to help test their infrastructure security; and it worked really well. However, now days it’s about the trade of id’s, credit card information, etc.

Beyond the regular Web, there is the Dark Web. You’ve probably heard something about it but probably just enough to know you didn’t want to know too much more about it. Well, here are some answers to some common questions about the Dark Web.

The DDoS prevention tool is part of Google Ideas, renamed Jigsaw, whose stated mission is to “build products to help people investigate corruption.”

Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.

Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.

Continue reading “Graphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’” »

One philosophy that I have often practice and encourage my team to do is to think like a hacker. It has served me and my teams well. At times; I have shared areas where risks exist in the emerging technologies; and hope that I don’t make folks too nervous. However, we all have to start thinking like hackers or pay the cost some day.

C-level executives from giant corporations and officials from the smallest companies all must think like hackers and test their cyber defenses regularly if they expect to avoid breaches of their systems.

That’s according to a panel of cybersecurity experts who recently spoke to a crowd gathered at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center.

Continue reading “Want to avoid breaches Think like a hacker” »