Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Sea urchins are remarkable organisms. They can quickly regrow damaged spines and feet. Some species also live to extraordinary old ages and—even more remarkably—do so with no signs of poor health, such as a decline in regenerative capacity or an increase in age-related mortality. These ocean Methuselahs even reproduce as if they were still youngsters.

MDI Biological Laboratory Associate Professor James A. Coffman, Ph.D., is studying the of sea urchins in hopes that a deeper understanding of the process of regeneration, which governs the regeneration of aging tissues as well as lost or damaged body parts, will lead to a deeper understanding of the aging process in humans, with whom sea urchins share a close genetic relationship.

In a paper recently published in Aging Cell, a leading journal in the field of aging biology, with Andrea G. Bodnar, Ph.D., of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies, the scientists shed new light on the aging process in sea urchins, raising the prospect that the physical decline that typically accompanies aging is not inevitable.

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#TheDAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization) is the hottest new form of investment built on revolutionary (Transparency, Democracy, Decentralization).

Our own Robin Hanson has been an inspiration:

“The slogan is vote on values, bet on beliefs. What you need are discreet decisions and then you need an outcome that you care about.”

Built from open-source code written by Ethereum-based startup Slock.it, The DAO has raised millions worth of ETH based on a business model of allowing those who buy voters rights tokens to cast a vote on funding proposals they want to support.

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The same laser system being developed to blast tiny spacecraft between the stars could also launch human missions to Mars, protect Earth from dangerous asteroids and help get rid of space junk, project leaders say.

Last month, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and other researchers announced Breakthrough Starshot, a $100 million project that aims to build prototype light-propelled “wafersats” that could reach the nearby Alpha Centauri star system just 20 years after launch.

The basic idea behind Breakthrough Starshot has been developed primarily by astrophysicist Philip Lubin of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has twice received funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program to develop the laser propulsion system. [Stephen Hawking Video: ‘Transcending Our Limits’ with Breakthrough Starshot].

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Your next pair of Adidas shoes may be put together by robots — the German sports retailer has said it will start selling its first robot-produced shoes in a new, state-of-the-art factory in its home market starting 2017.

The announcement came as Adidas unveiled its prototype “Speedfactory”, a state-of-the-art, 4,600 square-meter facility on Tuesday, meant to automate shoe production, which is largely done manually in Asian factories at the moment.

The new production site in the southern German city of Ansbach is still under construction, but it represents a return to local production for Adidas, which stopped manufacturing shoes in its home market more than two decades ago in favor of Asia.

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Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the first flexible wearable device capable of monitoring both biochemical and electric signals in the human body. The Chem-Phys patch records electrocardiogram (EKG) heart signals and tracks levels of lactate, a biochemical that is a marker of physical effort, in real time. The device can be worn on the chest and communicates wirelessly with a smartphone, smart watch or laptop. It could have a wide range of applications, from athletes monitoring their workouts to physicians monitoring patients with heart disease.

Nanoengineers and electrical engineers at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors worked together to build the device, which includes a flexible suite of sensors and a small electronic board. The device also can transmit the data from biochemical and electrical signals via Bluetooth.

Nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang and electrical engineering professor Patrick Mercier at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering led the project, with Wang’s team working on the patch’s sensors and chemistry, while Mercier’s team worked on the electronics and data transmission. They describe the Chem-Phys patch in the May 23 issue of Nature Communications.

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A more efficient way to mine water and other chemical volatiles to create rocket fuel in situ is arguably the fastest way to colonize the Moon and Mars.

Despite the recent buzz about eventually mining asteroids for metals, their real near-term value may be as space-based sources of water and carbon dioxide from which to make rocket propellant. The trick is in mining such volatile compounds efficiently enough to convert them to fuel in situ. That is, without having to import such resources from gravitationally-bound, planetary surfaces like the Moon, Mars or even Earth.

Here’s where a potentially revolutionary patent pending process dubbed “Optical-Mining” would figure in. The idea is to use this new technology to excavate both water ices and other volatile compounds from small 10 meter-diameter Near-Earth Asteroids. If successful, such an In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) asteroid-mining operation could mark the tipping point in viably extracting resources from thousands of such asteroids.

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