Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11870

It won’t be long now before cancer is nothing but a terrible, terrible memory.

Never soon enough, though.

Recent advances in an immune-cell cancer treatment called immunotherapy* (using engineered antibodies that can target specific molecules on cancer cells) are producing dramatic results for people with cancer, according to Stanley Riddell, MD, an immunotherapy researcher and oncologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.**

Riddell and his colleagues have refined new methods of engineering a patient’s own immune cells to better target and kill cancer cells while decreasing side effects. In laboratory and clinical trials, the researchers are seeing “dramatic responses” in patients with tumors that are resistant to conventional high-dose chemotherapy, “providing new hope for patients with many different kinds of malignancies,” Riddell said.

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An amputee feels texture in real time: Signals from sensors in an artificial fingertip are converted to neural-like spikes and delivered to nerves in the upper arm. (credit: Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

Amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first person in the world to recognize texture (smoothness vs. roughness) using an artificial “bionic” fingertip surgically connected to nerves in his upper arm. The experimental system was developed by EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) and SSSA (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna).

“The stimulation felt almost like what I would feel with my hand,” says Sørensen. “I felt the texture sensations at the tip of the index finger of my phantom hand.”

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In the next decade NASA plans to catch and redirect an asteroid. The question is, how will astronauts lasso and move around on a space rock? One option is using a space anchor, according to a Missouri University of Science & Technology design.

Missouri S& T students are working to design an anchoring device that will allow astronauts to clip in and move around on a wrangled asteroid. The device could be used during a human mission as part of NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission or ARM. The ARM objective is to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a sample and redirect it into orbit around the moon. The same techniques could be used for Martian missions in the 2030s, according to NASA.

Now back to the whole walking around on a moving asteroid objective.

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“A common challenge to the ideas presented in this book is that these exponential trends must reach a limit, as exponential trends commonly do.” –Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near

Much of the future we envision today depends on the exponential progress of information technology, most popularly illustrated by Moore’s Law. Thanks to shrinking processors, computers have gone from plodding, room-sized monoliths to the quick devices in our pockets or on our wrists. Looking back, this accelerating progress is hard to miss—it’s been amazingly consistent for over five decades.

But how long will it continue?

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The Roll-Array is easily towable by a standard 4×4 vehicle such as a Land Rover. When connected to the back of the car, the flexible solar panels are pulled out of a spool and create ground cover in a matter of minutes. On their website, Renovagen claims the panels will be able generate up to 100kWp – 10 times more power than other transportable solar panels on the market today.

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Not only is this new technology installed quickly, but the fuel cost savings during transportation is noteworthy. The tightly wound solar spools can be carried by the 4×4 vehicle attached to a small air pallet trailer in tow, which eliminates the need for large diesel generators.

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