Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Anomaly is an unusual Christmas tale, set in the late 60’s, which tells the story of a group of people connected by the same astrological event: A frightening meteor that will enter and exit the atmosphere. It is weird and sad and hopeful and just really interesting to watch.

Anomaly is an independent short film directed by Dan DiFelice & Salomon Lightelm. The film rose up to $60,000 in its Kikstarter campaign but it looks as gorgeous as if they had spent two million. Great post production houses like The Mill and Framestore also collaborated in the project. We featured Anomaly here the same day it was released on the Internet and we are very happy to have it on the Sploid Short Film Festival.

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made-in-spaces-first-3d-printer-sent-to-the-iss
“A California startup called Made In Space wants to make 3D for use in orbit. The idea is to give consumers the opportunity to allow their own satellites to be built right there, several hundred miles above Earth’s surface. Plans are in motion to send up a printer capable of accepting printing instructions from the public and building whatever someone on the ground has in mind.”

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Theatrical Trailer for The Martian. During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

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A Canadian company has clinched a patent for a 12.4 mile-high “space elevator” that could launch astronauts and tourists into orbit.

The free-standing tower would essentially be inflated, supported by a series of gas-pressurized cells, and serve as a docking platform for space planes that could launch cargo, tourists and satellites directly into lower orbit.

Thoth Technology, the Ontario-based company behind the invention, told CNBC the elevator could transport 10 tons of cargo at approximately seven miles per hour, with passengers able to reach the top of the tower in about 60 minutes. Passengers could then board a space plane that could reach lower orbit without the need for costly a rocket launch.

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Scientists at Ohio State University say they’ve grown the first near-complete human brain in a lab.

The brain organoid, if licensed for commercial lab use, could help speed research for neurological diseases and disorders, like Alzheimer’s and autism, Rene Anand, an Ohio State professor who worked on the project, said in a statement Tuesday.

“We will have a more precise prediction of efficacy of therapy and possible side effects before we do clinical trials,” Anand told The Huffington Post via email, explaining how his model is a more ethical alternative to trials that use rodent specimens. Anand said reducing the use of animals improves research as they’re “not as likely to predict clinical outcomes as human brain models.”

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Cancer requires extensive and fast division in order to become a serious threat, but this feature also renders it vulnerable, allowing certain growth pathways to be targeted. A new drug candidate has emerged which exploits this weakness, overstimulating proteins required for growth — tipping cellular stress in virulent cancer cells over the edge.

“No prior drug has been previously developed or proposed that actually stimulates an oncogene to promote therapy. Our prototype drug works in multiple types of cancers and encourages us that this could be a more general addition to the cancer drug arsenal.”

Many types of cancer require specific mutations in genes related to growth, and one particular target is the steroid receptor coactivator (SRC) family of oncogenes. These lie at the centre of signalling pathways used to grow rapidly, and conventional research has focused on inhibiting them to prevent tumour growth. Instead of inhibiting, this new strategy aims to upregulate their activity, overstimulating them to an extent that destroys the host cell. In their search for a suitable molecule which might cause such stimulation, researchers stumbled across a compound labeled MCB-613.

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