Lifeboat Foundation

Personal Perspective: Learning from a great philosopher of the mind.

Boronic acid has been used in organic chemistry for decades, even though it is not present in any organism. “It gives rise to different chemical reactions than those we find in nature,” explains Gerard Roelfes, Professor of Biomolecular Chemistry & Catalysis at the University of Groningen.

In the scientific literature, a citation acts as a mechanism to signal prior knowledge, enhance credibility, and protect against plagiarism. But it also gives credit to the individual or team who established or discovered the knowledge in question, and citations have thus emerged as a metric to measure the impact of a work or researcher.

“As long as the pharmaceutical companies quest for innovation is solely driven by intellectual property rights, they will keep failing in the war on cancer.”-Sylvie Beljanski.

Dr. Mirko Beljanski PhD, was a molecular biologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris who investigated how environmental toxins damage DNA leading to cancer as well as natural compounds with protective anticancer properties. His research eventually led him to the discovery of two unique and powerful anticancer plant extracts: Pao pereira and Rauwolfia vomitoria.

Continue reading “Dr. Mirko Beljanski’s incredible story and research on natural anticancer compounds Pao Pereira and Rauwolfia” »

Japanese scientists are set to kick off the world’s first clinical trials of “tooth regrowth medicine” at the Kyoto University Hospital, The Mainichi reports.

Researchers from the Japanese startup Toregem Biopharma are planning to enroll patients who were born missing some or all of their teeth from birth, a condition called congenital anodontia, for the trials.

The patients will receive an antibody treatment that deactivates a protein called USAG-1, believed to stop “tooth buds,” which most people have, from developing into either baby or permanent teeth.

The founder of the dating app Bumble Whitney Wolfe Herd believes the future of dating will involve having your personal AI “dating concierge” talk to hundreds of other AIs to find a match.

That unabashed vision may sound familiar: it’s literally the plot of a 2017 episode of “Black Mirror,” as countless people on social have pointed out.

“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge,” Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as Bumble CEO in 2023 but remains involved in the company, told an audience at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. “You could share your insecurities. There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.”

Nice.

A novel quantum algorithm, which exploits the relation between the Lindblad master equation, stochastic differential equations, and Hamiltonian simulations, is proposed to simulate open quantum systems on a quantum computer.

An excellent discussion of the history, strategies, and future of new funding models for science wherein we can Ensure that scientific progress can flourish by removing financial and institutional obstacles for the world’s best scientists, so that they can fully pursue their curiosity and produce…

For those who sit between science and tech, it’s hard not to notice the proliferation of new initiatives launched in the last two years, aimed at making major improvements in the life sciences especially.

While I don’t have a science background, nor any personal relationship to the space (other than knowing and liking many of the folks involved), I became interested in learning why the space changed so suddenly, particularly from a philanthropic lens. Figuring out what worked in science can help us tackle other, similarly-shaped problems in the world.

Continue reading “Understanding science funding in tech, 2011-2021” »

Crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, written before and during the Bolshevik Revolution by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism emerged in Russia before the October Revolution and developed through the 1920s and 1930s; like Marxism and the European avant-garde, two other movements that shared this intellectual moment, Russian Cosmism rejected the contemplative for the transformative, aiming to create not merely new art or philosophy but a new world. Cosmism went the furthest in its visions of transformation, calling for the end of death, the resuscitation of the dead, and free movement in cosmic space. This volume collects crucial texts, many available in English for the first time, by the radical biopolitical utopianists of Russian Cosmism.

Cosmism was developed by the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov in the late nineteenth century; he believed that humans had an ethical obligation not only to care for the sick but to cure death using science and technology; outer space was the territory of both immortal life and infinite resources. After the revolution, a new generation pursued Fedorov’s vision. Cosmist ideas inspired visual artists, poets, filmmakers, theater directors, novelists (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky read Fedorov’s writings), architects, and composers, and influenced Soviet politics and technology. In the 1930s, Stalin quashed Cosmism, jailing or executing many members of the movement. Today, when the philosophical imagination has again become entangled with scientific and technological imagination, the works of the Russian Cosmists seem newly relevant.