Lifeboat Foundation

The field of female reproductive longevity and inequality is getting more and more attention. In fact, it is one of the hottest areas of the emerging longevity biotechnology industry, and every venture firm in the field is either investing, incubating, or looking for projects in this area. Companies like BOLD Capital, Future Ventures, LongeVC, and iconic biotechnology investors including Bob Nelsen and Christian Angermayer, are all active and significant partners in this area of science. While females generally live longer than men, their reproductive period is limited—something that is often overlooked. A female’s peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. Fertility starts to decline by age 30, and this decline becomes more rapid once women reach the mid-30s. By 45, fertility declines so much that getting pregnant naturally is unlikely for most women. Likewise, women begin life with a fixed number of eggs in their ovaries, usually around one million. This number decreases as women age. Ovaries age faster than the rest of a woman’s body—an understudied phenomenon of a neglected organ. None of us would be here without them. Yet surprisingly little is known about the avocado-shaped organ that’s nestled inside half of all humans.

The ovaries also influence a woman’s overall health and well-being. This includes how they age, since this organ tends to lose its function with age faster than any other tissue. This is called asynchronous aging, and it’s one reason why a woman’s fertility declines, and menopause strikes, while they are still relatively young.

In one of my previous articles, I wrote about Gameto, a biotechnology company that is translating the impact of ovarian aging to develop solutions to improve fertility and stop the impact of menopause on female health. Gameto’s co-founder and CEO Dina Radenkovic told me about her intention to redefine the narrative around female reproductive longevity and making it more around health and longevity. Gameto is building a platform for ovarian therapeutics to address menopause and improve assisted fertility. Dina told me she hopes it will make women suffer fewer health problems in their later lives. Neglecting the ovaries—except for their crucial role in IVF treatments—has been part of a general disregard for many aspects of women’s health in the biomedical world.

California’s Marine Advanced Robotics has made considerable progress on its remarkable Wave-Adaptive Modular Vessel (WAM-V) since we first saw these wild spider-boats 16 years ago on a list of urban legends. Legends and photoshops they were not – indeed, the giant 100-ft Proteus laid the foundations for the smaller, smarter machines the company is making today.

In a nutshell, a WAM-V is an ultra-light catamaran with hulls mounted on clever suspension legs that use springs, shocks and ball joints to move with the waves, helping to stabilize them for pitch and roll, and making these boats suitable for sea conditions where others of the same size simply can’t operate. With props always in the water, they’re highly maneuverable, and capable of spinning 360 degrees almost in their own footprint.

Continue reading “Spider-legged WAM-V suspension boats float over the waves” »

Circa 2021

Perovskite quantum dots film has better mechanical stability and structural integrity compared to bulk thin film. Here, the authors demonstrate higher endurance of quantum dot films and develop hybrid CsPbI3 QD/PCBM device with PCE of 15.1% and 12.3% on rigid and flexible substrates, respectively.

Researchers at Stanford University are reversing symptoms of Alzheimer’s in mice using a strange tactic — they’re infusing elderly mice with spinal fluid from younger ones.

Many medical breakthroughs that benefit humans are discovered by conducting trials on mice.

Though we look nothing alike, almost all the genes found in mice have similar functions to genes in humans. We get diseases for the same reasons, meaning scientists can study illnesses closely in mice to understand how they manifest in us.

Continue reading “Scientific breakthrough cures memory loss in mice” »

Although the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate today, this paper presents a simple mechanism by which a dynamical form of dark energy (known as quintessence) could cause the acceleration to come to end and smoothly transition from expansion to a phase of slow contraction. That raises questions, How soon could this transition occur? And at what point would it be detectable? The conclusions are that the transition could be surprisingly soon, maybe less than 100 million y from now, and yet, for reasons described in the main text, it is not yet detectable today. The scenario is not far-fetched. In fact, it fits naturally with recent theories of cyclic cosmology and conjectures about quantum gravity.

Technology could make indoor areas as safe as outdoors, say physicists.

“there’s a new record to report: a new solar cell has hit 39.5 percent efficiency ”.

Scientists keep on pushing the efficiency of solar panels higher and higher, and there’s a new record to report: a new solar cell has hit 39.5 percent efficiency under the standard 1-sun global illumination conditions.

That 1-sun marker is simply a standardized way of measuring a fixed amount of sunlight, and almost 40 percent of that radiation can now be converted into electricity. The previous record for this type of solar panel material was 39.2 percent efficiency.

Continue reading “New Quantum Well Solar Cell Just Set a World Record For Efficiency” »