Lifeboat Foundation

Leveraging 3D printing to make the meat appear more appetizing.

A biotech startup in China recently showcased its lab-grown pork and is aiming for cost-parity with conventionally sourced pork by 2,025 Reuters reported.

Amidst growing concerns of emissions resulting from meat production, countries are looking for protein alternates that can feed their population while also being eco-friendly. Plant-based meats have been around for a while but need further development to stand in as replacements to animal meats. Cultured or lab-grown meats are sourced from animal cells and show a high resemblance to conventional meat but lack production at scale and are expensive to manufacture, making it difficult for consumers to switch. 3D printing to make the meat appear more appetizing.

Long gone are the days where tires were kind of boring.

Tires are there to make cars roll. They serve a simple function and should therefore be rather simple and boring. Right? Wrong! Now, in this video, we bring you advanced We dare you to watch them in action and not be impressed.

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Without a new legal framework, they could destabilize societal norms.

Autonomous weapon systems – commonly known as killer robots – may have killed human beings for the first time ever last year, according to a recent United Nations Security Council report on the Libyan civil war. History could well identify this as the starting point of the next major arms race, one that has the potential to be humanity’s final one.

Autonomous weapon systems are robots with lethal weapons that can operate independently, selecting and attacking targets without a human weighing in on those decisions. Militaries around the world are investing heavily in autonomous weapons research and development. The U.S. alone budgeted US$18 billion for autonomous weapons between 2016 and 2020.

Continue reading “Could Autonomous Robots Be More Dangerous than Nukes?” »

In vitro digestion of genomic DNA with Cas9 and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) yields genome-wide off-target sites at frequencies below 0.1%. Off-target sites can be further reduced with modified sgRNAs.

Martian soil needs a little bacteria to house plants.

The findings were detailed in a study published Wednesday in PLOS One.

The recent experiment is a crucial step in humanity’s vision of inhabiting a planet other than Earth, addressing the need to grow plants and crops to maintain a sustainable environment.

Continue reading “This could be the plant that sustains early Mars colonies” »

Image-guided radiation therapy has evolved to include the ability to track tumors in real time during treatment. It’s improving cure rates and limiting side effects for a growing number of cancer patients.

Think of it like radio making way for television. For more than a century, radiation therapy has been effective in treating cancer. From the first X-rays, to today’s computed tomography (CT) scans, physicians have relied on various imaging techniques to locate tumors and guide their treatment. Enter real-time tumor tracking.

“Magnetic Resonance-guided therapy is really a new paradigm,” said Dr. Rodney Ellis, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. He notes the leading-edge technology merges MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) with a linear accelerator, making it possible to reshape radiation dosage based on daily changes in a tumor’s shape, size and position and its surrounding healthy anatomy.

Efforts to study the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic have received help from a surprising source. A biologist in the United States has ‘excavated’ partial SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences from the beginnings of the pandemic’s probable epicentre in Wuhan, China, that were deposited — but later removed — from a US government database.

The partial genome sequences address an evolutionary conundrum about the early genetic diversity of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, although scientists emphasize that they do not shed light on its origins. Nor is it fully clear why researchers at Wuhan University asked for the sequences to be removed from the Sequence Read Archive (SRA), a repository for raw sequencing data maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Partial SARS-CoV-2 sequences from early outbreaks in Wuhan were removed from a US government database by the scientists who deposited them.

Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics announced on Friday early result that indicate their experimental oral antiviral drug molnupiravir might halve the risk of death or hospitalization from Covid-19.

In a news release, the company said 7.3% of 385 patients who received the antiviral were either hospitalized or died from Covid-19, compared with 14.1% of the 377 patients who received a placebo, which does nothing.

Full data from the molnupiravir trial has not yet been released, and this data has not yet been peer-reviewed or published. But Merck says it will seek authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration, and if it’s granted, the drug could be the first antiviral treatment available orally to fight Covid-19.

Designing a society that can adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence and allow everyone to thrive as these changes unfold is likely to be one of our most significant challenges in the coming years and decades. It will require an emphasis on retraining and education for those workers who can realistically undertake the necessary transition, as well as an improved safety net – and perhaps an entirely new social contract – for those who will inevitably be left behind.

From fast food to farming, Covid-19 has accelerated the rise of the worker robots. This in turn will put more jobs at risk and makes the need to reframe society ever more urgent.