Lifeboat Foundation

Just amazing!

A small fraction of the cremated remains of 61 people will be flown to the Moon next July as part of the payload delivered by Astrobotic’s Peregrine Mission One lander. The payload is offered by Celestis, a company that provides memorial spaceflights. This particular one has intrigued people because among the many deceased whose ashes will be taken to the moon, there are the remains of science writer and futurist Arthur C. Clarke.

Clarke is known to most people for being the author of 2001 – A Space Odyssey, a book in which an ancient alien civilization left one of its peculiar monoliths on the Moon. In the novel, this monolith is found in Tycho crater, but that is not where the Peregrine mission is landing. More aptly, the Astrobotic mission will land in a basaltic lava plain known as Lacus Mortis: the lake of death.

Continue reading “Arthur C Clarke Remains Among Those Expected To Fly To The Moon Next Summer” »

Stem cells hold so much potential for regenerative medicine, it is understandable that so many people should be so impatient to see all that potential realized. But people, the desperately ill among them, need to recognize that stem cells aren’t talismans. In unregulated clinical settings, stem cells can be worthless or even harmful. That’s the bad news. The good news is that stem cells are giving up their profound but decidedly unmagical secrets.

What stem cells lose in mystery, they gain in practicality. They are to be seen as manageable biological units that can, given the right preparation, perform myriad therapeutic applications, less as miracle workers and more as drudges that accept reprogramming and subsequently perform their assigned tasks. They may also sacrifice some of their protean identity, turning into cells that are less stemmy but more effective (and safer) as therapeutic agents. Stemminess may even by bypassed completely, as when cells of one type are directly transdifferentiated into cells of another type.

Even as the preparation of stem cell therapeutics becomes more sophisticated, it is becoming more streamlined, more industrialized. Helping to advance both trends—greater refinement, greater manufacturability—is a new generation of biotech startups. Several of these startups are described in this article. By commercializing the latest stem cell technologies, these startups mean to add to the list of FDA-approved cell-based treatments.

An expert on massive stars, Massey has been studying our nearest grand spiral neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy for decades now. Andromeda is a cornerstone of almost everything we now know about astronomy — from the first recognition that the cosmos is made up of individual galaxies to the discovery of the universe’s still unexplained dark matter. Please join us as we chat about this beautiful and beguiling galactic neighbor.

This is interesting.

As we build the gateway in and out of Africa, preparing people for the future, application and ethical usage of science and technology in the age of exponential growth is a major concern for us.

We help institutions, organizations, and corporates to train, instruct, and design future based courses and programs for the future as it exponentially becoming faster than we think.

Our book was developed for a course on “Exponential Technologies and Business Opportunities in the Age of Singularities” for the Tekedia Institute USA with an extension in Africa as part of a Mini Masters of Business Administration program (mini MBA).

Continue reading “Seizing Our Singularity Future” »

Scientists from NASA ’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and international collaborators demonstrated a new method for mapping the location and size of trees growing outside of forests, discovering billions of trees in arid and semi-arid regions and laying the groundwork for more accurate global measurement of carbon storage on land.

Using powerful supercomputers and machine learning algorithms, the team mapped the crown diameter – the width of a tree when viewed from above – of more than 1.8 billion trees across an area of more than 500,000 square miles, or 1,300,000 square kilometers. The team mapped how tree crown diameter, coverage, and density varied depending on rainfall and land use.

If you’re a user of Google’s Messages app on your Android smartphone, then you will now likely have the RCS update intended to bring standard text messaging into the current century. RCS is now available in all major countries except China, Russia and Iran. Building on standard SMS capabilities, this adds chat functionality to compete with WhatsApp and iMessage. But, in truth, it doesn’t compete at all. There’s a glaring issue that doesn’t look like being properly fixed anytime soon. This is now bad enough that you should now go use something else.

The issue, of course, is end-to-end encryption. Six months ago, reports emerged that Google was developing this level of security to upgrade RCS. As of this week, this is now finally available for public beta testing. On the surface, its intent is to deliver Android users with an iMessage alternative. But there is a glaring issue—and it’s a deal breaker. This deployment of end-to-end encryption on RCS is not available for groups—that’s seemingly too complex to handle right now. And there’s also no word yet as to when this limited upgrade might be rolled out.

With that in mind, Android users should opt for a different iMessage-like alternative. Fortunately, there is a simple solution available now. While its standard messenger is not end-to-end encrypted by default, Android offers users the option to select an alternative default messenger that does. Signal is the best secure messenger available. And while its install base is modest in comparison to WhatsApp or iMessage, it’s growing fast.

To the Moon and back, twice.

It is mainly about greater reliability.

Science & technology Jul 30th 2020 edition.

Continue reading “What the million-mile battery means for electric cars” »

Professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta has criticised the planned return to a Covid tier system in December.

Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the Great Barrington Declaration co-author said it “still leaves the doors open to the enormous harms of lockdown”.

Continue reading “Professor Sunetra Gupta: ‘Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent…the UK cannot afford it’” »