Lifeboat Foundation

Yes, a spinning vat of reflective liquid in a moon crater sounds awesome.

Coombes described the process to CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener podcast. Her thoughts would be processed by headset via a computer, and then converted to voltages before being assigned to a parameter on the synth.

Thinking about images and questions that stimulated more brainwave activity yielded more dramatic results — even thinking about the word “why” had an effect on volume and pitch.

Continue reading “Canadian musician Angie C just used a brainwave-reader to play the monster analogue synth TONTO with her mind” »

With advancements in stem cell therapy, scientists have now engineered stem cells that can treat metastatic bone cancer without damaging surrounding tissue.

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.