Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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3D printing is a universal process in the sense that pretty much any part that can be drawn up in a CAD program can be printed, at least within a certain resolution. Machining a part on a mill or lathe, while having the advantage of greater accuracy and material options, is a slightly less universal process in that many possible designs that exist in theory could never be machined. A hollow sphere can easily be printed, but a ball could never be milled as a single part into a hollow sphere—unless you happen to have a milling machine tiny enough to fit inside the ball. But what about biological parts, and whole animals? How universal, from a design perspective, is growth?

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“The board’s first rulings concerned five cases in which Facebook had removed posts for violating its policies. And in four out of the five cases reviewed, the board voted to overturn Facebook’s original decisions. The board also called on Facebook to give users greater clarity over its policies and how it intends to enforce them.”

“For all board members, you start with the supremacy of free speech,” Alan Rusbridger, a board member and former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, said.

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An anthropologist dives into the world of genetic engineering to explore whether gene-editing tools such as CRISPR fulfill the hope of redesigning our species for the better.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey. St. Martin’s Press, November 2020. Excerpt previously published by Black Inc.

Surreal artwork in the hotel lobby—a gorilla peeking out of a peeled orange, smoking a cigarette; an astronaut riding a cyborg giraffe—was the backdrop for bombshell news rocking the world. In November 2018, Hong Kong’s Le Méridien Cyberport hotel became the epicenter of controversy about Jiankui He, a Chinese researcher who was staying there when a journalist revealed he had created the world’s first “edited” babies. Select experts were gathering in the hotel for the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing—a meeting that had been called to deliberate about the future of the human species.

Continue reading “The Dawn of CRISPR Mutants” | >

Dotty graphene and doping: Whatever it takes for Russia’s record plasmonics to shine.

Physicists from MIPT and Vladimir State University, Russia, have achieved a nearly 90% efficiency converting light energy into surface waves on graphene. They relied on a laser-like energy conversion scheme and collective resonances. The paper came out in Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Manipulating light at the nanoscale is a task crucial for being able to create ultracompact devices for optical energy conversion and storage. To localize light on such a small scale, researchers convert optical radiation into so-called surface plasmon-polaritons. These SPPs are oscillations propagating along the interface between two materials with drastically different refractive indices — specifically, a metal and a dielectric or air. Depending on the materials chosen, the degree of surface wave localization varies. It is the strongest for light localized on a material only one atomic layer thick, because such 2D materials have high refractive indices.

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Dr. Richi Gill, MD, is back at work, able to enjoy time with his family in the evening and get a good night’s sleep, thanks to research. Three years ago, Gill broke his neck in a boogie board accident while on vacation with his young family. Getting mobile again with the use of a wheelchair is the first thing, Gill says, most people notice. However, for those with a spinal cord injury (SCI), what is happening inside the body also severely affects their quality of life.

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