Lifeboat Foundation

Mankind’s ability to edit the fabric of human life has led to scientific upheaval, global debate, and at least one international incident. Now, it’s coming to Netflix.

“Unnatural Selection,” a four-part docuseries debuting Friday, dissects the stories, science, and ethics behind genome editing, following academics, biohackers, and patients as they move through a brave new world made possible by technologies like CRISPR.

We recently spoke with co-directors Joe Egender and Leeor Kaufman about how the series came to be and how it frames the sprawling story of human genetic engineering. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tesla is rolling out more Model Y prototypes for testing and we are getting to see the new electric crossover in new colors, including now a beautiful new bright red prototype spotted at Gigafactory 1.

Earlier this month, a Model Y prototype was spotted being tested around Tesla’s headquarters in Palo Alto and since then, there has been a more steady stream of Model Y sightings.

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Qantas will test how pilots and passengers withstand a 20-hour nonstop from New York to Sydney, monitoring brain activity and melatonin levels during the flight.

The drones are loaded with packages at a “Nest”, where Wing employees pack them with up to 3 pounds of goods.

In response to the utter inadequacy of materialism to account for the mind, several philosophers have suggested panpsychism as a solution to the mind–body problem. Perhaps, they argue, all matter is inherently conscious but more primitive aggregates of matter may only have primitive consciousness. From that perspective, humans are very conscious and electrons are maybe just a little bit conscious.

Philosopher Philip Goff:

The panpsychist offers an alternative research programme: Rather than trying to account for consciousness in terms of utterly non-conscious elements, try to explain the complex consciousness of humans and other animals in terms of simpler forms of consciousness which are postulated to exist in simpler forms of matter, such as atoms or their sub-atomic components. This research project is still in its infancy. But a number of leading neuroscientists, such as Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, are now finding that working within a panpsychist framework bears fruit. The more fruit is borne by this alternative research programme, the more reason we have to accept panpsychism.

The universe is getting messy. Like a glass shattering to pieces or a single wave crashing onto the shore, the universe’s messiness can only move in one direction – toward more chaos and disorder. But scientists think that, at least for a single electron or the simplest quantum computer, they may be able to turn back time, and restore order to chaos. This doesn’t mean we’ll be visiting with dinosaurs or Napoleon any time soon, but for physicists, the idea that time can run backward at all is still a pretty big deal.

Normally, the universe’s trend toward disorder is a fundamental law: the second law of thermodynamics. It says more formally that any system can only move from more to less ordered, and that the chaos or disorder of a system – its entropy – can never decrease. But an international team of scientists led by researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology think they may have discovered a loophole.

Kelsey Moody of Ichor Therapeutics presented on the LysoClear development program at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference organized by the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation earlier this year. LysoClear is an example of the commercial development of a rejuvenation therapy, taken all the way from the starting point of the discovery of microbial enzymes capable of breaking down certain forms of harmful age-related molecular waste that contribute to aging and age-related diseases. The actual research is largely done, and the task now is to focus on manufacture, regulatory approval, and entry into the clinic.

Taken end to end, I think that this development program might be able to lay claim to being the first and oldest of the modern rejuvenation research initiatives, starting sometime back in the early 2000s. It began at the Methuselah Foundation as LysoSENS, the first of the SENS programs to get underway with modest philanthropic funding. Some of you may remember gathering dirt from graveyards to send in for analysis, in the hunt for microbial species that consume the molecular waste that our bodies cannot remove. Researches knew that those microbes existed because graveyards do not accumulate this waste — it is being broken down by something in the environment. The program carried forward into the SENS Research Foundation when it spun out from the Methuselah Foundation, and a portion of it was later licensed to Ichor Therapeutics, and became LysoClear.

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Wonderful news, the MitoMouse project has successfully reached its initial $50k goal and is well on the way towards the first stretch goal! This now means the projecct will launch at the lab and the MitoMouse strain will be created.

The next step for this ambitious project is to actually create progency from the SickMice and MitoMice in order to have an effective model to test the mitochondrial repair approach, which has already been shown to work in cells, in living animals. If successful it would be vindication for mitochondrial repair therapy and move the therapy closer to translation to humans. Here is Dr. Amutha Boominathan, the leader of the MitoMouse Project at the SENS Research Foundation, to tell us a little more about the first stretch goal for the project.

Obama even allotted $1.2 billion to the annual budget for the establishment of a special task force devoted to the issue, one that would develop an action plan for stopping the fast spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA.

A Game Changing Study

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