Lifeboat Foundation

Cilantro, also known as coriander, has been traditionally used as a folk medicine for thousands of years, with one of those uses being as an anticonvulsant to prevent the onset of epileptic seizures. New research from University of California, Irvine, has now for the first time homed in on the specific molecular action that explains how this herb can reduce seizures.

Technological advances are driving down the cost and ease of getting into space, allowing a crowd of new actors, from developing countries to small start-ups, to get into the game. In the next space race, the main challenge will be figuring out how to regulate all the new activity.

Recently, we had the opportunity to interview Professor George Church, a well-known geneticist and rejuvenation expert whom we have previously interviewed. Prof. Church’s company, Rejuvenate Bio, will be launching a clinical trial to test a rejuvenation therapy in dogs this fall.

In your recent paper on enabling large-scale genome editing, you talked about manipulating endogenous transposable elements with the help of dead Cas9 base editors. At Ending Age-Related Diseases, Andrei Gudkov spoke about the super mutagenic phenotype that arises from the expression of LINE1 reverse transcriptase. In this context, he mentioned the possibility of the retrobiome (as he referred to it) being the main driver of all types of cellular damage, which is consequently improperly addressed due to immunosenescence. Do you share his views on the contribution of LINEs and SINEs in aging? If not, why?

Yes. That is one of the reasons why we explored the tech for editing of repeats. We are now extending this to the germline engineering of repeats.

Tesla is working on several significant manufacturing improvements for the Model Y production program and it includes building a giant new casting machine to produce a big part of the Model Y frame in one single piece.

We have been reporting on how Tesla plans to simplify the design of its future vehicle platforms and achieve greater automation in the manufacturing process.

Continue reading “Tesla has a giant new machine to produce the Model Y frame in almost one piece” »

For Kenneth Church, sending a 3D printer that could one day print viable human organs to the International Space Station was a personal decision.

Church’s daughter, Kendie Hope, suffered from a diaphragmatic hernia when she was little that prevented her right lung from growing.

“It turned out that my kid shouldn’t have lived,” Church, who is the CEO of nScrypt — an Orlando-based manufacturer that sells 3D printing equipment, said.

Microsoft is investing $1 billion in OpenAI to support us building artificial general intelligence (AGI) with widely distributed [https://openai.com/charter/]

Economic benefits. We’re partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI. We’ll jointly develop new Azure.

AI supercomputing technologies, and Microsoft will become our exclusive cloud provider—so we’ll be working hard together to further extend Microsoft Azure’s capabilities in large-s.

As the founder, CEO and lead designer at SpaceX, a private company that makes rockets and spacecraft, Elon Musk envisions a time when his reusable rockets will bring people to the moon and Mars. He’s focused on humans becoming a “multi-planet species,” and on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, he speaks with Jeffrey Kluger (editor-at-large at Time magazine, and the co-author of “Apollo 13”) about his vision for the future.

It will take more than six weeks to travel about 238,600 miles (384,000km) to the moon. The four-tonne spacecraft has a lunar orbiter, a lander named Vikram after the founder of Isro, and a rover. The rover, named Pragyan, which means “wisdom” in Sanskrit, will spend two weeks traversing the moon’s surface. The six-wheeled vehicle, which will be deployed in early September, will collect crucial information about the mineral and chemical composition of the lunar surface, and search for water.

It was, he added, a “fully indigenous” project, using Indian technology.

Chandrayaan-2 aims to become the first mission to conduct a surface landing on the lunar south pole region, where it will collect crucial information about the moon’s composition. It would be India’s first surface landing on the moon – a feat previously achieved by only Russia, the US and China.

Continue reading “India’s Chandrayaan-2 moon mission lifts off a week after aborted launch” »