Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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If you can’t defeat death, what if you could postpone it, or at least postpone the diseases commonly associated with getting old?

Many people, especially the ultra-wealthy in Silicon Valley, are investing money into companies trying to answer exactly those questions.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and billionaire PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel have both invested in South San Francisco-based Unity Biotechnology, a company whose mission is to “extend human healthspan, the period in one’s life unburdened by the disease of aging.”

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There are currently about 22,000 tracked objects in LEO, some of which are smaller than one centimeter. The focus of many current plans has been on the active removal of current debris.

But with a projected 57,000 new satellites expected to launch by 2029, the question becomes: how to prevent new debris? Currently, at Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, David Spencer and his team are working on a passive debris removal system using drag sail deorbiting technology where these passive deorbiting systems are embedded within a spacecraft for deorbiting at the end of the spacecraft’s lifetime.

Licensed by Vestigo Aerospace and funded through a Purdue University Research Foundation grant, Spencer and his team hope to launch a drag sail prototype with Texas-based Firefly Aerospace, no earlier than this April. Right now, Spencer is the project and mission of LightSail 2, a solar sail currently in orbit.

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“The possibility that 100 years old might become the new 60” : EXCELLENT SLOGAN that doesn’t resort to the troublesome” I word” (“Immortality”)! Good article to share with non-science friends: light on hard science, but good emotional impact, incl. that catchy slogan.

Technology hasn’t just improved our lives; it’s also extended them — considerably.

For most of history, humans lived about 25 years. Real acceleration emerged at the turn of the 20th century, when everything from the creation of antibiotics to the implementation of better sanitation to the increased availability of clean water, and the ability to tackle killers like cancer and heart disease has us living routinely into our 80s. But many scientists believe we’re not stopping there.

Technological convergence is fueling this conviction. The intersection of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, networks, sensors, robotics, massive datasets, biotechnology and nanotechnology is taking direct aim at the limits of human lifespan.

Continue reading “We are nearing ‘longevity escape velocity’ — where science can extend your life for more than a year for every year you are alive” | >

People with diabetes are at a higher risk of fracturing a bone than the general population. And if they do break one it also takes longer than normal to heal.

In the March issue of Biomaterials, Henry Daniell, Shuying (Sheri) Yang, and colleagues at Penn’s School of Dental Medicine share promising findings from an in which a plant-grown sped healing of a fracture. The work, which used the protein insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), showed that an orally delivered, shelf-stable medication grown in could stimulate the growth of bone-building and promote bone regeneration.

“It’s amazing how one protein impacted fracture healing,” says Daniell, corresponding author on the paper. “The current drug for with a fracture requires repetitive injections and hospital visits and as a result patience compliance is low. Here we gave an oral drug once a day and saw healing to be greatly accelerated.”

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The first UAE-made high-performance drone has taken flight.

ADASI, the regional leader in autonomous systems and services, officially launched the Garmousha vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drone in a deal with the General Headquarters of the UAE Armed Forces.

The drone is a light military unmanned aircraft designed to carry 100kg over a six-hour period and 150km with a high-definition camera.

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Four years ago, Todd Rider was on top of the world. The MIT-trained bioengineer had developed a radical idea for killing viruses. Initial test results showed that his therapy, called DRACO, could kill every virus he threw it at: 15 viruses were killed in human cells, and two in mice.

It seemed like there was a chance it could be the biggest discovery in medicine since the invention of antibiotics. Enthusiastic headlines praised the potentially world-changing panacea. “Todd Rider Has a Kill Switch for Viruses,” wrote Bloomberg Businessweek. The Verge: “Killing sickness: is DRACO a doomsday device for viruses?” Time magazine declared it one of the top 50 inventions of the year.

Yet over the next few years, things started going wrong. Rider moved from lab to lab and says he couldn’t raise the money to continue testing DRACO, despite, he claims, the continued promise of the concept.

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