Lifeboat Foundation

This technology is being pushed as “New”. This was already perfected in 1965 if not before.

A recent article in Nature Communications announces the development of a kind of artificial womb (or extracorporeal gestational system). So far it has been used to further the development of premature lambs. Technology website Gizmodo breaks down the technical journal article in more understandable terms.

The research team, led by Alan Flake from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has shown that it’s possible to support extremely premature lambs in an external artificial womb, and to recreate the conditions required for normal gestational development. The lambs were able to grow inside a fluid-filled device, which sustained them for a record-breaking four weeks. Subsequent tests on the lambs indicated normal development of their brain, lungs, and organs. It may take another decade before this technology can be used on premature human infants, but it’s an important step in that direction.

Continue reading “Artificial Wombs: What’s Really Needed” »

Telegenomics provider Genome Medical has raised $23 million to help scale up its “last-mile” patient counseling services for healthcare systems and individuals across the U.S.

The company also plans to expand its team of clinical genomics specialists as well as continue the development of its delivery platform. The series B round brings Genome Medical’s fundraising total up to $46 million since its 2016 founding.

The latest financing was led by Echo Health Ventures, a collaboration between Cambia Health Solutions and Mosaic Health Solutions. Other new backers included LRVHealth, Casdin Capital, Perceptive Advisors, Manatt Venture Fund and Dreamers Fund.

Continue reading “Genome Medical nets $23M to grow its telegenomics service platform” »

Harvard geneticist George Church, famous for his plan to resurrect the woolly mammoth, has been assembling a list of genetic mutations and alterations that could give people longer lives and superhuman powers.

The spreadsheet, which reads like a mad scientist’s field notes, lists the known pros and cons of each gene. For instance, a specific mutation to the LRP5 gene would give you extra-strong bones — but also make you less buoyant in water. Other edits could give subjects resistance to radiation or incredible skills at holding their breath underwater.

All in all, the spreadsheet serves as a glimpse into the sort of changes we may expect once human gene-hacking becomes safer and more common.

Continue reading “This Harvard Prof Is Listing Genes That Could Make You Superhuman” »

Work by a team of University of Adelaide scientists to perfect metal and mineral extraction processes is bringing the possibility of mining the wealth contained within asteroids closer to reality. But science fiction won’t become fact until asteroid mining becomes economically as well as technically viable.

“Asteroids such as Bennu are closer to us than Adelaide is to Alice Springs, about 1000 kilometres away in Earth’s near orbit,” says Professor Volker Hessel, Deputy Dean-Research from the University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Engineering, Computer & Mathematical Sciences (ECMS) and Professor in the School of Chemical Engineering.

“Advances in space exploration mean that these bodies which contain nickel, cobalt, and platinum as well as water and organic matter, are now within reach.”

Continue reading “Asteroid mining not a million miles away” »

A discovery by researchers at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick offers a new technology for detecting bacteria in minutes by ‘zapping’ the bacteria with electricity.

Each year, 1 million men in the U.S. undergo biopsies to determine whether they have prostate cancer. The biopsy procedure traditionally has been guided by ultrasound imaging, but this method cannot clearly display the location of tumors in the prostate gland.

A multidisciplinary team of UCLA physicians has found that a new method, which includes biopsy guided by magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, can be used together with the traditional method to increase the rate of prostate cancer detection.

Ultrasound has been used to visualize the prostate in order to take a representative sampling of tissue to biopsy. The introduction of MRI has allowed doctors to see specific lesions in the prostate and only take tissue samples from those spots. But the two sampling methods often aren’t used in combination.

Continue reading “Study shows more effective method for detecting prostate cancer” »

Isaac Asimov referred to a 70-old man as an old individual who is unlikely to live much longer. Yet, given the present pace of discovery in the ageing field, the pace of ageing could be slowed within our lifetime, with science surpassing science fiction.

Thus, genetic studies have now firmly established that aging is regulated by specific genes conserved from yeast to mice [23,30–34].

Continue reading “Aging: past, present and future” »

I recently came to an important realisation: I will most likely see the so-called Singularity happen in my own lifetime. I’m 56, at this time, and I believe that the inflection point at which computers, ‘thinking machines’ and AI may become infinitely and recursively powerful is no more than 20–25 years away, at most — and it might be as soon as 12–15 years from today.

We are at ‘4’ on the exponential curve, and this matters a lot because doubling a small number such as 0.01 does not make much of a difference while doubling 4–8–16–32–64 is another story altogether: timing is essential, and the future is bound to increasingly happen gradually, then suddenly.

Continue reading “Why the singularity is certain to happen in my own lifetime” »