Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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There is strong evidence from publicly available sources that a Russian company called KB Arsenal is working on a new type of military satellite equipped with a nuclear power source. Called Ekipazh, its mission may well be to perform electronic warfare from space.

KB Arsenal, based in St. Petersburg, is no newcomer to the development of nuclear-powered satellites. In the Soviet days it built satellites known as US-A (standing for “active controllable satellite”), which carried nuclear reactors to power radars used for ocean reconnaissance (in the West they were known as “radar ocean reconnaissance satellites” or RORSAT for short.) The satellites had been conceived in the early 1960s at the OKB-52 design bureau of Vladimir Chelomei before work on them was transferred to KB Arsenal at the end of that decade. The satellites’ three-kilowatt thermoelectric reactors, known as BES-5 or Buk, were built by the Krasnaya Zvezda (“Red Star”) organization. The US-A satellites operated in low Earth orbits at an altitude of roughly 260 kilometers and, after finishing their mission, the reactors were boosted to storage orbits at an altitude of about 900 kilometers.

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Scientists are exploring how to edit genomes and even create brand new ones that never existed before, but how close are we to harnessing synthetic life?
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Scientists have made major strides when it comes to understanding the base code that underlies all living things—but what if we could program living cells like software?

The principle behind synthetic biology, the emerging study of building living systems, lies in this ability to synthesize life. An ability to create animal products, individualized medical therapies, and even transplantable organs, all starting with synthetic DNA and cells in a lab.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to synthesizing life: building artificial cells from the bottom-up or engineering microorganisms so significantly that it resynthesizes and redesigns the genome.

With genetic engineering tools becoming more and more accessible, researchers want to use these synthesized genomes to enhance human health with regards to things like detecting infections or environmental pollutants. Bacterial cells can be engineered that will detect toxic chemicals.

And these synthesized bacteria could potentially protect us from, for example, consuming toxins in contaminated water.

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In the iconic frontispiece to Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863), primate skeletons march across the page and, presumably, into the future: “Gibbon, Orang, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man.” Fresh evidence from anatomy and palaeontology had made humans’ place on the scala naturae scientifically irrefutable. We were unequivocally with the animals — albeit at the head of the line.

Biological advances have repeatedly changed who we think we are, writes Nathaniel Comfort, in the third essay of a series marking Nature’s anniversary on how the past 150 years have shaped science today. Biological advances have repeatedly changed who we think we are.

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Researchers long wondered how the billions of independent neurons in the brain come together to reliably build a biological machine that easily beats the most advanced computers. All of those tiny interactions appear to be tied to something that guarantees an impressive computational capacity.

Over the past 20 years, evidence mounted in support of a theory that the tunes itself to a point where it is as excitable as it can be without tipping into disorder, similar to a phase transition. This criticality hypothesis asserts that the brain is poised on the fine line between quiescence and chaos. At exactly this line, is maximized.

However, one of the key predictions of this theory—that criticality is truly a set point, and not a mere inevitability—had never been tested. Until now. New research from Washington University in St. Louis directly confirms this long-standing prediction in the brains of freely behaving animals.

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