Lifeboat Foundation

One startup company is repurposing the gene-editing tool.

As Silicon Valley heralds progress on self-driving cars and robot carers, much of the rest of the country is worried about machines taking control of human tasks.

Washington (AP) — Seated before the grounded space shuttle Discovery, a constellation of Trump administration officials used soaring rhetoric to vow to send Americans back to the moon and then on to Mars.

After voicing celestial aspirations, top officials moved to what National Intelligence Director Dan Coats called “a dark side” to space policy. Coats, Vice President Mike Pence, other top officials and outside space experts said the United States has to counter and perhaps match potential enemies’ ability to target U.S. satellites.

Pence, several cabinet secretaries and White House advisers gathered in the shadow of the shuttle at the Smithsonian Institution’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center to chart a new path in space — government, commercial and military — for the country. It was the first meeting of the National Space Council, revived after it was disbanded in 1993.

Continue reading “Pence Pledges the U.S. Will Go to the Moon, Mars and Beyond” »

Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s announcement last week accelerating plans for manned flights to Mars ratchets up political and public relations pressure on NASA’s efforts to reach the same goal.

With Musk publicly laying out a much faster schedule than NASA — while contending his vision is less expensive and could be financed primarily with private funds — a debate unlike any before is shaping up over the direction of U.S. space policy.

Read: Before Elon Musk can get SpaceX to Mars, he must overcome these nontechnical hurdles.

Continue reading “New space race to Mars pits NASA vs. SpaceX” »

David Brin: “Our midweek posting resumes the ongoing saga of transparency and freedom, and how (surprise?) each year’s declared “secure” system gets stripped bare, in the next. Now it’s Yahoo and Equifax and Billions of records. Millions of sincere people can see an Orwellian nightmare looming. Yet, the common reflex is to call for more shadows and walls! For us to HIDE from elites! It won’t work. It cannot work. It will never work. But there is an alternative. The very same trick that got us our freedom and wealth, in the first place.”

“We will not preserve freedom by hiding. Nor will it ever be possible to conceal info from elites. Moreover, that is not how we got the freedom that we already have.”

“We will remain free by aggressively applying these tools upon all elites. It is the only way we ever got freedom and it is the only way we can retain it.”

Continue reading “Transparency and Privacy: what we need, want and do not understand” »

The link between inflammation, cellular senescence, aging, and cancer is a complex relationship, but a new study sheds light on how these four interact.

The light and dark side of inflammation and cellular senescence

Cellular senescence is a protective mechanism that helps us to stay healthy and avoid cancer by removing damaged and aged cells from the cell cycle while preventing them from creating damaged copies of themselves. Senescent cells are disposed of via a self-destruct process known as apoptosis.

How much faster can you build a sneaker, exactly? A lot, it turns out. Wired UK has paid a visit to Adidas, which is hauling shoe manufacturing from labor-intensive Chinese plants into the aptly named Speed Factories in America and Germany.

Using tricks like robotic knitting, advanced plastic forming, and 3D printing (which is provided by Carbon, one of our 50 Smartest Companies of 2017) Adidas plans to make even custom sneakers 90 times faster than it can right now. It plans to crank out 1 million pairs of shoes a year from two Speed Factories—one in Atlanta, Georgia, the other in Bavaria, Germany—by the end of 2017.

Such innovation, it hopes, will allow it to remain competitive with Nike and Under Armor, which currently dominate the sportswear world.

Continue reading “Inside the Adidas Factory That Uses Robots to Build Running Shoes” »

New film, New Ideas New Inventions. Billions in Change 2 shows how simple life-changing inventions provide clean water, electricity, and improve the lives of farmers. See how these inventions will enable the unlucky half of the world to improve their lives.

For more information go to BillionsInChange.com

Continue reading “Billions In Change 2 Official Film” »

Business and Longevity…

Jim Mellon, Burnbrae Group founder, discussed the biggest risks facing central banks with Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua Oct. 4 on “Bloomberg Surveillance.” (Source: Bloomberg)