Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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2019 will be the year in which we discover molecules and properties that are as yet unknown to humans. The breadth of biology and the enormous flexibility of genetic material will provide us with an ideal platform to explore an effectively unlimited number of molecules for novel materials and solutions. We will ultimately leave behind hydrocarbons and truly enter the biological age.

Joshua Hoffman is cofounder and CEO of Zymergen

– Meet the companies fixing depression by stimulating neurons.

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I’m excited to share my new article from Quartz on how science will make it safer and easier for a 50-year-old woman to have a child in 2028 than a 25-year-old woman today. #IVG and #DelayedFertilityAdvantage are game changers.

Women’s biological clocks drive human conception—and, in turn, human history.

Biology’s inflexible window of female fertility is generally agreed to be between the ages 18 and 35. Any older, and the risk of miscarrying, not getting pregnant at all, or bearing unhealthy children skyrockets. When the average lifespan for a woman in the Western world now hovers at around 80 years old, this means that less than 25% of her life can be spent easily (and safely) procreating.

Men have the luxury of being able sow their seed for most of their lives with few health ramifications (which is why someone like 72-year-old US president Donald Trump has a 12-year-old child). By comparison, the average woman will only ovulate 300 to 400 eggs in her lifetime, which means she only has the same amount of menstrual cycles to ever pursue procreation.

Continue reading “Transhumanist science will free women from their biological clocks” | >

The quantum computing revolution is upon us. Like the first digital computers, quantum computers offer the possibility of technology exponentially more powerful than current systems. They stand to change companies, entire industries, and the world by solving problems that seem impossible today and will likely disrupt every industry.

MIT is offering online courses for professionals in Quantum Computing. Learn the business implifications, and applications of quantum, and take the next step in your career.

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Innovation in fashion is sparking radical change. In the future clothes could be computers, made with materials designed and grown in a lab.

Click here to subscribe to The Economist on YouTube: https://econ.st/2xvTKdy

A new wave of innovation is fueling a radical change in fashion. Wearable technology, data, automation and lab-grown materials will have a major impact on what people will be wearing in the future.

Since the birth of sewing and weaving, technology has always led developments in fashion. The Industrial Revolution mechanized manufacturing enabling mass production. In the 1960s synthetic materials like polyester took off, creating new possibilities for fashion.

Continue reading “What will people wear in the future? | The Economist” | >

George Church revealed progress on aging reversal using gene therapies. They have delivered 45 gene therapies to provide aging reversal. They find the combined treatment is effective against obesity, diabetes, osteoarthritis, cardiac damage and kidney disease.

This is the work that Nextbigfuture has been expecting from George’s company Rejuvenate Bio.

Rejuvenate Bio has been using the aging reversal therapies on dogs for almost all of 2018.

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Watch out, Earth gardens: Space is set to become the next destination for growing fresh vegetables.

Following the successful cultivation of lettuce at the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015, beans could be the next legume to leave our planet in 2021, said a Norwegian University of Science and Technology NTNU) press release. Other salad essentials could also be cultivated in space, and they would provide cosmonauts and other intergalactic travelers with the nutrition they need to live on other planets.

“The dream of every astronaut is to be able to eat fresh food – like strawberries, cherry tomatoes or anything that’s really flavorful. Someday that will certainly be possible,” said Silje Wolff, a plant physiologist at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRiS) at NTNU, in the press release. “We envision a greenhouse with several varieties of vegetables.”

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In patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), amyloid-β (Aβ) plaques and tau protein tangles accumulate in the brain long before the appearance of clinical symptoms. Early intervention is critical for slowing neurodegeneration and disease progression. Therefore, reliable markers of early AD are needed. Lucey et al. analyzed sleep patterns in aging cognitively normal subjects and showed that non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep negatively correlated with tau pathology and Aβ deposition in several brain areas. The results show that alterations in NREM sleep may be an early indicator of AD pathology and suggest that noninvasive sleep analysis might be useful for monitoring patients at risk for developing AD.

In Alzheimer’s disease (AD), deposition of insoluble amyloid-β (Aβ) is followed by intracellular aggregation of tau in the neocortex and subsequent neuronal cell loss, synaptic loss, brain atrophy, and cognitive impairment. By the time even the earliest clinical symptoms are detectable, Aβ accumulation is close to reaching its peak and neocortical tau pathology is frequently already present. The period in which AD pathology is accumulating in the absence of cognitive symptoms represents a clinically relevant time window for therapeutic intervention. Sleep is increasingly recognized as a potential marker for AD pathology and future risk of cognitive impairment. Previous studies in animal models and humans have associated decreased non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep slow wave activity (SWA) with Aβ deposition. In this study, we analyzed cognitive performance, brain imaging, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) AD biomarkers in participants enrolled in longitudinal studies of aging.

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A host of companies are developing regenerative treatments that lean on stem cells. Seeing an opportunity, Japan’s Fujifilm will build a U.S. stem cell manufacturing facility not only for its own efforts but also as a CDMO.

The company said today that its Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics Inc. (FDCI) subsidiary will invest about $21 million to build a facility in Madison, Wisconsin, to “industrialize” induced pluripotent stem cell technologies for its pipeline of regenerative drugs and to manufacture iPS cells for others. It expects the facility to be ready by March 2020.

“To meet the growing demand for FCDI’s iPS cell platform, the state-of-the-art production facility will have a flexible cell culturing design to serve production requirements of both industrial quantities of cells, and small, diverse batches,” Seimi Satake, FCDI CEO, said in a statement. “By combining Fujifilm’s experience gleaned from the intricate process of manufacturing photographic film along with FCDI’s knowledge of cell reprogramming, genetic engineering and cell differentiation, the facility is poised to address the complex manufacturing processes of cell therapies.”

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