Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2015

Fusion power can seem a bit like the last bus at night; it’s always coming, but never arrives. MIT is working to change that with a new compact tokamak fusion reactor design based on the latest commercially available magnetic superconductor technology. The ARC (affordable, robust, compact) reactor design promises smaller, cheaper reactors that could make fusion power practical within 10 years.

A commercially viable fusion reactor has been the Holy Grail of engineering since the 1950s, with the potential to turn almost all other major electricity sources into an historical footnote overnight. If perfected, it would essentially be an inexhaustible source of power, impacting on almost every aspect of life, from the environment to global politics. The trick is making it practical.

Continue reading “ARC reactor design uses superconducting magnets to draw fusion power closer” »

New genetic engineering method promises to super-charge recombineering and open the bacterial world at large to this underutilized approach.

When you think of the words “data” and “mine”, no doubt the idea of data mining comes first. However, just as much as we find value in mining the rich resources of data, so too can we apply the advanced techniques for dealing with data to real-world mining — that is, extracting natural resources from the earth. The world is just as dependent on natural resources as it is data resources, so it makes sense to see how the evolving areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning have an impact on the world of mining and natural resource extraction.

Mining has always been a dangerous profession, since extracting minerals, natural gas, petroleum, and other resources requires working in conditions that can be dangerous for human life. Increasingly, we are needing to go to harsher climates such as deep under the ocean or deep inside the earth to extract the resources we still need. It should come as little surprise then that mining and resource extraction companies are looking to robotics, autonomous systems, and AI applications of all sorts to minimize risk, maximize return, and also lessen the environmental impact that mining has on our ecosystem.

On a recent AI Today podcast episode, Antoine Desmet of mining technology and equipment company Komatsu shared how they’re using advanced forms of AI, automation, and robotics to make an impact on the organization’s operations. Antoine has an interesting background, starting his career as a telecom engineer and receiving a Ph.D in neural network engineering. After getting his Ph.D, he returned to Komatsu and started working in surface analytics. He states that at the time there was a lot of data to work with, but very few analytics in place. He decided to start implementing machine learning and in the last few years his company has seen significant growth through this approach, with his data science team growing from just one person to ten people.

Not all viruses set out to cause widespread death and sickness — some have the potential to fight cancer, according to new research.

Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have genetically engineered adenoviruses, which is a family of viruses that cause mild symptoms, to replicate inside cancer cells and kill them, according to a new paper in the journal Cancers.

To do this, Fumihiro Higashino, a molecular oncologist, and his team inserted adenylate-uridylate-rich elements (AREs) from two human genes — a stabilizing element found in a type of macromolecule present in all biological cells — into two strains of the virus to help specifically attack cancer cells.

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

Multipotent cells are critical to regenerative medicine and its associated deployment strategies. Localizing an abundant source of autologous, adult stem cells circumvents the immunological prohibitions of allogeneity and ethical dilemmas of embryologic stem cells, respectively. Classically, these cells have been described as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). In this chapter, we characterize adipose tissue as a unique source of MSCs because of its ubiquity, redundancy, and procurability. Specifically, lipoaspirates can be minimally processed to provide a heterogenous, cell-dense isolate – the stromal vascular fraction (SVF) – composed of terminally differentiated vessel-associated cell lines as well as putative progenitor cells. These cells have been cultured and expanded, giving rise to a dynamic cell line termed adipose-derived stromal cells (ASCs). SVF and ASC cell isolates are often administered by standard clinical routes including parenteral, topical application, and local injection in the clinical translational studies of cardiovascular ischemia, neurological injury, rheumatologic and orthopedic disease as well as advanced wound care and tissue engineering. These clinical applications raise safety concerns specific to administration, sequestration, and tumor growth augmentation. Further studies SVF and ASC cells are necessary to realize their potential in a regenerative medicine capacity.

I always enjoy the perspective of David Wood, and in this session of the London Futurists there is a panel discussion about genetic engineering in the future.

Our DNA is becoming as readable, writable, and hackable as our information technology. The resulting genetic revolution is poised to transform our healthcare, our choices for the characteristics of the next generation, and our evolution as a species. The future could bring breathtaking advances in human well-being, but it could also descend into a dangerous genetic arms race.

Continue reading “Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity” »

After biomedical scientists demonstrated that they could make dangerous viruses like influenza even more dangerous, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented a three-year moratorium on funding such research. But a couple of months ago, in December, the moratorium was lifted, and a tight set of rules were put in its place, such as a mandate for oversight panels.

The prospect of engineering a deadly pandemic virus in a laboratory suggests that only a fool would wish away government regulation entirely.

However, as a whole, regulation has done more harm than good in the arena of scientific innovation. The reason is that the sort of person who thinks like a bureaucratic regulator isn’t the sort of person who thinks like a scientist. The sad fact of the matter is that those most interested in the regulatory process tend to be motivated by politics and ideology rather than scientific inquiry and technological progress.