Lifeboat Foundation

The problem with the Fermi Paradox is our narrow assumption of life as being biological in form and time as being linear in direction. Chances are we are the sentient descendants of the civilizations we are looking for.

The discovery that a methane-burping microbe was not a bacterium, added a new, third branch to the tree of life: The Archaea.

After some of these microbes die, their calcium shells make their way into sea air.

Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, nature has produced a myriad of biological materials that serve either as skeletons or as defensive or offensive weapons. Although these natural structural materials are derived from relatively sterile natural components, such as fragile minerals and ductile biopolymers, they often exhibit extraordinary mechanical properties due to their highly ordered hierarchical structures and sophisticated interfacial design. Therefore, they are always a research subject for scientists aiming to create advanced artificial structural materials.

Through microstructural observation, researchers have determined that many biological materials, including fish scales, crab claws and bone, all have a characteristic “twisted plywood” structure that consists of a highly ordered arrangement of micro/nanoscale fiber lamellas. They are structurally sophisticated natural fiber-reinforced composites and often exhibit excellent damage tolerance that is desirable for engineering structural materials, but difficult to obtain. Therefore, researchers are seeking to mimic this kind of natural hierarchical structure and interfacial design by using artificial synthetic and abundant one-dimensional micro/nanoscale fibers as building blocks. In this way, they hope to produce high-performance artificial structural materials superior to existing materials.

As our organization grows and we are doing more and more things, there is an ever greater need for specialist knowledge and guidance to help inform our decisions as a company. We rely on the advice and expertize of both our scientific and business advisors and we have added to them this week with two new experts joining us.

We are delighted to announce that Steven A. Garan has joined our scientific advisory board. Steven is the Director of Bioinformatics at the Center for Research & Education on Aging (CREA) and serves on its advisory board, and he is a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. While at the University of California, Berkeley, he played a major role in the invention and the development of the Automated Imaging Microscope System (AIMS), and he collaborated for many years with a group from Paola S. Timiras’ lab, researching the role that caloric restriction plays in maintaining estrogen receptor-alpha and IGH-1 receptor immunoreactivity in various nuclei of the mouse hypothalamus.

Steven was also the director of the Aging Research Center and is a leading scientist in the field of aging research. His numerous publications include articles on systems biology, the effects of caloric restriction on the mouse hypothalamus, and the AIMS. He is best known for coining the word “Phenomics”, which was defined in “Phenomics: a new direction for the study of neuroendocrine aging”, an abstract published in the journal Experimental Gerontology.

Finding the physical pathways that create consciousness in the brain has eluded scientists thus far.

All humans begin life as a single cell that divides repeatedly to form two, then four, then eight cells, all the way up to the ~26 billion cells that make up a newborn. Tracing how and when those 26 billion cells arise from one zygote is the grand challenge of developmental biology, a field that has so far only been able to capture and analyze snapshots of the development process.

Now, a new method developed by scientists at the Wyss Institute and Harvard Medical School (HMS) finally brings that daunting task into the realm of possibility using evolving genetic barcodes that actively record the process of cell division in developing mice, enabling the lineage of every cell in a mouse’s body to be traced back to its single-celled origin.

The research is published today in Science as a First Release article.

Continue reading “Recording every cell’s history in real-time with evolving genetic barcodes” »

Life extension would give us more time to enjoy; why not?

At times, meeting people feels like going to the theater. Conversations tend to revolve around the same topics and can sound so cliché that they seem scripted. Of course, it depends on the people—close friends tend to be far more genuine than that—but if you pay attention during a conversation, a certain topic will pop up several times: aging.

Depending on the age of the people involved, the way they discuss aging will be different. Teenagers probably won’t even touch the subject; it generally starts creeping up in conversations once working life has begun or is about to begin. At this stage, chronological and biological aging are mostly conflated; responsibilities, more demanding schedules, and abandoning student life are all seen as hallmarks of growing older, when, in fact, they are only signs of growing up and are not absolute.

Continue reading “Time Is Precious, So Let’s Enjoy More of It” »

If you’re one of the billions of people worldwide to use mass public transit regularly, you’re sharing a lot more than a commute with your fellow passengers, suggests a new study published Tuesday in Cell Reports. You’re also sharing and swapping the teeming microbes that call our bodies home.

Researchers in Hong Kong—home to a public transit system that services 5 million commuters every day—recruited volunteers for an unique experiment. Over the course of several days, volunteers were asked to ride one of eight subway lines on the Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway system during the morning and evening rush hour. Before they boarded, they washed their hands, and once on board, they made ample use of the handrails. After they spent 30 minutes on the train, they exited and had their palms swabbed by researchers.