Lifeboat Foundation

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The quest to find new ways to harness solar power has taken a step forward after researchers successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen by altering the photosynthetic machinery in plants.

Photosynthesis is the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy. Oxygen is produced as by-product of photosynthesis when the water absorbed by plants is ‘split’. It is one of the most important reactions on the planet because it is the source of nearly all of the world’s oxygen. Hydrogen which is produced when the water is split could potentially be a green and unlimited source of renewable energy.

A new study, led by academics at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, used semi-artificial photosynthesis to explore new ways to produce and store solar energy. They used natural sunlight to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen using a mixture of biological components and manmade technologies.

What does all this mean? How can one company do all that?

I recently spoke with Ginkgo Bioworks co-founders Tom Knight and Jason Kelly about the future of manufacturing and how the secrets of biology will be the secrets to unlocking the next Industrial Revolution.

Seed oil components of an ornamental flower could provide a direct pathway for designing a new class of environmentally friendly lubricants. Researchers at the School of Science at IUPUI identified the compound in the seed oil that is produced in a manner unlike any other fatty acid. The study was published today online in the journal Nature Plants.

The Orychophragmus violaceus plant is a purple flower native to China; it’s commonly referred to as the February orchid. While collaborating on the O. violaceus plant’s biology and genetic makeup, researchers at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln encountered a bit of a mystery: All plant seeds contain oils as energy reserves for later growth, but researchers noticed the February orchid seed oils were unusual.

They called upon IUPUI bioorganic chemist Robert Minto, who specializes in identifying natural products and unknown compounds.

Continue reading “Serendipitous discovery may lead to eco-friendly lubricant” »

As we begin to question our biological roles during a non-biological (transhuman) era, will the role of pain remain as our sole method of detecting physical trauma or will it be replaced by a more efficient technological alternative?

Today, the Earth is covered with life in countless forms, but four billion years ago there was no life on our rocky world. So, it stands to reason that sometime between then and now a single organism came into existence that started it all. This is a widely-held belief among scientists, and the name they have given that ancient organism is LUCA. It stands for “last universal common ancestor” — the one microbe that you, your dog, the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning, and the tree in your back yard all descended from.

It’s a mind-blowing concept. It makes perfect sense, but tracing the origins of the ancestor of all life on Earth is an incredibly difficult task. For a long time, scientists had settled on a timeline of between 3.5 billion and 3.8 billion years ago. Now, a new round of research has pushed that date back even further. The work was published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

It’s important to note that LUCA isn’t thought to have been the very first cellular organism on Earth. The conditions under which life formed likely created many single-celled life forms, but only one of them had what it takes to “make it” on Earth, and that microbe is believed to be the root of everything that came later.

Level 4 – Awareness + World model: Systems that have a modeling system complex enough to create a world model: a sense of other, without a sense of self – e.g., dogs. Level 4 capabilities include static behaviors and rudimentary learned behavior.

Level 5 – Awareness + World model + Primarily subconscious self model = Sapient or Lucid: Lucidity means to be meta-aware – that is, to be aware of one’s own awareness, aware of abstractions, aware of one’s self, and therefore able to actively analyze each of these phenomena. If a given animal is meta-aware to any extent, it can therefore make lucid decisions. Level 5 capabilities include the following: The “sense of self”; Complex learned behavior; Ability to predict the future emotional states of the self (to some degree); The ability to make motivational tradeoffs.

Level 6 – Awareness + World model + Dynamic self model + Effective control of subconscious: The dynamic sense of self can expand from “the small self” (directed consciousness) to the big self (“social group dynamics”). The “self” can include features that cross barriers between biological and non-biological – e.g., features resulting from cybernetic additions, like smartphones.

Continue reading “The Transhumanist Bill of Rights version 2.0” »

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.