Lifeboat Foundation

Editor’s Note: The Falling Walls Conference is an annual, global gathering of forward thinking individuals from 80 countries organized by the Falling Walls Foundation. Each year, on November 9—the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—20 of the world’s leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present their current breakthrough research. The aim of the conference is to address two questions: Which will be the next walls to fall? And how will that change our lives? The author of the following essay is speaking at this year’s Falling Walls gathering.

This is more than just another industrial revolution—it is something that transcends humankind and even biology.

• By Jurgen Schmidhuber on November 2, 2017

Darwinian evolution is old-fashioned. Bioengineering raises new principles for the creation of life but, to what extent can we dispense with the past of our biology.

WOODS HOLE, Mass.—For the octopus and cuttlefish, instantaneously changing their skin color and pattern to disappear into the environment is just part of their camouflage prowess. These animals can also swiftly and reversibly morph their skin into a textured, 3D surface, giving the animal a ragged outline that mimics seaweed, coral, or other objects it detects and uses for camouflage.

This week, engineers at Cornell University report on their invention of stretchable surfaces with programmable 3D texture morphing, a synthetic “camouflaging skin” inspired by studying and modeling the real thing in octopus and cuttlefish. The engineers, along with collaborator and cephalopod biologist Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, report on their controllable soft actuator in the October 13 issue of Science.

Led by James Pikul and Rob Shepherd, the team’s pneumatically activated material takes a cue from the 3D bumps, or papillae, that cephalopods can express in one-fifth of a second for camouflage, and then retract to swim away with minimal hydrodynamic drag. (See video below of live Octopus rebescens expressing its skin papillae.)

Continue reading “Inspired by Octopus Skin, Engineers Develop a Programmable ‘Camouflaging’ Material” »

A Finnish research project has created a batch of single-cell protein using just electricity, water, carbon dioxide and microbes, in a small portable lab. While we’re hesitant to call it “food” in its current state, the stuff is edible and nutritious enough to be used for cooking or livestock feed, and the team hopes that the system can eventually be used to grow food in areas where it’s needed the most.

MouseAge (https://www.lifespan.io/mouseage) is creating the first photographic biomarker system using the power of artificial intelligence.

The goal of MouseAge is to create a system capable of determining the age of mice without the need for invasive or even harmful tests.

Continue reading “MouseAge: Visual Biomarker for Mouse Aging” »

Stephen Paddock’s brother has speculated, “something went wrong in his head.” David Eagleman asks, what precisely was it? We know little about Paddock but quite a bit about biological factors that can be associated with violent behavior, Eagleman says”

“David Eagleman directs the Center for Science and Law and is an adjunct professor of neuroscience at Stanford University. He is the writer and presenter of the PBS series, “The Brain with David Eagleman,” and the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.”

‘In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock’s brother Eric speculated, “something went wrong in his head.” But what precisely was it?”

Continue reading “The mystery of Stephen Paddock’s brain” »

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 to Jacques Dubochet (University of Lausanne, Switzerland), Joachim Frank (Columbia University, New York, USA) and Richard Henderson (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK) “for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution”.

We may soon have detailed images of life’s complex machineries in atomic resolution. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 is awarded to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for the development of cryo-electron microscopy, which both simplifies and improves the imaging of biomolecules. This method has moved biochemistry into a new era.

A picture is a key to understanding. Scientific breakthroughs often build upon the successful visualisation of objects invisible to the human eye. However, biochemical maps have long been filled with blank spaces because the available technology has had difficulty generating images of much of life’s molecular machinery. Cryo-electron microscopy changes all of this. Researchers can now freeze biomolecules mid-movement and visualise processes they have never previously seen, which is decisive for both the basic understanding of life’s chemistry and for the development of pharmaceuticals.

Continue reading “Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 Awarded for Cryo-Electron Microscopy” »

Leading women’s magazine Marie Claire has a feature story on life extension out this month (approx 1.5 million circulation):

Forget about life after death. More and more, women around the country are seeking another kind of miracle: not dying at all.

What if you could hit the pause button on aging? Live to 120 without feeling a day over 80? More radical still, what if you could cheat death? Would you do it?

Continue reading “Meet the Extensionists: People Who Believe Immortality Is Possible” »

Proponents of biology preprints argue they will accelerate the pace of science—and improve its quality—by publicizing findings long before they reach journals, helping researchers get rapid feedback on their work, and giving a leg up to young researchers who don’t yet have many publications. Some see little difference between posting a preprint and presenting unpublished findings at a meeting, except that the preprint audience can be far larger.

Many biologists remain wary, however. Some worry that competitors will steal their data or ideas, or rush to publish similar work. Others predict that preprint servers will become a time sink, as scientists spend hours trying to sift through an immense mishmash of papers of various quality. And some researchers fear that easy, rapid publication could foster preprint wars—in which the findings in one preprint are quickly attacked in another, sometimes within hours. Such online squabbles could leave the public bewildered and erode trust in scientists.

Biologists are posting unreviewed manuscripts in record numbers. But many are still not sure it’s a good idea.

Continue reading “Are preprints the future of biology? A survival guide for scientists” »