Lifeboat Foundation

That in-home DNA test won’t tell you much about how to eat or exercise. Fortunately, you don’t need it to.

Engineers have created a DNA-based chemical oscillator, opening the door to molecular computing.

• By Rachel Nuwer on February 21, 2018

Organoids, made from human stem cells, are growing into brains and other miniorgans to help researchers study development.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/facesoftbi/2018/02/22/regenerat…ira-pastor

Trinity College Dublin (TCD), in Ireland, is to be the recipient of a new specialist 3D bioprinting facility supported by a collaboration between multinational medical device and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, and the AMBER research center.

With preparations beginning in the first quarter of this year, the new 3D bioprinting laboratory is due to be opened by the close of 2018.

Professor Michael Morris, AMBER director, comments.

Continue reading “3D bioprinting center of excellence launched by AMBER and Johnson & Johnson” »

Waiting on research advances is the rationale behind cryopreservation, and more broadly, a worldview known as transhumanism. A person killed by cancer or heart disease could reasonably be revived in a future when such ailments no longer exist. “They believe in the advance of technology,” says Giuseppe Nucci, an Italian photographer who visited with transhumanists and toured the facilities of Russia-based cryonics company KrioRus. “They hope that someone will wake them up.”

This hope, that the future will vanquish the ills of the present, is as old as the first civilisations that realized that with each passing year life got a little better. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov helped create an early 20th-century movement known as cosmism that was rooted in the idea that, given enough time, humans could defeat evil and death. If the human life span was too short, then the simple solution was to extend it, even after death, and suspend its decomposition until the world caught up.

Employees of a liquid nitrogen and dry ice factory on the outskirts of Moscow are shrouded in fog while refilling their liquid nitrogen tanks. Founded by former KrioRus employees, the company now supplies them. PHOTOGRAPH BY GIUSEPPE NUCCI

Continue reading “These People Believe Death Is Only Temporary” »

Researchers have achieved a new kind of chimeric first, producing sheep-human hybrid embryos that could one day represent the future of organ donation – by using body parts grown inside unnatural, engineered animals.

With that end goal in mind, scientists have created the first interspecies sheep-human chimera, introducing human stem cells into sheep embryos, resulting in a hybrid creature that’s more than 99 percent sheep – but also a tiny, little bit like you and me.

Admittedly, the human portion of the embryos created in the experiment – before they were destroyed after 28 days – is exceedingly small, but the fact it exists at all is what generates considerable controversy in this field of research.

Continue reading “Scientists Just Made Sheep-Human Hybrids. Here’s What You Need to Know” »

Why redesigning the humble yeast could kick off the next industrial revolution.

Entrepreneur Juan Enriquez describes a future in which we will be able to hack evolution and even alter our memories thanks to DNA manipulation.