Lifeboat Foundation

Great news and a very promising vector for near future innovation!

A research team led by the University of Minnesota has discovered a way to rewarm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low (cryogenic) temperatures without damaging the tissue. The discovery could one day lead to saving millions of human lives by creating cryogenic tissue and organ banks of organs and tissues for transplantation.

Continue reading “Groundbreaking technology rewarms large-scale animal tissues preserved at low temperatures” »

Google has been working on advanced image-recognition systems for several years through its GoogLeNet projects. The project was, in part, aimed at the company’s autonomous car project, teaching self-driving cars to recognize everything from road layouts to stop signs.

The company has now applied GoogLeNet tech to cancer diagnosis, and reports that the system was already delivering good results straight out of the box, but says that tweaking the system has delivered stunning performance.

Pathologists have always faced a huge data problem in order to obtain an accurate diagnosis. A massive amount of information — slides containing cells from tissue biopsies, thinly sliced and stained — must be scanned in search of any abnormal cells. And time is of the essence.

Continue reading “Google Deep Learning system diagnoses cancer better than a pathologist with unlimited time” »

A new pathogen can have devastating consequences in genetically homogenous populations.

When Spanish forces arrived in Mexico in 1519, the native population was estimated to be around 25 million. A century later, there were only around 1 million left, following several devastating outbreaks of disease brought in from overseas.

Despite plenty of speculation, the diseases that contributed to the collapse of Aztec society remain unconfirmed. But now scientists have presented the first DNA evidence of a bacterial species from one of the worst epidemics — and it suggests that a deadly outbreak of salmonella might have been involved.

Continue reading “New Evidence Links the Collapse of Aztec Society to a Deadly Salmonella Outbreak” »

Researchers from the University of California, San Diego have successfully 3D printed a framework of functional blood vessels. Blood vessel networks are important in transporting blood, nutrients and waste around the human body.

The research team employed a 3D bioprinting process involving hydrogel and endothelial cells. Endothelial are the form of cells that make up the inner lining of blood vessels.

Leading the research was Shaochen Chen, who explains the motivation of the project.

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A new well written but not very favorable write-up on #transhumanism. Despite this, more and more publications are tackling describing the movement and its science. My work is featured a bit.

On the eve of the 20th century, an obscure Russian man who had refused to publish any of his works began to finalize his ideas about resurrecting the dead and living forever. A friend of Leo Tolstoy’s, this enigmatic Russian, whose name was Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, had grand ideas about not only how to reanimate the dead but about the ethics of doing so, as well as about the moral and religious consequences of living outside of Death’s shadow. He was animated by a utopian desire: to unite all of humanity and to create a biblical paradise on Earth, where we would live on, spurred on by love. He was an immortalist: one who desired to conquer death through scientific means.

Despite the religious zeal of his notions—which a number of later Christian philosophers unsurprisingly deemed blasphemy—Fyodorov’s ideas were underpinned by a faith in something material: the ability of humans to redevelop and redefine themselves through science, eventually becoming so powerfully modified that they would defeat death itself. Unfortunately for him, Fyodorov—who had worked as a librarian, then later in the archives of Ministry of Foreign Affairs—did not live to see his project enacted, as he died in 1903.

Continue reading “Transhumanism: More Nightmare Than Dream?” »

Antibiotic resistance continues to rise, and new drugs made to battle these increasingly formidable microbes could take more than a decade to develop. In an effort to stress the urgency of this rising resistance, the World Health Organization (WHO) created a list of the twelve deadliest superbugs with which we are currently dealing.

The list is broken into three categories based on the severity of the threat (medium, high, or critical) that a given superbug poses. The three critical bacteria, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacteriaceae, are all already resistant to multiple drugs. One of these (Pseudomonas aeruginosa) actually explodes when they die, making them even more deadly.

Pathogens that cause more common diseases like food poisoning or gonorrhea round out the rest of the list. Some big hitters include MRSA and salmonella.

Continue reading “These 12 Superbugs Could Wipe Out Humanity” »

Inspired by origami, North Carolina State University researchers have found a way to remotely control the order in which a two-dimensional (2-D) sheet folds itself into a three-dimensional (3D) structure.

“A longstanding challenge in the field has been finding a way to control the sequence in which a 2-D sheet will fold itself into a 3D object,” says Michael Dickey, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-corresponding author of a paper describing the work. “And as anyone who has done origami — or folded their laundry—can tell you, the order in which you make the folds can be extremely important.”

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Lasers are everywhere nowadays: Doctors use them to correct eyesight, cashiers to scan your groceries, and quantum scientist to control qubits in the future quantum computer. For most applications, the current bulky, energy-inefficient lasers are fine, but quantum scientist work at extremely low temperatures and on very small scales. For over 40 years, they have been searching for efficient and precise microwave lasers that will not disturb the very cold environment in which quantum technology works.

A team of researchers led by Leo Kouwenhoven at TU Delft has demonstrated an on-chip microwave laser based on a fundamental property of superconductivity, the ac Josephson effect. They embedded a small section of an interrupted superconductor, a Josephson junction, in a carefully engineered on-chip cavity. Such a device opens the door to many applications in which microwave radiation with minimal dissipation is key, for example in controlling qubits in a scalable quantum computer.

The scientists have published their work in Science on the 3rd of March.

Frozen organs could be brought back to life safely one day with the aid of nanotechnology, a new study finds. The development could help make donated organs available for virtually everyone who needs them in the future, the researchers say.

The number of donated organs that could be transplanted into patients could increase greatly if there were a way to freeze and reheat organs without damaging the cells within them.

In the new work, scientists developed a way to safely thaw frozen tissues with the aid of nanoparticles — particles only nanometers or billionths of a meter wide. (In comparison, the average human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.)

Continue reading “Big nanotechnology advance could spell end of deadly organ shortage” »