Lifeboat Foundation

New article for Vice Motherboard on the future of drugs and implants:

Brain stimulation is the future of drugs.

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There’s a common misconception that tattoos are only a way to express your individuality (just like everyone else does), or only serve as loving tributes to moms. But they have practical medical applications too, especially now that circuit board temporary tattoos exist.

Developed by Chaotic Moon Studios, which describes itself as a “creative technology studio,” these Tech Tats use conductive inks (in lieu of actual tattoo inks) that only sit on the surface of the skin so they’re not permanent. After all, given the speed at which technology evolves, the last thing you want is a permanent circuit board tattoo on your arm that’s outdated within a year.

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Tianjin is building the world’s largest animal cloning factory, aiming to produce one million cattle embryos annually, state media reported yesterday.

According to a Xinhua, mainland scientists have signed a deal to establish a 200 million yuan (HK$242 million) commercial animal cloning centre in the Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area, a government-sponsored business development park.

Its main building was already under construction and due to be completed by June next year, the report said. Among the animals it will clone are sniffer and pet dogs, high-grade beef cattle, racehorses and “non-human primates”. These animals will be used for commercial services and improving breeds.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ray Kurzweil’s wild prediction that in the 2030s, nanobots will connect our brains to the cloud, merging biology with the digital world.

Let’s talk about what’s happening today.

Over the past few decades, billions of dollars have been poured into three areas of research: neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces and optogenetics.

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The marginalization of anti-aging research is our most shameful humanitarian failure.

Aging is a hot topic among the chattering classes these days. What with biotech companies like Calico and Human Longevity Inc. being founded with the mission to defeat aging, and venerable institutions such as Prudential proclaiming the imminence of superlongevity on billboards, there’s no denying that this is a time of great interest in our oldest and deepest-held dream — to escape from the tyranny of inexorable and ultimately fatal physiological decline.

But hang on — is the buzz around aging really reflective of what’s being done to realize this goal? The briefest dispassionate analysis reveals a different story altogether. The proportion of government spending allocated in the industrialized world to diseases and disabilities of old age is appropriately high, but it is overwhelmingly dedicated to the transparently quixotic approach of attacking those ailments directly — as if they were infections — rather than attacking their lifelong accumulating causes.

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Seoul, South Korea, is the global plastic surgery capital.

The high-status neighborhood of Gangnam reportedly has 500 aesthetic centers alone.

Why the concentration? Because South Korea has the most plastic surgeries per capita on earth, with over 980,000 recorded operations in 2014. That’s 20 procedures per 1,000 people, putting it ahead of the US’s 13 procedures per 1,000. And Korea has had the most operations per capita since 2009.

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Engineers at the University of California, San Diego developed a new technology that uses an oscillating electric field to easily and quickly isolate drug-delivery nanoparticles from blood. The technology could serve as a general tool to separate and recover nanoparticles from other complex fluids for medical, environmental, and industrial applications.

Nanoparticles, which are generally one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, are difficult to separate from plasma, the liquid component of blood, due to their small size and low density. Traditional methods to remove nanoparticles from plasma samples typically involve diluting the plasma, adding a high concentration sugar solution to the plasma and spinning it in a centrifuge, or attaching a targeting agent to the surface of the nanoparticles. These methods either alter the normal behavior of the nanoparticles or cannot be applied to some of the most common nanoparticle types.

“This is the first example of isolating a wide range of nanoparticles out of plasma with a minimum amount of manipulation,” said Stuart Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego and first author of the study published October in the journal Small. “We’ve designed a very versatile technique that can be used to recover nanoparticles in a lot of different processes.”

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Interesting look at the future of human augmentation.

To celebrate the launch of critically acclaimed video game DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION, Square Enix has commissioned filmmaker Rob Spence aka Eyeborg (a self proclaimed cyborg who lost an eye replaced it with a wireless video camera) to investigate prosthetics, cybernetics and human augmentation.

Continue reading “Deus Ex: The Eyeborg Documentary” »

Gene editing has incredible potential and could give us an unprecedented control of the biological world. The newest addition CRISPR offers unprecedented speed and ease, but there have been questions over its accuracy and reliability. New data hints we can relax a little; it’s safer than we thought.

A brief overview of CRISPR

CRISPR has made gene editing big news in very little time. While it may not be the most accurate method, the system is customisable, cheap and fast and has clear advantages over its predecessors. The system is essentially made of two parts: an enzyme called Cas9 which snips the target DNA sequence, and a guiding sequence made up of RNA which binds to a matching DNA sequence. The system also needs a small 3 letter sequence called PAM, which is required next to the site for Cas9 to cut. Together these can accurately target a specific sequence in the genome, allowing you to make tiny changes or insert a new sequence by hijacking the cell’s own repair systems.

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