Lifeboat Foundation

Today is World Asteroid Day… https://bcgallie.wixsite.com/asteroidday

Asteroid Day is a global awareness movement to protect Earth against asteroid impacts. The original inspiration for this campaign came from Grigorij Richters’ asteroid impact disaster film 51 Degrees North — all profits from which he has now dedicated to the cause of Asteroid Day world-wide. Dr. Brian May is a key supporter and delivered a slight update of the original mix, specifically for the Asteroid Day launch. Learn more about Asteroid Day, here: http://www.asteroidday.org

Continue reading “We Will Rock You” »

This is the oldest and largest art magazine by circulation in the world. For the first time, it has #transhumanism in its search engines. A main task of mine all these years has been spreading that word and concept. My talk at #Moogfest on the Immortality Bus is covered a bit in this story.

L ast month, as bidding was underway at Sotheby’s for what would prove to be a stratospheric Jean-Michel Basquiat sale, Lonnie Holley, a 67-year-old artist who was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and has worked for decades in various folksy and homegrown modes, was preparing to take the stage at a sports bar in Durham, North Carolina. He was sitting at a table in the back, in a place that stank of burgers and beer. An audience of a few dozen had convened for the occasion, though it was hard to distinguish between Holley fans and regular denizens of the Bullpen, a joint next door to the stadium for the beloved local minor-league baseball team, the Durham Bulls. Night-game lights were bright outside. Televisions above the bar showed the Bulls making easy work of the Gwinnett Braves, in town for a weekend series from Georgia. The air was thick and languid in the way it tends to be on a deep, hot Southern summer night.

Holley is a hero to some: as an artist, he has made formidable paintings and sculptures that have been collected by the Souls Grow Deep Foundation and exhibited by museums and institutions all over, and as a musician, he has forged an unforgettable sound with a stirring voice and stewing electronics. For all his accomplishments, though, Holley remains underappreciated—certainly not as known in the worlds of either art or music as he should be.

Continue reading “For Moogfest, Michael Stipe, Lonnie Holley, and Transhuman Futurists Commune Down South” »

Philadelphia, PA, USA / Moscow, Russia — Bioquark, Inc., (www.bioquark.com) a life sciences company focused on the development of novel bio-products for regeneration, disease reversion, and healthy aging, and Moscow based, Lakmus LLC, a diversified investment company with business interests in pharmacies, restaurants, and real estate, announced a multi-disciplinary research collaboration with the FSBI Zakusov Institute of Pharmacology, Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (http://www.academpharm.ru/), and the Pavlov Institute of Physiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (http://www.infran.ru/), to jointly study the pharmacotherapeutic longevity enhancement properties of its combinatorial regenerative biologic candidates.

“We are very excited about this continued collaboration with Lakmus,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “The disciplined development of our combinatorial biologic candidates (Bioquantines) for healthy longevity enhancement, represents another important step in our continued evolution as a company focused on a broad range of therapeutic products and services in the regenerative healthcare space.”

Throughout the 20th century, natural products formed the basis for a majority of all pharmaceuticals, biologics, and consumer healthcare products used by patients around the globe, generating trillions of dollars of wealth. However, many scientists believe we have only touched the surface with what the natural world, and its range of organisms, which from a health and wellness perspective are much further advanced than human beings, has to teach us.

Continue reading “Bioquark Inc. and Lakmus LLC Announce Research Collaboration to Study Novel Biopharmaceuticals for Healthy Longevity Enhancement” »

It may have a boring name, but it is getting exciting boring done. The aptly yet ironically named company has just reached an important milestone in fulfilling Elon Musk’s newest moonshot. The visionary and entrepreneur extraordinaire took to Twitter to almost nonchalantly revealed that boring machine Godot has just completed the first segment underneath LA, while still leaving plenty of room for mystery and suspense.

Musk is anything but boring, of course, as can be seen by his ambitions turned into successful companies. His latest endeavor, however, is probably one of the most debated. It came out of the blue and, given the tongue-in-cheek name, not everyone might have taken it seriously at first. And some of those that did though Musk had finally lost it. Of course, it had its fair share of fans who shared a dream of escaping traffic congestion.

Musk’s plan to solve the traffic problem wasn’t simply to bore tunnels that cars and all sorts of vehicles would simply fill up again. Instead, the tunnels would ferry these vehicles on sleds traveling at 200 km/h. Back in April, that was nothing more than a pretty rendered animation, but last month Musk showed off a demo of just how fast that sled really is.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Boring Company finishes first tunnel segment in LA” »

The Managed, Reconfigurable, In-space Nodal Assembly (MARINA), developed by MIT graduate students, recently took first place at NASA’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkage Design Competition Forum. MARINA is designed as a habitable commercially owned module for use in low Earth orbit that would be extensible for future use as a Mars transit vehicle.

Image courtesy of the MARINA team.

The year is 2030. In a high-security containment lab, scientists gathered around a towering machine, eagerly awaiting the first look at a newly discovered bacterium on Mars.

With a series of beeps, the machine—a digital-to-biological converter, or DBC—signaled that it had successfully received the bacterium’s digitized genomic file. Using a chemical cocktail comprised of the building blocks of DNA, it whirled into action, automatically reconstructing the alien organism’s genes letter-by-letter.

Within a day, scientists had an exact replica of the Martian bacterium.

Continue reading “‘Biological Teleportation’ Edges Closer With Craig Venter’s Digital-to-Biological Converter” »

Planet Labs and other companies are sending hundreds of low-cost satellites into orbit. We’re only beginning to understand how that will change life on Earth.

“Understanding interactions between different gene networks, which are evolved to respond to different stressors, and understanding natural variation in these responses could have important agricultural applications in challenging environments.”

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The study’s design faced constraints. The constitution ordains equality for all, so getting permission to afford some welfare recipients special treatment was difficult. That limitation, and a budget of only €20m (plus diverted welfare funds that would have otherwise gone to the recipients), restricted the sample size to just 2,000 people. Mr Kangas frets that might prove too small to be statistically robust. And it limits the questions the study can investigate.

JUHA JARVINEN, an unemployed young father in a village near Jurva, in western Finland, brims with ideas for earning a living. He has just agreed to paint the roofs of two neighbours’ houses. His old business, making decorative window frames, went bust a few years ago. Having paid off debts, he recently registered another, to produce videos for clients.

Mr Jarvinen says that for six years he hoped to start a new business but it was impossible. The family got by on his wife’s wages as a nurse, plus unemployment and child benefits. He had a few job offers from local businesses, which are mainly in forestry, furniture and metalwork. But anything less than a permanent, well-paid post made no sense, since it would jeopardise his welfare payments. To re-enroll for benefits later would be painfully slow.

Continue reading “Finland tests a new form of welfare” »