Lifeboat Foundation

Speculations around whether biotech stocks are in a bubble remain undecided for the second year in a row. But one thing stands as indisputable—the field made massive progress during 2015, and faster than anticipated.

For those following the industry in recent years, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In fact, according to Adam Feuerstei at The Street, some twenty-eight biotech and drugs stocks grew their market caps to $1 billion or more in 2014, and major headlines like, “Human Genome Sequencing Now Under $1,000 Per Person,” were strewn across the web last year.

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It’s been a short 20 years since Mayor and Queloz first detected 51 Peg b, the first exoplanet discovered around a solar type star. This is my personal take on this all; kind of takes me back. I can still smell the thyme at Haute-Provence.

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My latest piece for The Huffington Post. It’s a recap of 2015 for transhumanism and includes some select stories & videos:

Last year, I wrote that 2014 was a great year for the transhumanism movement. But 2015 was simply incredible — it might end up being called a breakout year. I’m not yet willing to declare transhumanism as “mainstream,” but it’s getting quite close now. Transhumanism has become a word that is used frequently by people around the world and in major media when discussing radical science and technology changing our species.

Below is a quick recap of some select stories in English that came out this year on transhumanism and some of my efforts to bring the future closer.

Continue reading “Will 2015 Be Remembered as the Breakout Year for Transhumanism?” »

Physicists think they’ve come up with a way to learn a bit about the interior of a black hole — an impossible procedure that shows the insanity of studying the heart of a singularity.

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Researchers from the University Of New South Wales(UNSW) in Australia have successfully demonstrated that they can write and control the quantum version of computer code on a silicon microchip. Computers, at the moment, use binary language to operate, 0 and 1. Together, these two bits generate code words that can be used to program complex commands. But in quantum computing language there’s also the option for bits to be in superposition, what this actually means is that they can be 1 and 0 at the very exact same time. This unlocks a massively more powerful programming language, but until now scientists haven’t been able to figure out how to write it.

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“[Dave Valeza] captures the wonder artists worldwide have experienced with the rejuvination of the space industry of the past few years. From finding water on Mars to landing reusable rockets (plural!), 2015 has been a great year for space, and artists are loving it.”

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Futurism presents its annual This Year in Science immersive experience! This year’s themes include robot intelligence, space exploration, drones, CRISPR (a breakthrough gene editing tool), plus a special ‘Futurist of the Year’ award.

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BY: DANIEL KORN

The very mention of “nanobots” can bring up a certain future paranoia in people—undetectable robots under my skin? Thanks, but no thanks. Professor Ido Bachelet of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University confirms that while tiny robots being injected into a human body to fight disease might sound like science fiction, it is in fact very real.

Cancer treatment as we know it is problematic because it targets a large area. Chemo and radiation therapies are like setting off a bomb—they destroy cancerous cells, but in the process also damage the healthy ones surrounding it. This is why these therapies are sometimes as harmful as the cancer itself. Thus, the dilemma with curing cancer is not in finding treatments that can wipe out the cancerous cells, but ones that can do so without creating a bevy of additional medical issues. As Bachelet himself notes in a TEDMED talk: “searching for a safer cancer drug is basically like searching for a gun that kills only bad people.”

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