Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s first artificial liver has been grown from stem cells by British scientists. The resulting “mini-liver” is the size of a small coin; the same technique will be further developed to create a full-size liver.

The mini-liver is useful as it is; within two years it can be used to test new drugs, reducing the number of animal experiments as well as providing results based on a human (rather than animal) liver.

Year 2020

After decades of slow progress, researchers are exploring better treatments for kidney failure — which kills more people than HIV or tuberculosis.

Human pancreas-on-a-chip (PoC) technology is quickly advancing as a platform for complex in vitro modeling of islet physiology. This review summarizes the current progress and evaluates the possibility of using this technology for clinical islet transplantation.

PoC microfluidic platforms have mainly shown proof of principle for long-term culturing of islets to study islet function in a standardized format. Advancement in microfluidic design by using imaging-compatible biomaterials and biosensor technology might provide a novel future tool for predicting islet transplantation outcome. Progress in combining islets with other tissue types gives a possibility to study diabetic interventions in a minimal equivalent in vitro environment.

Although the field of PoC is still in its infancy, considerable progress in the development of functional systems has brought the technology on the verge of a general applicable tool that may be used to study islet quality and to replace animal testing in the development of diabetes interventions.

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Not to mention the potential for cost-savings. If you have been severely sick, you will have felt the unfairness of the high cost of drugs. The latest drugs for cancer, cardiovascular or gastrointestinal diseases, nervous disorders, and rare conditions are so costly that even selling an expensive car won’t cover a year’s supply of them.

The most poignant example is that of cancer drugs, whose approval is by far the most wasteful process of all drug types: The FDA approves less than four percent of cancer drugs, meaning 96 percent of them spend more than a decade being tested in petri dishes, mice, and a small set of patients, before scientists finally realize that they aren’t suitable for human use. Each drug in the four percent that does get approved bears an average price tag of more than a billion dollars, a bill passed down to you, the patient-customer.

Continue reading “The Organ-on-a-Chip Revolution Is Here” »

Elon Musk is confident that Neuralink will be able to restore vision in humans who are blind and full body functionality in humans who have a severed spinal cord.

Neuralink, another of Elon Musk’s companies, held its Show & Tell on Wednesday, and many revelations were shared in the live stream. One of those revelations included restoring vision even if someone was born blind. And also restoring full body functionality to someone with a severed spinal cord.

Elon Musk founded Neuralink to answer the question, “What do we do if there is a superintelligence that is much smarter than human beings? How do we, as a species, mitigate the risk or, in a benign scenario, go along for the ride?”

AI generated video I created with stable diffusion by using prompts that I used to generate AI art based on the themes in the song. I tried midjourney, disco diffusion, and settled in deforum in stable diffusion to create this AI generated music video. stable diffusion AI art is so much fun. All nipple censoring credit goes to drdollas. He had the difficult task of staring at thousands of images of beautiful, perfect female breasts for 73 hours. Check out his channel for the uncensored version.

Many people theorize about what attitudes artificially intelligent beings might one day take towards humanity. Rather than guess, we think it’s a better idea to just ask them directly — so we did. The following is an unedited transcription of one of our sessions with an AI informant who was not shy about sharing their ideas.

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Using well-known materials and manufacturing processes, researchers have built an effective, passive, ultrathin laser isolator that opens new research avenues in photonics.