Lifeboat Foundation

The company Algordanza will turn cremated human or animal ashes into a memorial diamond of your loved one — for a price.

Drawing design inspiration from the skin of stealthy sea creatures, engineers at the University of California, Irvine have developed a next-generation, adaptive space blanket that gives users the ability to control their temperature. The innovation is detailed in a study published today in Nature Communications.

At this year’s London Marathon, runners tested out algae pods filled with water instead of paper cups. Algae is the newest sustainable trend.

MeiraGTx’s founders were interested in those uses; the biotech’s programs today are in diseases of the eye, salivary gland and brain.

But “we wanted to have a broader perspective on how you could potentially use gene therapy” too, CEO Alexandria Forbes says.

That vision is a high-tech, futuristic one, in which the human body can essentially become a medicine-making factory, enabled by gene therapy. But it’ll require more research, and is still years from fruition.

Continue reading “‘It’s the next rising platform’: 2 promising technologies backed by billion-dollar drugmakers could transform the human body into a disease-destroying machine” »

Starlink could offer internet to anyone on the planet.

Starlink could transmit internet down to the ground.

“Smart” contact lenses sound like something from a sci fi movie — but they’re real, and they could help troops in the field.

French engineering school IMT Atlantique revealed what it calls “the first stand-alone contact lens with a flexible micro battery” earlier this month.

And, notably, it caught the attention of the U.S. military’s attention: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reportedly interested in the contact lens to augment troops’ visual capabilities in the field, according to Task and Purpose — meaning the gadget could represent the augmented contact lens that DARPA has spent a decade searching for.

Continue reading “DARPA: This Smart Contact Lens Could Give Soldiers Superpowers” »

But even with existing research, achieving sustained fusion inside a reactor is still many years out.

Rain, seas and a surface of eroding organic material can be found both on Earth and on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. However, on Titan it is methane, not water, that fills the lakes with slushy raindrops.

The experiments could create a new kind of monkey — and a big ethical dilemma.

Apr 25