Lifeboat Foundation

Steven Finkel tells the story of a close family member who had a discomforting health issue—the kind you don’t discuss at the dinner table.

“She went and chose a bunch of yogurts with active culture,” he says. The first yogurt—call it Yogurt A—made her constipated, and Yogurt B gave her diarrhea. “It’s like Goldilocks,” he adds, before concluding her tale of woe with a happy ending: “Yogurt C made her feel great.”

Hoping to understand how three versions of one food could cause such dissimilar reactions, the relative contacted Finkel, who is professor of biological sciences at USC Dornsife and an expert on bacterial physiology, genetics and evolution.

Fox Business adds:

Facebook’s new cryptocurrency platform could provide the embattled social media giant with a new revenue stream of historic proportions as it contends with a possible federal antitrust probe and continued scrutiny over its data privacy practices.

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We were gaining three IQ points per decade for many, many years. Now, that’s going backward. Could this explain some of our choices lately?

By finding water on the moon, startup Ispace envisions a bustling lunar economy by 2040.

Today, Facebook is coming together with 27 organizations around the world to start the non-profit Libra Association and create a new currency called Libra.

Libra is a global cryptocurrency built on blockchain to promote financial inclusion. Libra is digital, mobile, stable, fast, cheap and secure. Read the Libra White Paper.

It’s a start. So far so good, senolytics.

SAN FRANCISCO, June 18, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — UNITY Biotechnology, Inc. (UNITY) [NASDAQ: UBX], a biotechnology company developing therapeutics to extend healthspan by slowing, halting or reversing diseases of aging, today announced promising results from its first-in-human Phase 1 study of UBX0101 in patients with moderate to severe osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee. The study demonstrated that UBX0101 was safe and well-tolerated. Improvement in several clinical measures, including pain, function, as well as modulation of certain senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) factors and disease-related biomarkers was observed after a single dose of UBX0101.

Libra’s mission is to create a simple global financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people around the world. It’s powered by blockchain technology and the plan is to launch it in 2020. You can read more about the association here: https://libra.org/&h=AT0Vpgfo9yMWI9A93aDq0V-7D3PwK9TiZGZ…la1VStESZA

Being able to use mobile money can have an important positive impact on people’s lives because you don’t have to always carry cash, which can be insecure, or pay extra fees for transfers. This is especially important for people who don’t have access to traditional banks or financial services. Right now, there are around a billion people who don’t have a bank account but do have a mobile phone.

Facebook is finally ready to talk about its blockchain plans. Following numerous reports unraveling its upcoming announcement in detail, the company today said that its in-development global cryptocurrency, called Libra, will launch next year alongside the underlying blockchain-based network that will support it.

The trilogy’s success has been credited with establishing sci-fi, once marginalized in China, as a mainstream taste. Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration. The trilogy commands a huge following among aerospace engineers and cosmologists; one scientist wrote an explanatory guide, “The Physics of Three Body.” Some years ago, China’s aerospace agency asked Liu, whose first career was as a computer engineer in the hydropower industry, to address technicians and engineers about ways that “sci-fi thinking” could be harnessed to produce more imaginative approaches to scientific problems.

A leading sci-fi writer takes stock of China’s global rise.