Lifeboat Foundation

This week, UK-based futurologist Ian Pearson announced humanity will achieve immortality by the year 2050. Is he right?

According to the former rocket scientist and IT engineer – who claims to have an 85 percent success rate “when looking 10–15 years ahead” – recent advances in biomedical and computing technology will inevitably lead to victory over death via one of three means:

Continue reading “Are Humans Really On The Brink Of Achieving Immortality?” »

A landmark study, led by a team of scientists from King’s College London and the University of Cambridge, has described the mechanism responsible for the hardening of arteries. The research also points to a common antibiotic as a potential new treatment to prevent this condition.

Boy from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who crossed border with family has a confirmed infection.

Dallas, Los Angeles, and now an Australian city.

Lyft and Aptiv completed 55,000 self-driving vehicle rides in their first year.

Russia’s beleaguered space science program is hoping for a rare triumph this month. Spektr-RG, an x-ray satellite to be launched on 21 June from Kazakhstan, aims to map all of the estimated 100,000 galaxy clusters that can be seen across the universe. Containing as many as 1000 galaxies and the mass of 1 million billion suns, the clusters are the largest structures bound by gravity in the universe. Surveying them should shed light on the evolution of the universe and the nature of the dark energy that is accelerating its expansion.

Spektr-RG x-ray mission will be nation’s only space observatory.

Asteroid mining. Gene editing. Synthetic meat. We could provide for the needs of everyone, in style. It just takes some imagination.

Kyle Reese: The Terminator’s an infiltration unit, part man, part machine. Underneath, it’s a hyperalloy combat chassis — micro processor-controlled, fully armored. Very tough. But outside, it’s living human tissue — flesh, skin, hair, blood, grown for the cyborgs…

3D bioprinting is the automated fabrication of multicellular tissue via spatially defined deposition of cells. The ability to spatially control deposition in the x, y and z axes allows for creation of tissue-specific patterns or compartments, with in vivo-like architecture that mimics key aspects of native biology.

3D bioprinted tissues exhibit a microenvironment more suited to in vivo-like cellular function in comparison to traditional 2D monoculture (or monolayer co-cultures), as well as maintenance of a more defined architecture than is observed in self-aggregated co-culture models.

Neuroscientist Sara Lazar, of Mass General and Harvard Medical School, started studying meditation by accident. She sustained running injuries training for the Boston Marathon, and her physical therapist told her to stretch. So Lazar took up yoga.

“The yoga teacher made all sorts of claims, that yoga would increase your compassion and open your heart,” said Lazar. “And I’d think, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m here to stretch.’ But I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and open hearted, and able to see things from others’ points of view.”

Eventually, she looked up the scientific literature on mindfulness meditation (a category into which yoga can fall). She found the ever-increasing body of evidence that shows that meditation decreases stress, depression, and anxiety, reduces pain and insomnia, and increases quality of life.

Continue reading “Neuroscience shows that 50-year-olds can have the brains of 25-year-olds if they sit quietly and do nothing for 15 minutes a day” »