Lifeboat Foundation

This revolutionary gene modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer.

Summary: After years of effort, this revolutionary gene-modified T cell therapy is bearing fruit in treating a type of lymphoma, a resistant form of cancer. [This article first appeared on the website LongevityFacts.com. Author: Brady Hartman. ]

Thirty-seven-year-old Nick Asoian of Denver unsuccessfully fought Hodgkin’s Lymphoma using conventional cancer treatments for two years. In 2008, while in New Zealand for a ski race, Nick was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Two bone marrow transplants and two years of chemotherapy combined with radiation therapy didn’t bring his cancer to heel.

Continue reading “Revolutionary gene edited T cell therapy to treat lymphoma shows promise and little toxicity” »

Between 04–09 December 2017, thousands of researchers and experts gathered for at the largest and most influential AI and Thirty-first Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) in Long Beach, California. This is the conference’s 40th year, and its most-attended, at 7,229 registrations.

Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an Artificial Intelligence Conference in California. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.

Continue reading “Learning From First Principles — Demis Hassabis” »

Researchers have developed a superconducting switch that can make future computers think like the human brain.

As an added bonus, these tiny building blocks could even be used to split water, creating a clean-burning and near infinite source of energy.

The battery-powered autonomous ships will move goods across Belgium and the Netherlands, helping pull up to 23,000 polluting trucks off the road.

Planes that can fold their wings to different angles while in the air have the potential to fly faster than their peers, and NASA has recently made headway into their development. The space agency has conducted a series of test flights proving that it can control the wings it designed to move into any position and that they have aerodynamic benefits. While the technology has existed for a long time, it typically requires the use of heavy hydraulic systems. NASA’s version doesn’t need that kind of machinery: it relies on the properties of a temperature-activated material called shape memory alloy instead. Upon being heated, the alloy activates a twisting motion in the tubes serving as the wings’ actuator, moving the wings’ outer portion up to 70 degrees upwards or downwards.

The foldable wings will give typical planes like commercial airliners a way to adapt to different flight conditions. They can give pilots more control over their aircraft and could even lead to more fuel efficient flights. Planes designed to fly at supersonic speeds (faster than the speed of sound), however, will get more out of this technology.

By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) — Chinese scientists have cloned monkeys using the same technique that produced Dolly the sheep two decades ago, breaking a technical barrier that could open the door to copying humans.

Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, two identical long-tailed macaques, were born eight and six weeks ago, making them the first primates — the order of mammals that includes monkeys, apes and humans — to be cloned from a non-embryonic cell.

Continue reading “Chinese scientists just cloned two monkeys, moving one step closer to cloning humans” »

The ability to modify the weather has long belonged in the realm of science fiction, but now a team of scientists in Idaho think they’ve figured out how to make it happen outside a lab.

The ocean is crowded. As many as 10 million viruses can be found squirming in a single millilitre of its water, and it turns out they have friends we never even knew about.

Scientists have discovered a previously unknown family of viruses that dominate the ocean and can’t be detected by standard lab tests. Researchers suspect this viral multitude may already exist outside the water — maybe even inside us.

“We don’t think it’s ocean-specific at all,” says environmental microbiologist Martin Polz from MIT.