Lifeboat Foundation

On Nov. 26, 2022 a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket departed from departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to deliver supplies to the International Space Station. Among the 7,700 pounds of cargo on board, it is safe to say that the smallest delivery that day were a bunch of frozen bacteria.

In an interdisciplinary collaboration, a group of scientists from MIT Media Lab, NREL, Seed Health and others, bioengineered a plastic-eating bacteria to be able to upcycle plastics. Mashable met with some of them to find out how the bacteria works, why it was it was sent to space, and how it can help humanity tackle plastic pollution in space as well as on Earth.

Continue reading “Why Are We Sending a Plastic-Eating Enzyme to Space? | Mashable” »

You’ve seen the headlines. The FDA approved its use in tackling the underlying genetic mutation for sickle cell disease. Some researchers edited immune cells to fight untreatable blood cancers in children. Others took pig-to-human organ transplants from dream to reality in an attempt to alleviate the shortage of donor organs. Recent work aims to help millions of people with high cholesterol—and potentially bring CRISPR-based gene therapy to the masses—by lowering their chances of heart disease with a single injection.

But to Dr. Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for her role in developing CRISPR, we’re just scratching the surface of its potential. Together with graduate student Joy Wang, Doudna laid out a roadmap for the technology’s next decade in an article in Science.

If the 2010s were focused on establishing the CRISPR toolbox and proving its effectiveness, this decade is when the technology reaches its full potential. From CRISPR-based therapies and large-scale screens for disease diagnostics to engineering high-yield crops and nutritious foods, the technology “and its potential impact are still in their early stages,” the authors wrote.

MIT neuroscientists have found that the adult brain is filled with millions of “silent synapses” — immature connections between neurons that are not active until they are needed to help create new memories.

It was previously believed that silent synapses only existed during early development, playing a role in helping the brain learn new information encountered in early life. However, the new MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3AQPgchedUw

This video explores aliens, mind uploading to other species (like in Avatar), genetic engineering, and future robots. Watch this next video about digital immortality: https://youtu.be/sZdWN9pbbew.
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SOURCES:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eagle_eye#:~:text=Eagles%20hav…0developed, see%20from%205%20feet%20away.
• https://vcahospitals.com/know-your-pet/how-dogs-use-smell-to…has%20been, 10%2C000%20times%20better%20than%20people.
• https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/small-animals-liv…ion-world/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_cloning.

Continue reading “When WIll We Upload Our Minds To Other Species?” »

Because intelligence is such a strong genetic trait, rapidly advancing genetics research could result in the ability to create a class of super-intelligent humans one-thousand times higher in IQ than today’s most brilliant thinkers.

Last week, Rice University in Houston announced that one of its assistant professors of bioengineering, Jerzy Szablowski, received a Young Faculty Award from DARPA to research non-genetic drugs that can “temporarily enhance the human body’s resilience to extreme cold exposure.”

Thermogenesis is the use of energy to create heat, and our bodies have two different ways of doing this. One is shivering, which we’re all familiar with. The other, which Szablowski simply calls non-shivering thermogenesis, involves burning off brown adipose tissue (BAT), or brow n fat.

This type of fat exists specifically to warm us up when we get cold; it stores energy and only activates in cold temperatures. Most of our body fat is white fat. It builds up when we ingest more calories than we burn and stores those calories for when we don’t get enough energy from food. An unfortunate majority of American adults have the opposite problem: too much white fat, which increases the risk of conditions like heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.

Basically many have theorized that these seeds coming from meteorites mean that essentially perhaps that life started from seeds like this. Going much deeper down the rabbit hole we actually are starting to see a grand design possibly by actually organisms that evolved into what we have now over millions of years which is actually weird because all earth would have been just a rock but this could be a grand architecture genetically even from the first seed to the biological singularity. This could Basically prove the existence of some entity that may have created humans and all life most like from this seed which means whether it is alien gods or God there will be so much more discover due to this complexity which can benefit all medicine and also genetic engineering 🤔 😉 😀

The fact the first of four surviving pieces was collected within 12 hours of landing, allowing little time for contamination, added to the meteorite’s value. Indeed, because the abundance of organic material in the meteorite was ten times lower than in other carbonaceous chondrites, they might not have been distinguishable from Earthly contamination had it not been retrieved so quickly. As it is, some of the amino acids found are quite rare on Earth, confirming their extraterrestrial origins.

The Winchcombe stones had a number of features never previously seen in meteorites, including low amino acid abundance for a carbonaceous chondrite but unusual ratios among the amino acids and PAHs that are present. Combined with the incomplete conversion of Winchcombe’s components into solid rock, this led the authors to speculate Winchcombe could represent a new class of meteorite that has not been studied before.

Continue reading “UK Meteorite That Fell To Earth Contains Building Blocks For Life” »

The ultraviolet nail polish drying devices used to cure gel manicures may pose more of a public health concern than previously thought. Researchers at the University of California San Diego studied these ultraviolet (UV) light emitting devices, and found that their use leads to cell death and cancer-causing mutations in human cells.

The devices are a common fixture in nail salons, and generally use a particular spectrum of UV light (340-395nm) to cure the chemicals used in gel manicures. While tanning beds use a different spectrum of UV light (280-400nm) that studies have conclusively proven to be carcinogenic, the spectrum used in the nail dryers has not been well studied.

“If you look at the way these devices are presented, they are marketed as safe, with nothing to be concerned about,” said Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of bioengineering as well as cellular and molecular medicine at UC San Diego, and corresponding author of the study published Jan. 17 in Nature Communications. “But to the best of our knowledge, no one has actually studied these devices and how they affect human cells at the molecular and cellular levels until now.”

Summary: Researchers have developed a new family of nano-scale capsules capable of carrying CRISPR gene editing tools to different organs of the body before harmlessly dissolving. The capsules were able to enter the brains of mice and successfully edit a gene associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gene therapies have the potential to treat neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, but they face a common barrier — the blood-brain barrier.