Lifeboat Foundation

It was a great pleasure to share latest data and insights with a fantastic community of researchers, engineers, innovators and investors last week, hosted by the Imperial College Centre for Neurotechnology in London. Hope you enjoy the overview slides!

Presentation by Alvaro Fernandez hosted by the Imperial College Centre for Neurotechnology in London.

Description: As seen in patent and investment trends, research findings and consumer/patient behaviors, Mental Health and Brain Enhancement are rapidly evolving in transformational ways which some call “empowering” and some “controversial.” Alvaro Fernandez, Editor-in-Chief of independent market research firm SharpBrains, will present and discuss the latest market data and forecasts on how digital platforms are poised to revolutionize brain & mental health diagnostics, monitoring, therapies and enhancement.

Continue reading “Why the Future of Brain Enhancement and Mental Health is Digital and Pervasive” »

CFTC head to the UN: Cryptocoins aren’t going anywhere; “we are witnessing a technological revolution”

Introduction

Good evening. The United Nations has played a special role in my life. I grew up close by, about 20 miles away in northern New Jersey. More importantly, my Aunt is the founder and president of the International Health Awareness Network (IHAN), which works in consultative status with the Department of Public Information of the United Nations. Consequently, from the first days of that ambitious project back in 1987, she was often in these buildings advocating her vision, and seeking support for the organization, which aspires to “educate, empower and provide health care to socioeconomically underserved women and children.” My family would come to see her here. And occasionally, I had the great fortune of participating at IHAN events, listening to the speeches, and hearing about the organization’s vision to fulfill its mission. Those moments are themselves transformational, and foundational in setting my agenda for facilitating change in the future.

Additionally, in 2008, my sister’s wedding reception was held in the Delegates Dining Room of the United Nations. A spectacular night for my family, and another reason why this building and institution is so special to me.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed tiny ultrasound-powered nanorobots that can swim through blood, removing harmful bacteria and the toxins they produce.

Continue reading “Ultrasound-powered nanorobots clear bacteria and toxins from blood” »

A journalist, a soup exec, and an imam walk into a room. There’s no joke here. It’s just another day at CrisprCon.

On Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of scientists, industry folk, and public health officials from all over the world filled the amphitheater at the Boston World Trade Center to reckon with the power of biology’s favorite new DNA-tinkering tool: Crispr. The topics were thorny—from the ethics of self-experimenting biohackers to the feasibility of pan-global governance structures. And more than once you could feel the air rush right out of the room. But that was kind of the point. CrisprCon is designed to make people uncomfortable.

“I’m going to talk about the monkey in the room,” said Antonio Cosme, an urban farmer and community organizer in Detroit who appeared on a panel at the second annual conference devoted to Crispr’s big ethical questions to talk about equitable access to gene editing technologies. He referred to the results of an audience poll that had appeared moments before in a word cloud behind him, with one bigger than all the others: “eugenics.”

Continue reading “Crispr Fans Fight for Egalitarian Access to Gene Editing” »

Researchers at the US National Cancer Institute have reported in on an experimental breast cancer therapy that achieved remarkable results, rehabilitating Judy Perkins from the brink of death (she had been given two months to live, had tumors in her liver and throughout her body) to robust health two years later.

http://www.thepathmag.com/can-you-actually-hack-your-dna-to-slow-down-aging/

Many technologies / interventions progressing down the development pathways in the coming years — but there are a lot of free, common sense adjustments you can make today:

https://player.fm/series/healthy-relationship-talk-radio/cel…1-2018

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/entrepreneursempower/2018/06/03…ira-pastor

It was a good week for physics as a team with members from Australia and Switzerland invented a flux capacitor able to break time-reversal symmetry. They proposed a device based on quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor. And another team with members from across the U.S. reported on a gravitational wave event that likely signaled the creation of a black hole—the merger of two neutron stars.

In biology news, a team of engineers led by Sinisa Vukelic invented a noninvasive technique to correct vision. Like LASIK, it uses lasers but is non-surgical and has few side-effects. And an international team of researchers found what they describe as the mother of all lizards in the Italian Alps, the oldest known lizard fossil, from approximately 240 million years ago. Also, a team at the University of Sydney found that walking faster could make you live longer. People do not even need to walk more, the team reported, they just need to pick up the pace of their normal stride to see an improvement in several health factors. And a team from Cal Poly Pomona discovered how microbes survive clean rooms and contaminate spacecraft—and it involved the cleaning agents themselves.

In other news, a team of researchers from the University of California and the University of Southern Queensland announced that they had identified 121 giant planets that may have habitable moons. And a team at Stanford University found that wars and clan structure might explain a strange biological event that occurred 7,000 years ago—male genetic diversity appeared to collapse for a time. Also, a team of researchers from MIT and Harvard University report the development of a 3D printer that can print data sets as physical objects—offering far more realistic, nearly true-color renderings.