Lifeboat Foundation

“Researchers Successfully Implant Living, Functional 3D Printed Human Tissue Into Animals”

My question is “why?”

The news has been full of stories about new advancements in 3D printed tissue. Companies such as Organovo and research institutions such as the University of California San Diego are leading the charge in the development of 3D printed, functional human tissue, particularly liver tissue. So far, printed tissue is being used mostly for pharmaceutical drug testing, but everyone in the 3D printing biosphere professes the ultimate goal of eventually producing whole, fully functional human organs that can be transplanted into patients. Most experts agree that it will happen; it’s just a matter of when.

Continue reading “Wake Forest Researchers Successfully Implant Living, Functional 3D Printed Human Tissue Into Animals” »

The method would assist governments and charities trying to fight poverty but lacking precise and reliable information on where poor people are living and what they need, the researchers based at Stanford University in California said.

Eradicating extreme poverty, measured as people living on less than $1.25 U.S. a day, by 2030 is among the sustainable development goals adopted by United Nations member states last year.

Beyond the orbit of Neptune, the farthest recognized-planet from our sun, lies the mysteries population known as the Trans-Neptunian Object (TNOs). For years, astronomers have been discovering bodies and minor planets in this region which are influenced by Neptune’s gravity, and orbit our sun at an average distance of 30 Astronomical Units.

The article overplays the alarmist tone a bit, but this is still an idiotic experiment.

If I understand correctly (the reporter didn’t explain it properly), he mutated the virus multiple times, until it no longer matches existing antibodies (i.e. somebody exposed would still become resistant — if they survived — and it is still possible to create new antiviral drugs that can target it); i.e. it is dangerous, but not invincible.

Given how long it takes to make new vaccinations for flue strains (and the cost of distributing them globally), this is still deeply irresponsible.

Continue reading “Exclusive: Controversial US scientist creates deadly new flu strain for pandemic research” »

Researchers estimate that driverless cars could, by midcentury, reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. Which means that, using the number of fatalities in 2013 as a baseline, self-driving cars could save 29,447 lives a year. In the United States alone, that’s nearly 300,000 fatalities prevented over the course of a decade, and 1.5 million lives saved in a half-century. For context: Anti-smoking efforts saved 8 million lives in the United States over a 50-year period.

The life-saving estimates for driverless cars are on par with the efficacy of modern vaccines, which save 42,000 lives for each U.S. birth cohort, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization. Which means driverless cars are poised to save 10 million lives per decade—and 50 million lives around the world in half a century.

Continue reading “Will Uber’s Fleet of Self-Driving Cars Save Lives?” »

DARPA’s answer to terrorists and bad guy drones.

Lasers might be the best bet.

EPJ — Nonlinear Biomedical Physics is an open access journal, published under the brand SpringerOpen, dedicated to the application of nonlinear dynamics and integrative systems science to the quantitative modeling and understanding of how structure and function as well as dysfunctions and diseases emerge in complex biomedical matter and processes. Coverage is focused on the application-driven development of theoretical, experimental and computational techniques, including relevant methodologies, instrumentation and related advanced technology.

This article originally appeared in the Conversation.

Researchers including George Church have made further progress on the path to fully rewriting the genome of living bacteria. Such a recoded organism, once available, could feature functionality not seen in nature. It could also make the bacteria cultivated in pharmaceutical and other industries immune to viruses, saving billions of dollars of losses due to viral contamination. Finally, the altered genetic information in such an organism wouldn’t be able to contaminate natural cells because of the code’s limitations outside the lab, researchers say, so its creation could stop laboratory engineered organisms from genetically contaminating wildlife. In the DNA of living organisms, the same amino acid can be encoded by multiple codons — DNA “words” of three nucleotide letters. Here, building on previous work that demonstrated it was possible to use the genetic equivalent of “search and replace” in Escherichia coli to substitute a single codon with an alternative, Nili Ostrov, Church and colleagues explored the feasibility of replacing multiple codons, genome-wide. The researchers attempted to reduce the number of codons in the E. coli code from 64 to 57 by exploring how to eradicate more than 60,000 instances of seven different codons. They systematically replaced all 62,214 instances of these seven codons with alternatives. In the recoded E.coli segments that the researchers assembled and tested, 63% of all instances of the seven codons were replaced, the researchers say, and most of the genes impacted by underlying amino acid changes were expressed normally. Though they did not achieve a fully operational 57-codon E. coli, “a functionally altered genome of this scale has not yet been explored,” the authors write. Their results provide critical insights into the next step in the genome rewriting arena — creating a fully recoded organism.