Lifeboat Foundation

In some countries, progress has not always been smooth. Disease, epidemics and unexpected events are a reminder that ever-longer lives are not a given.

Meanwhile, the deaths that may preoccupy us — from terrorism, war and natural disasters — make up less than 0.5% of all deaths combined.

It will happen to all of us, but how and when we die speaks volumes about who we are and where we live.

It was 100 times faster on a routine task.

In a recent study, LawGeex, a legal tech startup, challenged a group of 20 experienced lawyers to test their skills and knowledge against its AI-powered algorithm.

A legal battle

Continue reading “This AI outperformed 20 corporate lawyers at legal work” »

I’ll be on BBC Four this coming Monday (21:00) and Tuesday (02:30) hanging out with celebrated conceptual artist Ryan Gander. We discuss #transhumanism and the future of upgrades:

Celebrated conceptual artist Ryan Gander investigates the selfie – the icon of a new kind of self-regard that hardly existed just ten years ago.

Humans have long envied animals that are able to regenerate parts of their bodies. Arms, legs, tails, even whole chunks of the organism. Yet despite all the technology and best efforts, humans don’t have this ability. However, this could all change. Harvard University uncovered the DNA switch that controls genes for whole body regeneration. This means that one day, humans may be able to grow back lost limbs!

Many people know that certain animals are able to achieve extraordinary feats of repair, such as salamanders which grow back legs, or geckos which can shed their tails to escape predators and then form new ones in just two months. It doesn’t stop there either. Planarian worms, jellyfish, and sea anemones take this regeneration to a whole new level and can actually regenerate their entire bodies after being cut in half.

Continue reading “Harvard Scientists Have Discovered The DNA Switch That Controls Whole-Body Regeneration” »

This is something near and dear to me.

The Out Astronaut Project is a collaboration between Stardom Space and Project PoSSUM to address the under-representation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) people in science and space. We highlight the contributions of LGBTQ members currently working in science and space and provide grants to promising LGBTQ students currently pursuing professions in space-related fields.

Scientists probe cellular hideouts for HIV and show that CRISPR can still cut the AIDS virus from DNA in monkeys.

Scientists in India observed the highest-voltage thunderstorm ever documented with the help of a subatomic particle you might not hear much about: the muon.

The researchers operate the GRAPES-3 telescope, which measures muons, particles that are similar to electrons but heavier. Specifically, the Gamma Ray Astronomy at PeV EnergieS Phase-3 (GRAPES-3) muon telescope measures high-energy particles from outer space called cosmic rays. It typically picks up 2.5 million muons each minute, mapped on a 13-by-13 grid across the sky. But during thunderstorms, it experiences quick changes to the amount of muons it receives. The GRAPES-3 researchers added electric field monitors to the experiment, and devised a way to turn these muon fluctuations into measurements of the voltage of passing storms.

The Shelton family from Texas sent their first bouquet in 1998 after the Challenger disaster. And they haven’t stopped since.

Over the last 540 million years, the Earth has weathered three major ice ages—periods during which global temperatures plummeted, producing extensive ice sheets and glaciers that have stretched beyond the polar caps.

Now scientists at MIT, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of California at Berkeley have identified the likely trigger for these ice ages.

In a study published in Science, the team reports that each of the last three major ice ages were preceded by tropical “arc-continent collisions”—tectonic pileups that occurred near the Earth’s equator, in which oceanic plates rode up over continental plates, exposing tens of thousands of kilometers of oceanic rock to a tropical environment.