Lifeboat Foundation

I was going blind which is not a good thing when you need to see to run a growing nonprofit. Luckily, it is 2018 and technology is advancing at an exponential rate so I had some options. Following is my story which is relevant for many reasons including that we virtually all develop eye problems over time and the state of the art available is constantly changing.

MY STORY

I finally couldn’t read text at normal resolution on my 60″ monitor which is about 4 feet from my face (and normally at 1600×900 resolution to make the text bigger) so it was time to go to the optician again. The optician considerably upgraded my prescription to −17.25 diopters on my left eye and −12.25 diopters on my right eye but warned me that this might not improve my vision much due to the beginning of cataracts in my eyes. So unlike in the past where I bought my glasses from outside the country due to restrictions on being able to purchase thin lenses in the U.S. that were implemented during the Nixon administration, I ordered glasses locally so I could speed up the process.

I was unable to see well with the new glasses so it was time to visit an ophthalmologist that my optician recommended. The ophthalmologist had the following assessment:

Continue reading “I was going blind” »

We need more walkable cities and fewer cars! If aliens came to our planet they would conclude that cars are the dominant species!

Traffic signals give priority to motor vehicles over pedestrians. This inequality undermines many of the stated goals of transport, health and environment policy.

State and city governments say they want to encourage walking and biking for many reasons:

FDA-approved asthma drug appears to be effective against dementia in mice.

For the first time in an animal model, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University showed that the tau pathology that accompanies Alzheimer’s disease can be reversed using the asthma drug zileuton [1].

Abstract

Continue reading “Researchers Reverse Cognitive Impairments in Mice with Alzheimer’s” »

Scientists from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) have designed a new control system for wind turbines in offshore wind farms that allows power transmission to the coast in a more flexible and cheaper way than current solutions.

This innovation allows the use of a diode rectifier station in the offshore platform of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) link. In this way, the wind turbine’s alternating current (AC) can be easily converted into direct current (DC) for HVDC transmission.

Continue reading “A new system optimises electric transmission from offshore wind farms” »

Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight.

The successful field test of their larger, next-generation harvester proved what the team had predicted earlier in 2017: that the water harvester can extract drinkable water every day/night cycle at very low humidity and at low cost, making it ideal for people living in arid, water-starved areas of the world.

“There is nothing like this,” said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science.”

Continue reading “In desert trials, next-generation water harvester delivers fresh water from air” »

NHS hospital bosses are debating a reform involving “widespread adoption of artificial intelligence” and “full automation”.

From diagnosis to recovery, machines could take on a range of jobs, a new report suggests.

Denis Campbell Health policy editor.

Continue reading “The robot will see you now: how AI could revolutionise NHS” »

Hooray for Juno!

Though NASA’s Juno spacecraft has probed Jupiter’s secrets for nearly two years, the $1 billion mission was set to crash into the planet’s clouds in July. Now, however, the agency has confirmed Business Insider’s previous report that Juno will get three additional years of flight.

One of the most commonly asked questions we receive is “How is progress going in aging research?” It is something we are asked so often that we decided to provide the community with a resource that will help them to keep track of progress directly.

To that end, today we have launched our new curated database, The Rejuvenation Roadmap, which will be tracking the progress of the many therapies and projects in the rejuvenation biotechnology field. This database aims to give a quick visual summary of the status of each drug or therapy along with some additional information for people interested in learning more about them.

We believe that an informed community is an effective one, and this was one of our motivations for developing this new database. There are many resources for scientists, such as the superb databases of the Human Ageing Genomic Resources maintained by Dr. João Pedro de Magalhães, which are excellent for researchers. However, we noticed that there was no database that tracked the efforts of the many researchers and projects in the field, and while some people do maintain lists, they are often not public facing, easy to access, or user-friendly.

“Society is vulnerable, so we need to prepare ourselves as individuals,” said Dan Eliasson of the Swedish civil contingencies agency, which is in charge of the project. “There’s also an information deficit in terms of concrete advice, which we aim to provide.”

Defence pamphlet shows how population can prepare in event of attack and contribute to country’s ‘total defence’

Jon Henley European affairs correspondent.

Continue reading “Sweden distributes ‘be prepared for war’ leaflet to all 4.8m homes” »