Lifeboat Foundation

A video about how fast technological progress is going, how much technology has improved the world and the potential for technology to solve our most pressing challenges. Inspired in part by the book Abundance by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, and by the video “Shift Happens 3.0” (also known as “Did You Know”) by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

Among the things mentioned are developments and possibilities within information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The video also touches upon how several of these developments are exponential, but it does not get into the realm of technological singularity and the thoughts of people such as Ray Kurzweil, which is the topic of some of my other videos.

Continue reading “Did You Know? The Future Is Better Than You Think!” »

Plasmonics, the study of how electrons behave in a metal under an electromagnetic field, requires the use of specialty coherent light sources as a basic tool. Optical interferometry can potentially become more important in biomedicine if only the technology could be made more compact, practical, and proven useful.

Toward that end researchers at Brown University have developed a way of using plasmonics techniques without using a coherent light source at all. This allows optical interferometry at the nanoscale and should lead to new types of biomedical sensors that can do rapid wide spectrum analysis for a variety of markers.

Here’s more details about the technology from Brown University:

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“Finding that GDF11 levels are under genetic control is of significant interest. Since it is under genetic control, we can find the genes responsible for GDF11 levels and its changes with age,” said the study’s senior author Rob Pazdro, assistant professor at University of Georgia in the US.

Scientists have shown that a hormone instrumental in the ageing process is under genetic control, introducing a new mechanism by which genetics regulate ageing and disease.

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Personally, I am not a Breitbart fan; however, I am publishing this article to highlight something that I noticed. In this article it highlighted the 3 Rules of Robotics which are old and need to be updated. One of the rules is “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” is not true. Why? Because as long as criminals who have enough money and can pay others well to re-engineer/ re-program robotics; robotics can become dangerous to humans. The drones today are good examples of how stalkers are using them, drug cartels, etc.

Robotics, once the almost exclusive purview of science fiction, is now approaching a point at which it will be capable of dramatic influence over humanity. These advancements are as much a lesson in caution as in the wonder of the human imagination.

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Isolating cancer cells is the new option for treating cancer.

We have new weapons to fight cancer, less invasive and smarter, since they use the operating behavior of the cells themselves and the immune system.

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Whether or not nerve cells are able to regrow after injury depends on their location in the body. Injured nerve cells in the peripheral nervous system, such as those in the arms and legs, can recover and regrow, at least to some extent. But nerve cells in the central nervous system—the brain and spinal cord—can’t recover at all.

A UCLA-led collaboration has identified a specific network of genes and a pattern of gene expression mice that promote repair in the peripheral nervous system in a mouse model. This network, the researchers found, does not exist in the central nervous system. The researchers also found a drug that can promote nerve regeneration in the central nervous system.

The study appears in the online edition of the journal Neuron.

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Even though it’s looking increasingly likely that humanity will find a way to wipe itself off the face of the Earth, there’s a chance that our creative output may live on. Servers, hard drives, flash drives, and disks will degrade (as will our libraries of paper books, of course), but a group of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have found a way to encode data onto DNA—the very same stuff that all living beings’ genetic information is stored on—that could survive for millennia.

One gram of DNA can potentially hold up to 455 exabytes of data, according to the New Scientist. For reference: There are one billion gigabytes in an exabyte, and 1,000 exabytes in a zettabyte. The cloud computing company EMC estimated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world in 2011, which means we would need only about 4 grams (about a teaspoon) of DNA to hold everything from Plato through the complete works of Shakespeare to Beyonce’s latest album (not to mention every brunch photo ever posted on Instagram).

There are four types of molecules that make up DNA, which form pairs. To encode information on DNA, scientists program the pairs into 1s and os—the same binary language that encodes digital data. This is not a new concept—scientists at Harvard University encoded a book onto DNA in 2012—but up to now, it had been difficult to retrieve the information stored on the DNA.

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Here is a revolutionary needle-free device that can collect blood sample.

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At Vanderbilt University scientists are building an artificial kidney that they envision will one day will be a standard of care over dialysis. The device consists of a silicon nanotechnology filter chip and embedded living kidney cells that would work together to mimic the functionality of a healthy kidney. The end result is expected to be about the size of a natural kidney, small enough to be implantable and powered by the body’s own blood flow.

The filter component has tiny pores that can be individually shaped to perform a specific task. These filters would sit in a series, each one performing a different filtration step. Between the filter slices there would be living kidney cells that perform tasks that the man made components are not very good at, including reabsorption of nutrients and getting rid of accumulated waste.

Here’s video with Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Dr. William Fissell, the lead scientist on the research:

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