Lifeboat Foundation

Isaac Asimov won the Hugo award for Best All-Time Series for his Foundation books, which follow a future human civilization through an apparently inevitable upheaval. The story begins amid a vast galactic empire in decline. Hari Seldon, a mathematician, develops the practice of psychohistory, a method of predicting future events using statistics.

Seldon predicts the fall of the galactic empire lasting 300,000 years. By his calculations, there’s no preventing the oncoming storm, but they can shift its trajectory. With a few small changes, humanity can reduce the period of recovery to just 1,000 years. Seldon is confident enough in his predictions that he convinces the authorities to let him create two gatherings of minds. Collections of scientists who will preserve humanity’s collected knowledge and lift future generations out of the looming dark age, known as the Foundations.

Continue reading “Predicting the end of humanity with maths: The Science of ‘Foundation’” »

Every year, a few hundred scientists in the United Kingdom try to establish new labs from scratch; globally, thousands of researchers become heads of their own labs. From the outset, it’s a chase for money and a time of intense pressure as scientists try to build research programmes while juggling teaching, fundraising, publishing and family life. Ali began her lab with just £15,000 in grants to cover equipment and experiments; Dan had £20,000. Both need to recruit PhD students, and Dan must also devise and deliver a programme of lectures.

Two researchers. Three years. One pandemic.

Disaster sciences, digital twins & artificial intelligence — craig fugate, chief emergency management officer, one concern.

Mr. Craig Fugate is the former Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA — an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security, whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to disasters that have occurred in the United States and that overwhelm the resources of local and state authorities.)

Continue reading “Craig Fugate, Chief Emergency Management Officer, One Concern — Disaster Science, Digital Twins, AI” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln1x3A9TuYg

Pollution creates particulate matter (tiny floating particles) and aerosols that can be harmful to our health. With missions like the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA), public health officials can start to map this particulate matter around the world, understand its effect on diseases, and know where the most risk is. In this month’s talk, we’ll chat with the instrument operations systems engineer for MAIA and discuss how vital positions like hers are for mission success and for making sure important data gets back to us on Earth.

Speaker: janelle wellons, instrument operations systems engineer, NASA/JPL

Continue reading “Instrumental: Engineers Who Make Science Possible (Live Public Talk)” »

Some thoughts about possible communication with intelligent alliens, for more info see:

Contact with intelligent aliens would happen on their terms, not ours.

X-Prize board member Sergey Young on his new book, and the potential for a longevity X-Prize.

“We have created science and technology to extend our life, but we haven’t created life we want to extend.”–Sergey Young, Seeking Delphi™ episode #55, explaining why he believes more people do not support radical life extension.

Continue reading “#55: The Longevity Dialogs Part 3, The Science and Technology of Growing Young with Sergey Young” »

The newly formed biotech start up Halo Therapeutics, spun out from the University of Bristol, has become the latest company to join the Science Creates ecosystem.

The team is targeting new treatments for coronavirus as they expand on their exciting recent breakthrough discovery, which was published in Science Magazine.

The context

Continue reading “Halo Therapeutics join Science Creates to advance antiviral development” »

We embrace hybridized practices among different disciplines and living organisms, open knowledge and precarity as a challenge. Our current lines of research are based in the use of sound to understa…

Nad plus works for alzheimers.

In June of 2,018 the World Health Organization (WHO) released the 11th edition of its International Classification of Diseases, and for the first time added aging.¹ The classification of aging as a disease paves the way for new research into novel therapeutics to delay or reverse age-related illnesses such as cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and neurodegeneration.^2,3 Nutrient sensing systems have been an intense focus of investigation, including mTOR (the mammalian target of rapamycin) for regulating protein synthesis and cell growth; AMPK (activated protein kinase) for sensing low energy states; and sirtuins, a family of seven proteins critical to DNA expression and aging, which can only function in conjunction with NAD+ (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), a coenzyme present in all living cells.⁴

Across the kingdom of life, an increase in intracellular levels of NAD+ triggers shifts that enhance survival, including boosting energy production and upregulating cellular repair.⁵ In fact, the slow, ineluctable process of aging has been described as a “cascade of robustness breakdown triggered by a decrease in systemic NAD+ biosynthesis and the resultant functional defects in susceptible organs and tissues.”⁶ Aging is marked by epigenetic shifts, genomic instability, altered nutrient sensing ability, telomere attrition, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and dysregulated intercellular communication.^7,8

By middle age, our NAD+ levels have plummeted to half that of our youth.⁹ Numerous studies have demonstrated that boosting NAD+ levels increases insulin sensitivity, reverses mitochondrial dysfunction, and extends lifespan.^10,11 NAD+ levels can be increased by activating enzymes that stimulate synthesis of NAD+, by inhibiting an enzyme (CD38) that degrades NAD+, and by supplementing with NAD precursors, including nicotinamide riboside(NR) and nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN).^12,13 A conceptual framework called NAD World, formulated over the last decade by developmental biologist Shin-ichiro Imai, MD, PhD, of Washington University School of Medicine, posits NMN as a critical, systemic signaling molecule that maintains biological robustness of the communication network supporting NAD+.⁶.