Lifeboat Foundation

We are entering an era of directed design in which we will expand the limited notion that biology is only the ‘study of life and living things’ and see biology as the ultimate distributed, manufacturing platform (as Stanford bioengineer, Drew Endy, often says). This new mode of manufacturing will offer us unrivaled personalization and functionality.

New foods. New fuels. New materials. New drugs.

We’re already taking our first steps in this direction. Joule Unlimited has engineered bacteria to convert CO₂ into fuels in a single-step, continuous process. Others are engineering yeast to produce artemisinin — a potent anti-malarial compound used by millions of people globally. Still other microbes are being reprogrammed to produce industrial ingredients, like those used in synthetic rubber.

A new UC San Francisco study challenges the most influential textbook explanation of how the mammalian brain detects when the body is becoming too warm, and how it then orchestrates the myriad responses that animals, including humans, use to lower their temperature—from “automatic” physiological processes such as sweating and panting, to complex behaviors, such as moving to cooler environs. These responses are vital to health, as the metabolic processes that keep us alive have evolved to operate within a narrow temperature range.

Experiments on these questions dating back 80 years, using rats and mice, have repeatedly pointed to a tiny brain region known as the preoptic hypothalamus (POA) as the site that detects the body’s warmth. But because this compact area governs functions as diverse as sleep, mating, parental behaviors, eating, and drinking, it has been difficult to precisely pinpoint which cells and circuits are dedicated to detecting and responding to warmth.

“We know a lot about how body temperature is regulated in peripheral tissues, and a bit about the key regulatory brain regions, but the identity of the neurons that act as the master regulators of body temperature has been elusive,” said UCSF’s Zachary Knight, PhD, assistant professor of physiology and senior author on the new UCSF study, which appears in the September 8, 2016 online issue of Cell.

Continue reading “Long-sought ‘warm-sensitive’ brain cells identified in new study” »

The Pentagon wants to fundamentally change how social science research is conducted.

The Defense Department uses principles of human behavior to make major decisions affecting national security, but social science is inherently limited, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, mostly because social scientists “rarely, if ever, have ground truth” about “actual causes of observed behaviors in the ‘real world.’”

To help mitigate those shortcomings, DARPA is gathering information on ways, and potentially new technology, that can assess how closely social science research methods do represent the real world. Simulations, for instance, could be used to calibrate whether the inferences about human behavior social scientists make when they’re conducting an analysis are valid.

Continue reading “DARPA Wants a ‘Social Supercollider’ To Help It Understand Humans” »

For vessels operating at sea, avoiding collisions is a basic operational requirement. When those vessels are operated by humans, collision avoidance is part of basic operator training. And when those vessels become highly autonomous, collision avoidance must be incorporated into complex autonomy algorithms that must be thoroughly tested before the vessels enter the water.

And that’s a very good thing.

Wish I could attend.

The Aviation Industry Corp. of China (AVIC) will promote its new generation aircraft at China’s upcoming aerospace trade show, the aircraft manufacturer said Thursday.

The company’s heavy transport aircraft Y-20 and stealth fighter J-31, the major models in the new series, will be demonstrated at the 11th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition, which opens on Nov. 1 in the southern port city of Zhuhai, Guangdong Province.

The new planes represent AVIC’s advances toward the fourth generation of aircraft technology, the company said.

“The vast majority of space technology being developed is dual-use, and so serves Chinese security interests as well,” says Johnson-Freese, an expert on the Chinese space program and a professor at the US Naval War College. “China understands the military advantages reaped by US space capabilities for many years, and wants those same capabilities”.

On a cool Sunday evening in March, a geochemist named Sun Weidong gave a public lecture to an audience of laymen, students, and professors at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, the capital city of the landlocked province of Anhui in eastern China. But the professor didn’t just talk about geochemistry. He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.”

In other words, “the stream” in question wasn’t China’s famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. “The Nile,” someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta — with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author, a researcher at the same institute, watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs, intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.

In the past year, Sun, a highly decorated scientist, has ignited a passionate online debate with claims that the founders of Chinese civilization were not in any sense Chinese but actually migrants from Egypt. He conceived of this connection in the 1990s while performing radiometric dating of ancient Chinese bronzes; to his surprise, their chemical composition more closely resembled those of ancient Egyptian bronzes than native Chinese ores. Both Sun’s ideas and the controversy surrounding them flow out of a much older tradition of nationalist archaeology in China, which for more than a century has sought to answer a basic scientific question that has always been heavily politicized: Where do the Chinese people come from?

Continue reading “Study claims: Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt” »

Saudi’s new friend.

Once termed by Napoleon Bonaparte as the “sleeping giant,” China has now woken up and is living up to his prophecy: “The giant sleeps, and let it, for should it wake the world will shake.” China has now woken up and is shaking the world.

For 500 years China did little. While it was rich in resources it was plundered by the European powers. After the Maoist revolution, it began a process of unification and then focused on production. Many experiments were made including the ill-fated “cultural revolution.” But the Chinese determination for achieving parity on a world scale paid off. In the initial growing process, they were described as the “yellow pencil” and what not, but they persevered. And it was American President Richard Nixon who had to go to China in 1972 to meet Chairman Mao Zedong and establish relations that admitted China to the world stage.

Continue reading “Economic ties with China a key positive measure” »