Lifeboat Foundation

Consider the paradox of the modern business office: It’s a place of productivity where busy people meet deadlines, yet it’s teeming with distractions.

Companies are loading up on game rooms and snack bars, while 70 percent of American offices have adopted an open-office floor plan. The hope for open offices was to encourage random hallway banter, which can lead to innovation, but it’s not working out so great. Turns out privacy is a necessary condition for supporting productive people.

To end the oppression of open offices, several startups are building workstations of the future: software that pulls everything we normally do on a computer inside of virtual reality (VR). After all, what’s more private than a VR display around your head?

Continue reading “I Worked in a VR Office, and It Was Actually Awesome” »

Open Bionics prosthetic arm.

We’re live with Open Bionics and we’re checking out their insanely cool Deus Ex prosthetic arm.

A new story by Scientific American on transhumanism: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/turned-off-b…resident/#

Transhumanist candidate Zoltan Istvan urges spending less on war and more on the scientific quest to defeat death.

“A new United Nations report has found that e-government is an effective tool for facilitating integrated policies and public service by promoting accountable and transparent institutions, such as through open data and participatory decision-making …”

Read more

“Instead, Descartes relies on 4 petabytes of satellite imaging data and a machine learning algorithm to figure out how healthy the corn crop is from space.”

Read more

More progress with senolytics for treating age related diseases and further vindication for the SENS approach to aging.

The open access paper linked below provides another reason to be optimistic about the therapies to clear senescent cells from old tissues that are presently under development. Here, the researchers created genetically engineered mice in which they could selectively trigger senescent cell death in lung tissues. In older mice, the result was improved pulmonary function, and other improvements in the state of lung tissue — turning back the clock on some of the detrimental age-related changes that take place in the lungs.

Cells become senescent in response to damage or environmental toxicity, or at the end of their replicative lifespan, or to assist in wound healing. The vast majority either destroy themselves or are destroyed by the immune system, but a few manage to linger on. Those few grow in numbers over the years, and more so once the immune system begins to decline and falter in its duties. Ever more senescent cells accumulate in tissues with advancing age, and they secrete a mix of signals that can encourage other cells to become senescent, increase inflammation, and destructively remodel nearby tissue structures. In small numbers senescent cells can help to resist cancer or assist healing, but in large numbers they contribute meaningfully to all of the symptoms and conditions of old age. They are one of the root causes of aging.

Continue reading “Removing Senescent Cells from the Lungs of Old Mice Improves Pulmonary Function and Reduces Age-Related Loss of Tissue Elasticity” »

Sure its only to place a flag on the moon. I am sure that the opportunity around rare materials mining, etc. is also enticing to N Korea.

Totally for peaceful purposes, the country says.

A team of University of Toronto chemists has created a battery that stores energy in a biologically-derived unit, paving the way for cheaper consumer electronics that are easier on the environment.

The battery is similar to many commercially-available high-energy lithium-ion batteries with one important difference. It uses flavin from vitamin B2 as the cathode: the part that stores the electricity that is released when connected to a device.

“We’ve been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications,” says Dwight Seferos, an associate professor in U of T’s department of chemistry and Canada Research Chair in Polymer Nanotechnology.

Continue reading “Chemists create vitamin-driven battery” »