Lifeboat Foundation

Seventeen years ago, Helen Greiner was scrambling to find investors to back her company’s development of a robot that would clean people’s houses. As she made the rounds of venture capitalists, the responses ranged from “You’re not an Internet company” to “You’re too early stage” to “I would do this, but my partners would kill me.”

But Greiner and her partners, Colin Angle and MIT robotics professor Rodney Brooks, persevered, funneling money from their firm’s contract engineering work to fund the robot project. Today, that company, iRobot Corp. of Bedford, is one of the nation’s largest makers of home robots, generating more than $500 million in annual sales from its Roomba floor vacuum and other products, and employing 600 people, including 500 in Massachusetts.

iRobot is an anchor of a burgeoning Massachusetts robotics industry that includes more than 100 companies, employs more than 3,000, and attracts tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of investments. Since 2008, at least 20 robotics startups have launched in Massachusetts. Venture capital funding of the local industry tripled to more than $60 million in 2012, the most recent year available, from less than $20 million in 2008, according to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a trade group in Burlington.

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BOSTON, Sept. 29, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — Veritas Genetics today announced that the company is making it possible for participants in the Personal Genome Project (PGP) to be among the first to get their whole genome sequenced and interpreted for less than a $1,000.

Led by Veritas Genetics Co-Founder Dr. George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Personal Genome Project, PGP is a long-term effort to sequence thousands of complete genomes to enable research into personal genomics and personalized medicine. PGP has more than 16,000 participants worldwide.

The “$1,000 Genome” has long been considered the tipping point when sequencing and interpreting the human genome becomes commonplace and begins to rapidly increase what is known and to dramatically impact healthcare. The catchphrase underscores how far science has come since the actual cost of the Human Genome Project, estimated at $2.7 billion spent over a decade.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=xU8kDSTzYd4

This short video (with some fun integrated graphics) is from an interview I did with El País (the largest newspaper in Spain). It highlights some of the emerging technologies and approaches which have the potential to shift health, medicine and biopharma from an intermittent and reactive physician-centric mode, to an era of more continuous data and a proactive approach in which the individual is increasingly empowered and integrated into personalized wellness, diagnosis and therapy.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/09/science/rat-brain-digital-…oject.html

The research was partly supported by a more than $1 billion program that aims to eventually reconstruct the human brain in a computer.

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In the near future of the short film Enhanced, people can undergo a procedure that blends their bodies with technology, becoming smarter, healthier, and less anxious. But one stand-up comic finds he’s uneasy with the promise of perfection.

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He believes in a good backup plan.

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A team of physicists has proposed a way of teleporting energy over long distances. The technique, which is purely theoretical at this point, takes advantage of the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement where two particles share the same existence.

The researchers, who work out of Tohoku University in Japan, and led by Masahiro Hotta,describe their proposal in the latest edition of Physical Review A. Their system exploits properties of squeezed light or vacuum states that should allow for the teleportation of information about an energy state. In turn, this teleported quantum energy could be made useable.

Unlike teleportation schemes as portrayed in Star Trek or The Fly, this type of teleportation describes entanglement experiments in which two entangled particles are joined despite no apparent connection between them. When a change happens to one particle, the same change happens to the other. Hence, the impression of teleportation. Physicists have conducted experiments using light, matter, and now, energy.

Continue reading “Physicists say energy can be teleported ‘without a limit of distance’” »

Many people may not know it but the most important risk factor for cancer is growing older. Most cancers occur in people over the age of 65.

Many people may not see cancer as an age-related disease, but it’s a major hurdle we’ll have to overcome in the pursuit of longer lives.

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Fear of scientists “playing god” is at the centre of many a plot line in science fiction stories. Perhaps the latest popular iteration of the story we all love is Jurassic World (2015), a film I find interesting only for the tribute it paid to the original Michael Crichton novel and movie Jurassic Park.

Full op-ed from h+ Magazine on 7 October 2015 http://hplusmagazine.com/2015/10/07/opinion-synthetic-biolog…f-mankind/

In Jurassic Park, a novel devoted to the scare of genetic engineering when biotech was new in the 1990s, the character of John Hammond says:

Continue reading “h+ Magazine: Synthetic Biology — The True Savior of Mankind” »