Lifeboat Foundation

To help stem the tide of rhino poaching, some biotech companies such as Pembient are seeking to develop and manufacture synthetic horns that are biologically identical to the real thing. The thinking behind this is that the availability of bio-identical fake horns at a substantially lower price than wild horns would cause demand to shift towards the synthetic substitutes, which would reduce people’s incentives to poach rhinos.

I have argued previously that—from the perspective of what would be most effective in curbing poaching—the synthetic horns should not be made to be perfect fakes, i.e., bio-identical. Instead, the synthetic horns should be engineered to be (i) difficult to distinguish from wild horns but (ii) undesirable or unappealing in some respect so that buyers would place little value on them. This proposal makes use of a phenomenon in economics known as adverse selection, which occurs when buyers in a market are unable to distinguish between high- and low-quality products, and their lack of information drives down demand—and, hence, prices—enough that high-quality products (which would be wild horns in the context of rhino horns) cease to be supplied by sellers.

For conservationists and others who are concerned about the fate of the rhinos, it is critical to understand why biotech companies would prefer making bio-identical synthetic horns—rather than undesirable fakes—because of the implications this has for conservation policies. Simply put, it would be more profitable to produce and sell perfect fakes rather than synthetic horns that would be considered undesirable. All else being equal, putting out undesirable fakes that buyers cannot distinguish from the real ones, by reducing demand for horns, would lead to lower prices in the horn market compared to the case with bio-identical synthetic horns. This, of course, would generate less revenue for the producers of synthetic horns.

Continue reading “Can Biotech Companies Save The Rhinos?” »

Check it out! Finally! Now get ready to mass produce synthetic diamonds for QC, medical tech, etc.

Every additive manufacturing (AM) system offers the potential for endless creativity. As designers learn to embrace the possibilities offered by digital design and AM, the number of applications for the technology increases. Everything has its limits, however, and for AM those limits are sometimes related to materials.

Continue reading “Lockheed Martin Submits Patent for 3D Printed Synthetic Diamond” »

Biology is the world’s greatest manufacturing platform, according to MIT spinout Ginkgo Bioworks.

The synthetic-biology startup is re-engineering yeast to act as tiny organic “factories” that produce chemicals for the flavor, fragrance, and food industries, with aims of making products more quickly, cheaply, and efficiently than traditional methods.

“We see biology as a transformative technology,” says Ginkgo co-founder Reshma Shetty PhD ’08, who co-invented the technology at MIT. “It is the most powerful and sophisticated manufacturing platform on the planet, able to self-assemble incredible structures at a scale that is far out of reach of the most cutting-edge human technology.”

Excellent! Super human capabilities at work via brain-controlled robotics.

Eight people who spent years paralyzed from spinal cord injuries have regained partial control of their lower limbs as well as some sensation following work with brain-controlled robotics. Five of the participants had been paralyzed for at least five years and two had been paralyzed for more than ten.

It took seven months of training before most of the subjects saw any changes. After a year, four patients’ sensation and muscle control changed significantly enough that doctors upgraded their diagnoses from complete to partial paralysis.

Continue reading “Robotic Brain Training Relieves Paralysis in Duke Study” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6eDDIyS_EA

Longevity sticker shock is holding back progress in rejuvenation biotechnology.

Filmed at BIL 2016 in Los Angeles.

http://democracynow.org — A new article in the medical journal The Lancet has concluded much of the Northern Hemisphere will be too hot by 2085 to host the Summer Olympics. Researchers are projecting only eight cities in the hemisphere outside of Western Europe would be cool enough to host the Games. This includes just three cities in North America: Calgary, Vancouver and San Francisco. The list of cities where it could be too hot is staggering: Istanbul, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Budapest, Tokyo, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles—and the list goes on. Extreme high temperatures have already impacted the athletic world. In 2007, high heat forced the cancellation of the Chicago Marathon. At this year’s U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Los Angeles, 30 percent of the runners dropped out of the race due to the heat. For more, we speak with Kirk Smith, lead author of the article and professor of global environmental health at the University of California, Berkeley.

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: http://democracynow.org

Continue reading “Climate Study: By 2085 All U.S. Cities Except San Francisco Will Be Too Hot to Host Summer Olympics” »

I’m guessing you’d be like: surprised .

So, here’s the deal. My biohacker friends led by Peter Fedichev and Sergey Filonov in collaboration with my old friend and the longevity record holder Robert Shmookler Reis published a very cool paper. They proposed a way to quantitatively describe the two types of aging – negligible senescence and normal aging. We all know that some animals just don’t care about time passing by. Their mortality doesn’t increase with age. Such negligibly senescent species include the notorious naked mole rat and a bunch of other critters like certain turtles and clams to name a few. So the paper explains what it is exactly that makes these animals age so slowly – it’s the stability of their gene networks.

What does network stability mean then? Well, it’s actually pretty straightforward – if the DNA repair mechanisms are very efficient and the connectivity of the network is low enough, then this network is stable. So, normally aging species, such as ourselves, have unstable networks. This is a major bummer by all means. But! There is a way to overcome this problem, according to the proposed math model.

Continue reading “What would you say if I told you that aging happens not because of accumulation of stresses, but rather because of the intrinsic properties of the gene network of the organism?” »

Fraud detection technology is in high demand and growing thanks to areas such as India. However, there is a huge growing demand for synthetic diamonds in their use in technology, medical, synthetic biology as well.

It takes billions of years to produce a natural diamond, but a laboratory can grow one in days and to the untrained eye they look the same. In an attempt to protect its reputation, De Beers has developed technology that can spot the difference. Ivor Bennett reports.

When dealing with diamonds, one can never be too sure. That’s why at De Beers, it’s not just humans checking the gems anymore, but machines too. SOUNDBITE (English) JONATHAN KENDALL, PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DIAMOND GRADING AND RESEARCH, SAYING: “A synthetic is a man-made product. It’s not a gem, it’s not a beautiful product. It’s not about love and affection and emotion. And it’s not unique and it’s not mysterious. And that’s everything that a diamond is.” It takes about 3 billion years to make a natural diamond. but just three weeks for a synthetic one. To the naked eye though, they look the same. So how do you tell the difference? SOUNDBITE (English) IVOR BENNETT, REUTERS REPORTER, SAYING: “It’s all to do with how the stone looks under UV light. A natural diamond for example will appear dark blue in colour with a regular structure. But if i click on the synthetic one, you can see it’s much lighter with these block-like structures, which is down to its irregular growth.

Continue reading “Why De Beers is spending on diamond technology” »

Nice.

Engineers at the University of Washington (UW) have devised a new method of wireless communication that converts Bluetooth transmission from mobile devices into Wi-Fi signals. Using this “interscatter” communications technology allows medical devices and implants with limited power sources to gain the ability to send data using low-power Wi-Fi signals to smartphones and smartwatches.

The UW team previously described the technique of “backscattering” ambient RF signals — repurposing existing RF signals in the environment — to enable device-to-device communication without the need for onboard power sources. Now, the team builds on that prior research to introduce “interscattering,” the inter-technology, over-the-air conversion of Bluetooth signals to create Wi-Fi transmissions.

Continue reading “‘Interscatter’ Tech Converts Bluetooth For WiFi-Connected Implants” »