Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: engineering

We have a vacancy for a senior/principal mechanical engineer capable of providing specialist consultancy/mechanical design analysis, research and development support to clients in both space and terrestrial markets.

The role involves leadership of all aspects of multiple mechanism and tribology projects from identification of opportunities and where necessary funding sources, through preparation of winning proposals to execution of the work in-line with cost, schedule and quality requirements.

Working mainly with bespoke, precision mechanical systems, the main purpose of the role is to provide specialist engineering consultancy and research/development support to external clients involved in space and vacuum mechanism development. In addition, the job-holder will be expected to provide conceptual/architectural design and development leadership for in-house devices, new products and test facility developments.

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With threats of sea level rise, storm surge and other natural disasters, researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science are turning to nature to protect humans from nature. They are developing innovative ways to guard coastlines and prevent scouring and erosion from waves and storms using bioinspired materials that mimic mangrove trees found along shores, rivers and estuaries in the tropics and subtropics. Growing from a tangle of roots that twist their way out of the mud, mangrove trees naturally protect shorelines, shelter coastal ecosystem habitats and provide important water filtration. In many cases, these roots trap sediments flowing down rivers and off the land, helping to stabilize the coastline.

Certain root systems even have the ability to dissipate tidal energy through unique hydrological flows and divert the energy of water in different directions reducing risk of coastal damage. Yet, to date, few studies have examined the fluid dynamics such as flow structure and on mangrove roots.

For a study, published in the American Physical Society’s journal, Physical Review Fluids, researchers singled out the red mangrove tree (Rhizophora mangle) from more than 80 different species of mangroves, because of its robust network of roots that can withstand extreme environmental conditions. The red mangrove provided the researchers with an ideal model for bioinspired shoreline applications.

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Scotrenewables Tidal Power, a Scottish engineering company, is focused on an energy source they call “tidal energy generation.” A video promoting their solution: They have plenty to show for their efforts, namely, the world’s most powerful operational tidal turbine, the SR2000 2MW.

A reduction in manufacturing and installation costs plus simple, quick and low cost maintenance strategies will be key to success.

The company release said, “Scotrenewables Tidal Power has set another record with its first 2MW floating tidal stream turbine with the unit clocking up over 3GWh of renewable electricity in its first year of testing at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) in Orkney, Scotland.”

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A university in Singapore has conducted one of the first practical flights of a solar-powered quadcopter drone.

The prototype has flown as high as 10 meters (about 33 feet) in test flights using solar power with no battery or other energy storage on board, according to the National University of Singapore (NUS), which announced that an engineering team had conducted the test flight.

“Rotary winged aircraft are significantly less efficient at generating lift compared to their fixed wing counterparts [so] a viable 100 per cent solar rotary aircraft that can take-off and land vertically remains a major engineering challenge to date,” the university said in a statement.

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In late July, Bruce Jakosky and Christopher Edwards published a paper titled “Inventory of CO2 available for terraforming Mars,” which was sponsored by NASA. The paper analyzed the amount of volatiles, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), on or in Mars currently, and concluded reasonably that there are not enough volatiles available on Mars to terraform it sufficiently for a person to not need a pressure suit. Jakosky is the principal investigator for MAVEN, the NASA Mars orbiter studying the planet’s atmosphere. He and his co-author wrote what is technically an accurate paper, in spite of what was an existing mild controversy over the amount of some volatiles in the soil and regolith of Mars.

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Today, we would like to share with you the talk given by Kelsey Moody, CEO of Biotech Company Ichor, at the recent Ending Age-Related Diseases: Investment Prospects & Advances in Research conference in New York City. In this talk, Kelsey discusses Ichor’s protein engineering platform, how Ichor has used it, and Ichor’s plans for using it to discover new classes of drugs for age-related diseases.

Kelsey is a process-oriented biotechnology executive who has specialized in the study of aging and aging mechanisms for over a decade. Since 2013, he has successfully built Ichor Therapeutics from a living room start-up into a premier, vertically integrated contract research organization that focuses on preclinical research services for aging pathways. Proceeds from this work are used to self-fund R&D initiatives that constitute Ichor’s portfolio companies in enzyme therapy (Lysoclear, Inc.), small molecule drug discovery (Antoxerene, Inc.), and protein engineering (RecombiPure, Inc.) Kelsey has received graduate-level training in medicine, business, and laboratory research.

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Now that we are starting to see the arrival of actual therapies aimed at targeting the processes of aging directly in order to prevent age-related diseases, it has become easier to separate two very distinct groups.

The first group consists of the snake oil salesmen peddling unproven supplements and therapies to whoever is foolish enough to buy and take things on faith without using the scientific method. The hucksters have long been a plague on our field, preying on the gullible and tainting legitimate science with their charlatanry and nonsense. One example is the “biotech company” that makes bold claims yet never delivers on those claims in practice, offering data based on poorly designed experiments and tiny cohorts that are statistically irrelevant; another example is the supplement peddler selling expensive supplement blends with flashy names, which, on inspection, turn out to be commonly available herbs and minerals mixed and sold at a high markup. These sorts of people have plagued our community and given the field a reputation of snake oil.

The second group are the credible scientists, researchers, and companies who have been working on therapies for years and sometimes more than a decade. Many of these therapies are following the damage repair approach advocated by Dr. Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation over a decade ago. The basic idea is to take an engineering approach to the damage that aging does to the body and to periodically repair that damage in order to keep its level below that which causes pathology. These therapies are now starting to arrive, with some already in human trials right now, and this marks a milestone in our field: the credible science has finally outstripped the snake oil, and the focus can move from pseudoscience to real, evidence-based science.

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It may seem off-putting to some, but human waste is full of nutrients that can be recycled into valuable products that could promote agricultural sustainability and better economic independence for some developing countries.

Cities produce and must manage huge quantities of . Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a model to clarify what parts of the world may benefit most from re-circulation of human-waste-derived nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus from cities and back into farm fields. They report their findings in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“We grow our in the field, apply nutrient-rich fertilizers, eat the crops, excrete all of the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and then those nutrients end up at the ,” said Jeremy Guest, a civil and environmental engineering professor and study co-author. “It is a very linear, one-directional flow of resources. Engineering a more circular nutrient cycle would create opportunities that could benefit the environment, economy and agriculture.”

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