Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: futurism

This year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve islet transplants as a treatment for people with type 1 diabetes. The transplants, which deliver insulin-making cells to replace those lost to the disease, have been classified as experimental in the United States since they were first performed more than 20 years ago.

Islet transplants hold great promise for treating type 1 diabetes, especially for what’s colloquially known as “brittle diabetes,” in which patients have a lot of difficulty safely managing their blood sugar with insulin injections, said Stanford interventional radiologist Avnesh Thakor, MD, PhD, who conducts research on islet biology and transplantation.

Nearly 1.6 million Americans have type 1 diabetes, and more than 70,000 are likely to be good candidates for islet transplant.

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The job of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. A powerful way to combat destructive behaviors of any kind is to construct a sound image of where you’d like to be at some point in the future. Explore what it will sound, look, taste, and feel like to live your future life, to be your future self. And then assess each temptation you face with this image in mind. Weigh whether it will move you closer or further away from that future. Seduce yourself, appropriate your own longing for a better, more pleasurable, more spectacular future.

The movement is a call to action for studios to make movies, for artists to paint pictures, and for anyone with access to the means of creation and communication to participate in the most pragmatic form of dreaming. To imagine a world so compelling you don’t want to wake up—not until the dreamworld becomes reality. To create something literal, like Akon’s newly announced project to build a real life Wakanda in Senegal.

Solarpunk just might be the cultural movement we deserve in the midst of our ongoing trials and tribulations. It’s the one we need to make the rest of this decade a palatable, even euphoric experience. Sometimes, demanding to thrive is the very best way to survive. It is the necessity and audacity not only of hope, but of beauty.

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Over the course of Earth’s four billion-year history, things have moved around rather a lot – including the continents of today.

An online interactive map shows exactly where your hometown has wandered over the course of hundreds of millions of years of continental drift.

Created by California palaeontologist Ian Webster in a web application, the map is based on geological models created by Christopher Stoese, CNN reported.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=mGz_QKbNm18

The DR7 is designed to be a personal commuter aircraft. So far, a 1/3 scale full composite proof-of-concept aircraft has been tested successfully. In order to minimize the propeller hazards, the rotors have been enclosed. They are tilted downwards for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) launches and landings. They tilt horizontally to go forward. And all of this fits into a regular car garage.

http://www.deloreanaerospace.com/

Short of the revolutionary Burt Rotan wild aircraft designs, airplanes have changed little over the past decades. Winged-cylinder with a propulsion system is how we travel through the air. Unless you have the astronomical budget the military enjoys to design hypersonic aircraft, not for the general public, the choice is simple — airplanes or helicopters. DeLorean Aerospace just announced that its DR7 should fly by the end of 2018. That would shake things up, but is it practical, viable, for real?

DeLorean DR-7

In the 1980s, the DeLorean Motors Corporation gave us a break from the ho-hum cars sold everywhere by offering an aesthetically pleasing aerodynamic car. Eventually, DeLorean Aerospace picked up where its four-wheel parent left off, with a uniquely designed aircraft, the DR7. Although the name more or less gives it away, the company was founded in 2012 by Paul DeLorean, John DeLorean’s nephew. The mission was to develop a flying car.

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Shrimps are tough: 3.

A new species of freshwater Crustacea has been discovered during an expedition of the desert Lut, known as the hottest place on Earth.

The newly identified species belongs to the genus Phallocryptus of which only four species were previously known from different arid and semiarid regions.

Dr. Hossein Rajaei from the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History and Dr. Alexander V Rudov from Tehran University made the discovery during an expedition of Lut to better understand the desert’s ecology, biodiversity, geomorphology, and paleontology.

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