The Lifeboat Foundation has recruited its 500th scientific advisory board member, Dr. Martine Rothblatt, founder of United Therapeutics, Sirius Satellite Radio, and the Terasem Movement.

The Lifeboat Foundation’s mission is “safeguarding humanity,” with 27 subboards and 24 programs, intended to protect against existential risks such as asteroids, nuclear attacks, bioweapons, and pandemics.

The Lifeboat Foundation recently announced it has earmarked funds for its Thermal Censorship of Ecophagy [aka “gray goo”] Study, conducted by nanotechnology researcher Robert A. Freitas Jr. “During our [diamondoid mechanosynthesis] work, we found that a number of reactions are very near the limit of adequate reliability at room temperature,” Freitas told KurzweilAI.net. “If all key pathways allowing diamond building have at least one step that is temperature sensitive, then the error rate of ecophages in-the-wild may be high enough to prohibit (or greatly slow) their replication rate.”