Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

The common cold sore virus, which is often caught in childhood, usually stays in the body for life—quietly dormant in the nerves. Now and then, things like stress, illness or injury can trigger it, bringing on a cold sore in some people. But this same virus—called herpes simplex virus type 1—may also play an important role in something far more serious: Alzheimer’s disease.

Over 30 years ago, my colleagues and I made a surprising discovery. We found that this cold sore virus can be present in the brains of older people. It was the first clear sign that a virus could be quietly living in the brain, which was long thought to be completely germ-free—protected by the so-called “blood-brain barrier.”

Then we discovered something even more striking. People who have a certain version of a gene (called APOE-e4) that increases their risk of Alzheimer’s, and who have been infected with this virus, have a risk that is many times greater.

Read more | >

A groundbreaking cement developed by Chinese scientists can now generate electricity from heat—thanks to a bio-inspired design that mimics plant stems. By combining hydrogel layers with traditional cement, this innovation enhances ion flow and delivers record-high thermoelectric efficiency. This breakthrough could power smart infrastructure, allowing buildings, roads, and bridges to self-generate electricity for sensors, lighting, and more—ushering in a new era of energy-smart cities.

Read more | >

Spotted thanks to a fleeting light distortion in 2011, a mysterious duo — a tiny star and its hefty companion — has turned out to be much faster and stranger than first imagined. Astronomers have observed hypervelocity stars before, but NASA scientists may have just identified a truly extraordina

Read more | >

In 2024 a shockwave rippled through the astronomical world, shaking it to the core. The disturbance didn’t come from some astral disaster at the solar system’s doorstep, however. Rather it arrived via the careful analysis of many far-distant galaxies, which revealed new details of the universe’s evolution across eons of cosmic history. Against most experts’ expectations, the result suggested that dark energy —the mysterious force driving the universe’s accelerating expansion—was not an unwavering constant but rather a more fickle beast that was weakening over time.

The shocking claim’s source was the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), run by an international collaboration at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. And it was so surprising because cosmologists’ best explanations for the universe’s observed large-scale structure have long assumed that dark energy is a simple, steady thing. But as Joshua Frieman, a physicist at the University of Chicago, says: “We tend to stick with the simplest theory that works—until it doesn’t.” Heady with delight and confusion, theorists began scrambling to explain DESI’s findings and resurfaced old, more complex ideas shelved decades ago.

In March 2025 even more evidence accrued in favor of dark energy’s dynamic nature in DESI’s latest data release—this time from a much larger, multimillion-galaxy sample. Dark energy’s implied fading, it seemed, was refusing to fade away.

Read more | >

Organoids, miniaturized, stem cell-derived versions of human organs, are revolutionizing biomedical research by offering human-specific models for disease study and drug testing. While they have limitations, organoids increasingly challenge the dominance of animal models in preclinical science.

Read more | >

A new gene therapy reversed heart failure in pigs by repairing heart function through cBIN1, showing major promise for future treatment.

A new gene therapy has been shown to reverse the effects of heart failure and restore heart function in a large animal model. The treatment increases the heart’s ability to pump blood and significantly improves survival rates. A paper describing the results calls it “an unprecedented recovery of cardiac function.”

Heart failure is currently irreversible. Without a heart transplant, most treatments aim only to reduce the heart’s workload and slow the progression of the disease. If this gene therapy produces similar outcomes in future clinical trials, it could offer a way to repair the hearts of one in four people expected to develop heart failure during their lifetime.

Read more | >

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a novel artificial intelligence (AI) model inspired by neural oscillations in the brain, with the goal of significantly advancing how machine learning algorithms handle long sequences of data.

AI often struggles with analyzing complex information that unfolds over long periods of time, such as climate trends, biological signals, or financial data. One new type of AI model called “state-space models” has been designed specifically to understand these sequential patterns more effectively. However, existing state-space models often face challenges—they can become unstable or require a significant amount of computational resources when processing long data sequences.

To address these issues, CSAIL researchers T. Konstantin Rusch and Daniela Rus have developed what they call “linear oscillatory state-space models” (LinOSS), which leverage principles of forced harmonic oscillators—a concept deeply rooted in physics and observed in .

Read more | >