Lifeboat Foundation

Learning to deal with lignin is important for recycling and space settlements. Unused biomass on space settlements and long-term voyages is something that just can’t be tolerated. The same problem exists in dealing with plant waste on earth. A new process helps convert it into a precursor for polyester, which can be used for all kinds of other materials.

Plant cells are composed of three main substances: cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. According to Yining Zeng, Michael E. Himmel, and Shi-You Ding in Biotechnology for Biofuels, the composition amounts to “40 to 50% of cellulose, 15 to 25% hemicelluloses, 20 to 25% lignin, and 5 to 10% other components.^[1]” For the most part, the only truly useful part is the cellulose and the hemicellulose. The lignin is usually just thrown away. The most common use is fuel for heating units. That’s right. They just burn it.

Continue reading “What to do with the lignin?” »

There is a theory that humans’ long life spans and women’s long postreproductive lives, might be connected through the grandmother effect. “…An analysis of church birth and death records in Finland for individuals born between 1731 and 1890 showed that having a maternal grandmother between 50 and 75 years of age while a grandchild was 5 years old or younger increased the child’s survival… The second study … it’s not just the existence of a grandmother, but her proximity that matters. The shorter the distance between grandmother and grandchild, the more involved the grandmother can be and the more benefits that accrue to her daughter and grandchildren…” See More.

Most of us know that at some point in our evolutionary history around 600 million years ago, single-celled organisms evolved into more complex multicellular life.

But knowing that happened and actually seeing it happen in real-time in front of you is an entirely different matter altogether.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Witnessed in Real-Time a Single-Celled Algae Evolve Into a Multicellular Organism” »

The idea that breastmilk has a microbiome (or microbiota)—a community of bacteria living within it—is relatively new and has sparked debate about where breastmilk bacteria come from. Some scientists believe breastmilk bacteria originate in the mother’s gut while others believe they are transferred to the mother from the infant’s mouth during breastfeeding.

New research from the CHILD Cohort Study—an ongoing birth cohort study involving thousands of Canadian children and their families—has shed some light on this question by highlighting the importance of the infant’s mouth as a source of breastmilk bacteria.

The study, published today in Cell Host & Microbe, found that among the many factors examined, the method of breastfeeding—whether mothers fed their infants directly at the breast or fed them pumped breastmilk from a bottle—was the most consistent factor associated with the milk microbiota composition.

Continue reading “Breastmilk microbiome linked to method of feeding” »

Try as you might, some events cannot be remembered. Known in psychology as memory blocking, the phenomenon has remained elusive since first described more than half a century ago. Now Donnelly Centre researchers have found that blocking is not due to problems with forming memories, as previously thought, but with memory recall—in worms at least.

By studying this process in the C. elegans worm, a creature only one millimeter long but whose biology has been studied so extensively that the position of all of its 302 nerve cells in the body is known, the researchers think they’ll be able to pinpoint the cells and molecules at play during learning and memory.

The findings are described in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

A newly discovered species of lichen from Ecuador that contains both tryptamine and psilocybin has recently been discovered, dispelling the belief that the infamous ‘magic mushrooms’ are the only plant species containing this hallucinogenic compound.

Lichens are of particular interest to biologists because of their symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi. The fungus creates the network that sustains, hydrates, and protects the algae, which in turn generates the sugars necessary to feed it through photosynthesis. While they both exhibit plant-like characteristics, neither are actually plants — they are composite organisms. This makes the psychedelic lichen even more intriguing.

Continue reading “A New Species Of Psychedelic Lichen Found To Contain Psilocybin & DMT” »