Lifeboat Foundation

The ability to produce more electricity per weight compared to traditional silicon solar cells makes them highly suitable for sending into space to harvest the Sun’s energy, according to the researchers.

“High specific power is actually one of the greatest goals of any space-based light harvesting or energy harvesting technology,” said Deep Jariwala from the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is not just important for satellites or space stations, but also if you want real utility-scale solar power in space. The number of [silicon] solar cells you would have to ship up is so large that no space vehicles currently can take those kinds of materials up there in an economically viable way.”

Dr. Moss and his son Ben discuss the most important cancer and general health-related topic of all, SUGAR, and the problems it has caused in their lives as well as for more than 50% of adults in the United States and other industrialized countries. They share their personal experiences and the science that clearly connects sugar to cancer, metabolic syndrome, and diabetes.

Program Notes:
For more information on cancer-fighting foods and supplements, please visit our website: https://www.themossreport.com.

Continue reading “Sugar, Metabolism & Cancer — How is metabolic syndrome linked to cancer?” »

Plants modified to grow in the dark could also provide fresh produce in extreme environments on Earth.

A common nutrient found in everyday foods might be the key to a long and healthy life, according to researchers from Columbia University.

The nutrient in question is taurine, a naturally occurring amino acid with a range of essential roles around the body.

Not only does the concentration of this nutrient in our bodies decrease as we age, but supplementation can increase lifespan by up to 12 percent in different species.

Eating nutritious food has been shown time and time again to help improve metabolic health and delay aging. But what the appropriate quantities of these dietary macronutrients are has received somewhat varying results.

To investigate what they might be researchers from Waseda University fed isocaloric diets with varying amounts of protein to mice, and their findings are published in GeroScience. According to the researchers, the animals were found to be metabolically healthier when they were fed moderate protein diets, and these findings could provide insight into developing nutritional interventions as well as to improving metabolic health in people.

Continue reading “Eat Right And You Could Live Longer” »

Poems, essays and even books—is there anything the open AI platform ChatGPT can’t handle? These new AI developments have inspired researchers at TU Delft and the Swiss technical university EPFL to dig a little deeper: For instance, can ChatGPT also design a robot? And is this a good thing for the design process, or are there risks? The researchers published their findings in Nature Machine Intelligence.

What are the greatest future challenges for humanity? This was the first question that Cosimo Della Santina, assistant professor, and Ph.D. student Francesco Stella, both from TU Delft, and Josie Hughes from EPFL, asked ChatGPT.

“We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” says Della Santina. In the end, they chose food supply as their challenge, and as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato-harvesting robot.

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Dr. Jennifer Doudna and Dr. Emmanuelle Charpentier for their work on the gene editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9. This gives us the ability to change the DNA of any living thing, from plants and animals to humans.

The applications are enormous, from improving farming to curing diseases. A decade or so from now, CRISPR will no doubt be taught in High Schools, and be a basic building block of medicine and agriculture. It is going to change everything.

Continue reading “Throw Forward Thursday: CRISPR” »

While there are many things that negatively affect bees, Hu says exposure to pesticides prevents them from feeding and sustaining the colony.

“The pesticides may prevent the bees from being able to do the daily functions of the hive,” Hu said. “So, for example, they might get lost on their way to finding food, or they might not be able to remember where the sites that they found food were and not be able to communicate to the other bees where the food was.”

At 11 years old, Hu found that tea polyphenols and caffeine could repair the honeybee’s learning and memory. Polyphenols are compounds that stimulate the brain. Hu is now 13 years old.

Researchers have trained a robotic ‘chef’ to watch and learn from cooking videos, and recreate the dish itself.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed their robotic chef with a cookbook of eight simple salad recipes. After watching a video of a human demonstrating one of the recipes, the robot was able to identify which recipe was being prepared and make it.

Continue reading “Robot ‘chef’ learns to recreate recipes from watching food videos” »