Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists researching the microbial life on volcanic vents uncovered more incredible ocean landscapes from the seafloor off the coast of California. Just check this out:

An international team, led by University of Georgia associate professor Samantha Joye, set out to explore sites in both the northern and southern Gulf of California, analyzing how microorganisms live in the hot waters by the vents. These images come from the ROV SuBastian, a remotely operated sub that can take samples and image the area around these vents, operated from the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel, Falkor.

Continue reading “New Mirror-Like Pools Discovered Deep in the Pacific Ocean” »

The button mushroom in your local grocery store is a visible outpost of a largely hidden, alien-like kingdom that rules all life on land: fungi. Annamaria Talas takes a look.

University of Central Florida researchers have developed a way to control the speed of light. Not only can they speed up a pulse of light and slow it down, they can also make it travel backward.

Researchers spot the signatures of nuclear fusion in a table-top-sized setup commonly used to study the plasmas found in stars and other astrophysical objects.

Future nuclear fusion reactors promise the possibility of supplying Earth with an unlimited source of clean energy. Attempts to create these reactors typically involve building-sized contraptions to generate the hot plasma needed to initiate fusion reactions. Now Yue Zhang at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues have successfully ignited sustained fusion using a setup that is small enough to sit on a table.

This future is here 😲.

The creatures “can reversibly enter a state where outwardly observable signs of metabolic activity are paused under conditions that are essentially incompatible with life.”

Miniaturised frogs form a fascinating but poorly understood group of amphibians. They have been exceptionally prone to taxonomic underestimation because when frogs evolve small body size they start to look remarkably similar – so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are.

As part of my PhD I have been studying frogs and reptiles on Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean that’s a little larger than mainland France. It has more than 350 frog species, giving it possibly the highest frog diversity per square kilometre of any country in the world. And many of these frogs are very small.

We have added to the knowledge of these tiny species by describing five new species as belonging to the group of frogs commonly referred to as “narrow-mouthed” frogs. The largest of them could sit happily on your thumbnail. The smallest is just longer than a grain of rice.

Continue reading “Check Out These Adorable, Tiny Frog Species Just Discovered in Madagascar” »

For the first time scientists have found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not engage in photosynthesis.

The peculiar organism is dubbed ‘corallicolid’ because it is found in 70 per cent of corals around the world and may provide clues as to how to protect coral reefs in the future.

“This is the second most abundant cohabitant of coral on the planet and it hasn’t been seen until now,” says Patrick Keeling, a University of British Columbia botanist and senior researcher overseeing the study published in Nature. “This organism poses completely new biochemical questions. It looks like a parasite, and it’s definitely not photosynthetic. But it still makes chlorophyll.”

Continue reading “Scientists discover first organism with chlorophyll genes that doesn’t photosynthesize” »

We’re headed toward a future in which anyone who needs a new heart gets one.