Lifeboat Foundation

A roving spring of bubbling mud is moving around like a geologic poltergeist in southern California.

There’s still a lot left to learn about black holes. One of the questions astronomers ask: How can black holes change our future?

A thought experiment to see whether life extension might contribute to your happiness.

Today, we’re going to engage in a thought experiment. We’re going to imagine a world with some sort of antechamber to life in which you hang around as some sort of disembodied entity before you are born. (Some people actually believe in something like that, but we won’t go there; it’s just a thought experiment.)

The Choice to Be Born

Continue reading “Choosing Health Early On” »

Now in a new paper, published in Psychological Science, Martin Maier and Rasha Abdel Rahman at the Humboldt University of Berlin report that by affecting visual processing at an early stage, such linguistic differences can even determine whether someone will see a coloured shape – or they won’t. “Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive,” they write.

The wavelengths of light that we perceive as colours form a smooth continuum, but crucially, the colour categories that people use to divide up this spectrum vary between languages. Maier and Abdel-Rahman studied native Greek-, Russian- and German-speakers for whom these categories differ.

In both Greek and Russian, there is a dedicated category-word for “light blue” and another for “dark blue” but no specific word for “blue” as a broader category. In German (as in English), people can use qualifiers to refer to “light blue”, “navy blue” or “sky blue”, and so on, but there are no dedicated category words for these shades. On the other hand, in German (also as in English) there is a dedicated word “blue” (blau in German) to cover all the shades of blue. However, Russian, Greek and German alike have a dedicated category word for referring to all shades of “green”, just as we do in English.

Continue reading “Your native language affects what you can and can’t see” »

In 40 years, human actions like deforestation have taken a major toll on wildlife, a new report finds.

• By Scott Waldman, E&E News on October 31, 2018

Two men who were paralysed in separate accidents more than six years ago can stand and walk short distances on crutches after their spinal cords were treated with electrical stimulation.

David Mzee, 28, and Gert-Jan Oskam, 35, had electrical pulses beamed into their spines to stimulate their leg muscles as they practised walking in a supportive harness on a treadmill.

The find offers a glimpse into a previously unknown marine ecosystem — and spotlights just how little we know about the seafloor.

Scientists uncovered a chain of volcanic seamounts off the coast of the Australian island of Tasmania.

Today’s Google doodle features a man standing among large dinosaur bones in the Alberta Badlands.

It’s in honour of Joseph Burr Tyrrell, who was born 160 years ago in Weston, Ont.

Tyrrell, who died in 1957 at the age of 98, was a Canadian geologist, cartographer and mining consultant.

Continue reading “Google’s Doodle Is An Adorable Tribute To A Canadian Geologist” »

When fish are filleted in a seafood-processing plant, or when shrimp and shellfish are boiled, a lot of wastewater is generated. Currently, that water is simply discarded. An experimental new system, however, is able to draw much of the nutrients from it – and those nutrients could have a number of uses.