Lifeboat Foundation

To celebrate the completion of the James Webb Space Telescope’s first year of science operations, NASA has released a close-up image of the birth of sun-like stars.

The image, captured on Webb’s telescope is a small star-forming region in the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex – the nearest star-forming region to Earth.

The region’s proximity at 390 light-years allows for a highly detailed close-up, with no foreground stars in the intervening space.

Dr. ryan brinkman-vice president and research director, dotmatics

Scientists have long been perceived and portrayed in films as old people in white lab coats perched at a bench full of bubbling fluorescent liquids. The present-day reality is quite different. Scientists are increasingly data jockeys in hoodies sitting before monitors analyzing enormous amounts of data. Modern-day labs are more likely composed of sterile rows of robots doing the manual handling of materials, and lab notebooks are now electronic, in massive data centers holding vast quantities of information. Today, scientific input comes from data pulled from the cloud, with algorithms fueling scientific discovery the way Bunsen burners once did.

Advances in technology, and especially instrumentation, enable scientists to collect and process data at an unprecedented scale. As a result, scientists are now faced with massive datasets that require sophisticated analysis techniques and computational tools to extract meaningful insights. This also presents significant challenges—how do you store, manage, and share these large datasets, as well as ensure that the data is of high quality and reliable?

Once dismissed as a new age fad, lucid dreaming has gained attention as a possible performance enhancer and therapeutic tool.

We all know the feeling of waking up groggy and exhausted, struggling to find the energy to tackle the day ahead. The key to breaking free from this cycle lies in understanding the science of sleep and adopting evidence-based strategies to enhance its quality. So, let’s explore the stages of sleeping and the role of circadian rhythms in regulating our sleep-wake cycles to transform your habits and embark on the journey to obtain better sleep every night!

Get Better Sleep Every Night: Understand the Science

Continue reading “The Science of Sleep: How to Get Better Sleep Every Night” »

“It tastes like chicken.” That’s a common review of UPSIDE Foods’ new trial product. Perhaps that’s not surprising: it is, after all, chicken — at the cellular level. But the fillets are not from a slaughterhouse. They are grown in bioreactors in an urban factory in California.

Alittle over a decade ago, only a handful of researchers were investigating the potential of laboratory-made meat. The world’s first cultured beef burger, which reportedly cost US$325,000, was made by Maastricht University biomedical engineer Mark Post, who ate it at a press conference in 2013. Such products are now much closer to market: more than 150 companies around the world are working on cultured meat (from ground beef to steaks, chicken, pork and fish), milk or related ‘cellular agriculture’ products, including leather.

Companies making cultured meat are attracting billions of dollars of investment. Here are their biggest challenges.

Usual weather prediction systems have the capacity to generate around 50 predictions for the week ahead. FourCastNet can instead predict thousands of possibilities, accurately capturing the risk of rare but deadly disasters and thereby giving vulnerable populations valuable time to prepare and evacuate.

The hoped-for revolution in climate modeling is just the beginning. With the advent of AI, science is about to become much more exciting—and in some ways unrecognizable. The reverberations of this shift will be felt far outside the lab; they will affect us all.

Accelerating Effective Treatments To Prevent And Reverse Human Age-Related Disease — Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. — President & Chief Science Officer, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEVF)

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D., is President & Chief Science Officer of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation (https://www.levf.org/), an organization focused on proactively identifying and addressing the most challenging obstacles on the path to the widespread availability of genuinely effective treatments to prevent and reverse human age-related disease.

Continue reading “Dr. Aubrey de Grey, Ph.D. — President & Chief Science Officer, Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation” »

A robot fish named Belle could be the “spy on the marine life” that researchers have been looking for.

Do you ever mesh your other hobbies with the space stuff? Yes. I once turned the results of one of my experiments into a musical. In 2020, during the lockdowns, I put a scientific instrument on my balcony to measure light, sound and pollution before and after the pandemic. I ended up with several graphs and thought, Why not turn these into a musical? So, me and my brother got several musical instruments and played notes according to how high or low each point on the graph was. We actually submitted that to the NASA SpaceApps COVID-19 Challenge and became one of the top six global winners.

Do you think you’ll study space science at university when you’re older? I think so. Either aerospace or astrophysics, or maybe both.

Continue reading “‘I’m really into planetary defence’: Meet the 13-year-old whose science project could protect Earth from asteroids” »