Lifeboat Foundation

Today we bring you an interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.

Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die? This can seem like a silly question to people encountering it for the first time because most of us would quickly respond, “Because that’s just how it is; all creatures age and die eventually as their bodies wear out.”

Essentially, Josh is saying, “Not so fast. In fact, a lot of creatures don’t age and die. Humans, as well as most other animals that do age and die, are programmed to do so. So, humans are programmed to die in much the same way that salmon are programmed to die after spawning.”

Continue reading “Dr. Josh Mitteldorf – Are we on the verge of major breakthroughs in anti-aging science?” »

The March for Science celebrated its anniversary today. And while the turnout around the world was significantly smaller than last year, supporters haven’t lost any of their energy.

The crowds were much smaller for the second March for Science, but the concerns may have been even more intense.

http://www.corebrainjournal.com/2018/04/211-regenerative-bio…cs-pastor/

Take any two cells from your body and there’s a good chance their genetic sequences will be a match. That is, unless you happen to have what’s referred to in the medical literature as a ‘tetragametic chimerism’ – a condition that causes separate fertilised embryos to merge into a single body.

Once thought to be rare among humans, there’s good reason to suspect we might be seeing a lot more of it in the future.

The truth is, nobody is really certain how many humans have cells in their body that once belonged to a sibling.

Continue reading “Some People Are Their Own Identical Twins, And The Science Behind That Is Fascinating” »

Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about our nocturnal adventures, sometimes at tedious length.

But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, they start to make a lot more sense. And dreams are much more important than you might think.

Here are some common questions answered about the nighttime hallucinations we call dreams.

Continue reading “Science Is Getting Closer to Understanding What Goes on Inside The Mind When We Dream” »

In principle, a wormhole-like scenario is possible, but a wormhole tends to close before objects or other matter could pass through it. As far as we know, it’s unlikely we could construct a wormhole that stays open long enough for us to get to a distant part of the universe.

That’s really the issue: Can you keep a wormhole open?

Continue reading “Blue Sky Science: Are there wormholes that lead to other galaxies?” »

For all its progress, Russia’s state-funded science still lags behind that of emerging science powers including China, India and South Korea, especially when it comes to translating discoveries into economic gains. Decades of underfunding, excessive state bureaucracy and entrenched opposition to reform within the country’s sputtering research institutions are hampering competitiveness, says Khokhlov. “What we need are new ideas, new labs, fresh talent and more freedom and competition.”

With Vladimir Putin set to earn another presidential term, researchers wonder whether his government will reverse decades of decline.

In 1969, William Safire was President Nixon’s speech writer. He wrote the short speech shown below, and delivered it to Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman. The speech was to be read by Nixon in the event that the Apollo 11 lunar lander failed to launch or that some other problem caused the lander or mothership to crash back onto the surface of the moon.

In 1969, the space race was at full throttle. Russians were first to launch a satellite, send a dog and a man into space,* and perform an extravehicular space walk. America was under great pressure to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s promise and beat the Russians in landing a man on the moon. Today, former engineers at NASA acknowledge that they believed the chances of such a catastrophe were more than 50%.

Continue reading “What if Apollo 11 had failed? Nixon’s undelivered speech” »