Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers at The University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University have put a basic principle of black holes to the test, showing that matter completely vanishes when pulled in. Their results constitute another successful test for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

Most scientists agree that black holes, cosmic entities of such great gravity that nothing can escape their grip, are surrounded by a so-called event horizon. Once matter or energy gets close enough to the black hole, it cannot escape—it will be pulled in. Though widely believed, the existence of event horizons has not been proved.

“Our whole point here is to turn this idea of an event horizon into an experimental science, and find out if event horizons really do exist or not,” said Pawan Kumar, a professor of astrophysics at The University of Texas at Austin.

The new work addresses not only what dark energy is but why the rate of universal expansion has the value it does.

“Everybody wants to know what dark energy is,” Wang told Live Science. “I reconsidered this question more carefully,” from the perspective of the universe’s energy density.

Wang and his colleagues assumed that modern quantum field theory was correct about the energy density being very large, but that the vacuum fluctuations, or the movements of empty space, were very large on tiny scales, near what is called the Planck length, or 1.62 × 10 ^ minus 35 meters. That’s so small that a proton is 100 million trillion times bigger.

Continue reading “Dark Energy May Lurk in the Nothingness of Space” »

HONG KONG — Sören Schwertfeger finished his postdoctorate research on autonomous robots in Germany, and seemed set to go to Europe or the United States, where artificial intelligence was pioneered and established.

Instead, he went to China.

“You couldn’t have started a lab like mine elsewhere,” Mr. Schwertfeger said.

Continue reading “Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?” »

Anticipation is growing for the July release of Tesla’s ‘affordable’ $35,000 Model 3.

Now, the latest shots of Telsa testing the car may have revealed one of its final secrets — what the interior will look like.

Continue reading “Spy shots reveal Tesla Model 3’s radical single screen dashboard” »

Peace and love on this Memorial Day to those who served and gave their lives for freedom. My interview a while back with Express is still right on.track about the future of military and how most human soldier casualties will be a thing of the past.

THERE will be no longer be human casualties of war from wealthy countries within 10 years as advanced militaries will begin sending MACHINES to warzones, an expert has claimed.

There is an urgent need to develop better biomarkers and to use the in cost effective packages for accurate measurement of aging.

As human life expectancy has increased throughout the 20th and 21st centuries this has led to a steady increase in the population of older people. With that increase has come the rise of age-related diseases and disabilities. As a result it is becoming ever more important to develop preventative strategies to monitor and maintain health as well as therapies that directly address the various aging processes to delay or prevent the onset of age-related diseases.

One of the ways we can do this is by developing more effective ways to measure how someone is aging, this means developing high quality aging biomarkers. The challenge in creating such biomarkers has always been the fundamental question – what do we measure?

Continue reading “The Need for Better Aging Biomarkers” »

By Kim Thurler, Tufts University

(MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass.) — Changing the natural electrical signaling that exists in cells outside the nervous system can improve resistance to life-threatening bacterial infections, according to new research from Tufts University biologists. The researchers found that administering drugs, including those already used in humans for other purposes, to make the cell interior more negatively charged strengthens tadpoles’ innate immune response to E. coli infection and injury. This reveals a novel aspect of the immune system – regulation by non-neural bioelectricity – and suggests a new approach for clinical applications in human medicine. The study is published online May 26, 2017, in npj Regenerative Medicine, a Nature Research journal.

“All cells, not just nerve cells, naturally generate and receive electrical signals. Being able to regulate such non-neural bioelectricity with the many ion channel and neurotransmitter drugs that are already human-approved gives us an amazing new toolkit to augment the immune system’s ability to resist infections,” said the paper’s corresponding author Michael Levin, Ph.D., Vannevar Bush Professor of Biology and Director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences. Levin is also an Associate Faculty member of the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Continue reading “Bioelectricity is a new weapon to fight dangerous infection” »

Read more

• With Chinese scientists announcing that they have tested CRISPR on a human for the first time, the U.S. must decide soon whether it will be a leader or a follower in advancing the tech.
• While gene editing technology could be used in nefarious ways, it could also cure diseases and improve millions of lives, but we won’t know how effective it is until we begin human trials.

While the middle part of the 20th century saw the world’s superpowers racing to explore space, the first global competition of this century is being set in a much smaller arena: our DNA.