Lifeboat Foundation

Mosquito-borne disease affecting millions has had no approved vaccine until now

When female Aedes Aegypti mosquito sups on the blood of its human victims it too often deposits the virus that causes dengue, causing as many as 400 million infections per year worldwide. Severe forms of the painful, flu-like disease can be fatal, especially among children. And until recently there has been no truly effective prevention except avoiding getting bit. But the outlook against the disease is looking better.

During the past month Dengvaxia, developed by the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi, has been approved for use in three countries: Mexico and the Philippines approved the vaccine earlier this month. This week, the company also announced the drug has received the green light in Brazil, which has seen more than 1.4 million cases of the disease in 2015. Exactly when the inoculations will be deployed—and at what price—remains unclear as terms of the vaccine are being negotiated between the company and the countries.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=iXcfm10bvZo

If nanotechnology continues to advance as experts expect, within 30 years it could give us ‘superhuman’ abilities. For example, we could survive for hours without needing to breathe.

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In late May, mathematician Eric Weinstein gave a talk at Oxford University about his ideas about “Geometric Unity,” a mathematical theory that purports to explain why the universe works the way it does. Weinstein He earned a 1992 Ph.D [in Mathematical Physics from Harvard University and has since held a Lady Davis Fellowship in the Racah Institute ofPhysics at Hebrew University, an NSF fellowship in the mathematics Department of MIT.

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A new experiment to give away money as “basic income” is underway in Germany. In 2014, Michael Bohmeyer, a 31-year-old German entrepreneur, launched “My Basic Income” (“Mein Grundeinkommen”), and this month, the project, made possible through crowdfunding, issued $1,100 checks to 26 people to use however they want. Leftists in Germany tend to support the idea…

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VIDEO: You may never need to wash your jeans again.

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Interstellar is one of the best sci-fi movies of the last decade, imagining a post-apocalyptic human population that needs to be saved from a dying Earth. A nearby black hole has the answers to humanity’s problems, and the brilliant script tells us we can enter a black hole and then use it to transcend space and time. In the film, the black hole also leaks out information that can save us, and it is captured by a complex computer as it’s being entered. That might seem implausible, but since we don’t know a lot about how black holes work, we can certainly accept such an outlandish proposition in the context of the movie.

In real life, however, physicists are trying to figure out how to access the secrets of a black hole. And it looks like some researchers have a theory to retrieve information from it, though it’s not quite as exciting as the complex bookcase that Interstellar proposes.

DON’T MISS: The biggest ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ plot holes explained

Continue reading “Researchers say retrieving information from a black hole might be possible” »

Lions and tigers and bears oh my… wink

It’s mind blowing. And beautiful.

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“You like your Tesla, but does your Tesla like you?” My new story for TechCrunch on robots understanding beauty and even whether they like your appearance or not:

Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets.

But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.

Continue reading “The First International Beauty Contest Judged By Robots” »

It’s summer in December at the Arctic Circle this week.

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