Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 12

Analysis of Moroccan stalagmites reveals that the Sahara received increased rainfall between 8,700 and 4,300 years ago, supporting early herding societies. This rainfall, likely driven by tropical plumes and monsoon expansion, narrowed the desert, improved habitability, and facilitated human movement.

Analysis of stalagmite samples from caves in southern Morocco has revealed new details about past rainfall patterns in the Sahara Desert. Researchers from the University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England that is made up of 39 constituent colleges, and a range of academic departments, which are organized into four divisions. It was established circa 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second-oldest university in continuous operation after the University of Bologna.

Read more | >

As Shakespeare put it, we all have our entrances and our exits on this grand stage we call life, and now researchers have identified the specific point in middle-age when our brain cells show the first signs of starting down a downward slope.

That age, based on brain scans and tests covering 19,300 individuals, is on average around 44 years. It’s here that degeneration starts to be noticeable, before hitting its most rapid rate at age 67. By the time we reach 90, the speed of brain aging levels off.

According to the team behind the new study, led by researchers from Stony Brook University in the US, the findings could be helpful in figuring out ways to promote better brain health during the later stages of life.

Read more | >

The Dark Storm hacktivist group claims to be behind DDoS attacks causing multiple X worldwide outages on Monday, leading the company to enable DDoS protections from Cloudflare.

While X owner Elon Musk did not specifically state that DDoS attacks were behind the outages, he did confirm that it was caused by a “massive cyberattack.”

“There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X,” Musk posted on X.

Read more | >

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said today that Americans lost a record $12.5 billion to fraud last year, a 25% increase over the previous year.

Consumers reported that investment scams resulted in the highest losses, totaling around $5.7 billion with a median loss of over $9,000 and exceeding all other fraud categories. The second largest reported loss was linked with imposter scams, amounting to $2.95 billion in 2024.

Younger people have also reported losing money to fraud more often than people over 70, as 44% of all reports filed last year came from consumers between 20 and 29.

Read more | >

Ever since their discovery almost four decades ago, high-temperature superconductors have fascinated scientists and engineers alike. These materials, primarily cuprates, defy classical understanding because they conduct electricity without resistance at temperatures far higher than traditional superconductors. Yet despite decades of research, we still don’t have a clear, comprehensive microscopic picture of how superconductivity emerges in these complex materials.

During my Ph.D. at Caltech, I was intrigued by the profound puzzle presented by high-temperature superconductors: Can we directly compute their from fundamental quantum mechanics without relying on simplified models or approximations? With this question, I embarked on a challenging but rewarding scientific journey.

Read more | >

Dissecting the effects of hypothermic and hypometabolic states on aging processes, the authors show that activation of neurons in the preoptic area induces a torpor-like state in mice that slows epigenetic aging and improves healthspan. These pro-longevity effects are mediated by reduced Tb, reinforcing evidence that Tb is a key mediator of aging processes.

Read more | >

In a new study, funded in part by NIH, a team led by Dr. Carlos Carmona-Fontaine from New York University investigated a peculiar characteristic of cell growth called the Allee effect. In the Allee effect, the viability of a cell population drops below a certain cell density. This suggests the cells are somehow cooperating to survive. The study appeared on February 19, 2025, in Nature.

To look at whether cancer cells exhibit an Allee effect, the researchers grew several types of cancer cells with various restricted nutrients. They found that depriving the cells of an amino acid that the cells need to grow appeared to create an Allee effect. Only higher-density cell populations survived under these conditions. This indicated that a cooperative survival strategy had kicked in.

The team then further explored how cancer cells might be cooperating to survive in low-amino acid environments. Chains of amino acids called oligopeptides can be broken down by cells into individual amino acids. The scientists found that cancer cells released substances into their immediate environment that broke nearby oligopeptides down. Because this occurred outside the cancer cells, any cell in the immediate vicinity could use the resulting free amino acids.

Read more | >