Lifeboat Foundation

Sergey Brin, the brilliant Tech billionaire who co-founded Google, is building an airship at a cost of 250 million dollars, that would allow him to carry his home to wherever he goes. Could this concept be extended to the solar system as a whole? Might we want to take the Sun with us for a ride through the Milky Way galaxy?

Ecclesiastes 1:9 argued: “there is nothing new under the sun.” This gloomy perspective need not be true forever. With a few more centuries of science and technology, our civilization might develop a stellar engine that propels the Sun and allows us to travel with it through the Milky Way galaxy and beyond.

Continue reading “Can Technological Civilizations Move Stars?” »

“New surveys of the sky provide groundbreaking opportunities to search for technosignatures coordinated with supernovae.” said Bárbara Cabrales.

Are we alone in the universe? This longstanding question is what the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has been trying to answer for decades as its vast array of radio telescopes continues to scan the heavens for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, also known as technsigatures. Now, a team of researchers led by the Berkeley SETI Research Center have developed the SETI Ellipsoid with the hope it will offer greater opportunities for identifying technsigatures from intelligent civilizations throughout the cosmos. These findings were recently published in The Astronomical Journal and hold the potential to help scientists better understand the necessary criterion for finding intelligent life beyond Earth.

For the study, the researchers began by hypothesizing that intelligent civilizations could use what’s known as a Schelling point (more commonly called a focal point) during supernovae events as an opportunity to broadcast coordinated signals announcing their existence to the cosmos. The researchers then compared this criterion to data from NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) spacecraft, finding the criterion matched 5 percent of TESS data. After searching through the data using their new SETI Ellipsoid method, the team identified zero technosignatures, but noted this new method could provide unique opportunities for identifying technosignatures in the future.

Continue reading “Unlocking the Cosmos: The SETI Ellipsoid Approach to Technosignature Detection” »

An explainable deep learning model using a chemical substructure-based approach for the exploration of chemical compound libraries identified structural classes of compounds with antibiotic activity and low toxicity.

Researchers have engineered T cells with a cancer-derived mutation, boosting their potency against tumors over 100-fold without toxicity, marking a significant advancement in immunotherapy that could…

Nerve cells in the brain demand an enormous amount of energy to survive and maintain their connections for communicating with other nerve cells. In Alzheimer’s disease, the ability to make energy is compromised, and the connections between nerve cells (called synapses) eventually come apart and wither, causing new memories to fade and fail.

A Scripps Research team, reporting in the journal Advanced Science, has now identified the energetic reactions in brain cells that malfunction and lead to neurodegeneration. By using a small molecule to address the malfunction, which occurred in the mitochondria—the cell’s major energy producers—the researchers showed that many neuron-to-neuron connections were successfully restored in nerve cell models derived from human Alzheimer’s patient stem cells. These findings highlight that improving mitochondrial metabolism could be a promising therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s and related disorders.

“We thought that if we could repair metabolic activity in the mitochondria, maybe we could salvage the energy production,” says senior author Stuart Lipton, MD, Ph.D., Step Family Foundation Endowed Professor and Co-Director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center at Scripps Research, and a clinical neurologist in La Jolla, Calif. “In using human neurons derived from people with Alzheimer’s, protecting the energy levels was sufficient to rescue a large number of neuronal connections.”

The waterborne disease has killed more than 4,000 people in seven countries over the past two years. Experts blame severe storms, a lack of vaccines, and poor water and sewer systems.

Roughly 1 in 2 wearers of ventricular assist devices are diagnosed with an infection. The reason for this is the thick cable for the power supply. ETH Zurich researchers have now developed a solution to mitigate this problem.

For many patients waiting for a donor heart, the only way to live a decent life is with the help of a pump attached directly to their heart. This pump requires about as much power as a TV, which it draws from an external battery via a seven-millimeter-thick cable. The system is handy and reliable, but it has one big flaw: Despite medical treatment, the point at which the cable exits the abdomen can be breached by bacteria.

Continue reading “A new solution for energy transfer to heart pumps mitigates infection” »

A specific combination of targeted therapy and immunotherapy may better help patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) overcome inherent immune resistance and reinvigorate anti-tumor activity, according to a new study led by a researcher from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Results from the Phase II umbrella HUDSON study, published in Nature Medicine, demonstrate that the anti PD-L1 antibody, durvalumab, coupled with the ATR inhibitor, ceralasertib, provides the greatest clinical benefit of four combinations evaluated.

This pair had an objective response rate (ORR) of 13.9% compared to just 2.6% with the other tested combinations. Median progression-free survival (PFS) was 5.8 months versus 2.7 months for other combinations, while median overall survival (OS) was 17.4 months versus 9.4 months. In patients with ATM alterations, which should sensitize tumors to ATR inhibitors, the ORR increased to 26.1%. Durvalumab-ceralasertib had a manageable safety profile.

The threat actors behind the PikaBot malware have made significant changes to the malware in what has been described as a case of “devolution.”

“Although it appears to be in a new development cycle and testing phase, the developers have reduced the complexity of the code by removing advanced obfuscation techniques and changing the network communications,” Zscaler ThreatLabz researcher Nikolaos Pantazopoulos said.

PikaBot, first documented by the cybersecurity firm in May 2023, is a malware loader and a backdoor that can execute commands and inject payloads from a command-and-control (C2) server as well as allow the attacker to control the infected host.