Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Rhodopsin can kill cancer cells keeping the surrounding cells healthy đŸ˜€

Considerable time and funding are required in development of new medicines necessary for otherwise untreatable illnesses. Professor Yuki SUDO of Okayama University seeks an innovative form of treatment using rhodopsin, a protein with light-reactive qualities. By extracting it and artificially inserting it into affected cells, it could treat illness simply by exposure to a specific type of light. He has succeeded in using rhodopsin to eliminate cells from cancer, the first such accomplishment ever achieved in the world. In this episode, we introduce the research toward a “light switch” to cure disease.

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Researchers have proposed a new strategy for the shape assembly of robot swarms based on the idea of mean-shift exploration: When a robot is surrounded by neighboring robots and unoccupied locations, it actively gives up its current location by exploring the highest density of nearby unoccupied locations in the desired shape.

The study, titled, “Mean-shift exploration in shape assembly of robot swarms,” has been published in Nature Communications.

This idea is realized by adapting the mean-shift algorithm, an optimization technique widely used in for locating the maxima of a density function.

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TITUSVILLE, Fla. — SpaceX plans to remove from orbit about 100 of its older Starlink satellites because of a design flaw that could cause them to fail.

In a statement Feb. 12, SpaceX said it would perform controlled descents of about 100 “early-version 1” Starlink satellites out of concerns that the spacecraft could fail in orbit and no longer be maneuver.

“These satellites are currently maneuverable and serving users effectively, but the Starlink team identified a common issue in this small population of satellites that could increase the probability of failure in the future,” SpaceX stated. The company did not elaborate on that issue or identify the specific satellites affected.

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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.

Fritz Zwicky, the astronomer who discovered dark matter in 1933, wrote in his 1957 book Morphological Astronomy: “Considering the Sun itself, many changes are imaginable. Most fascinating is perhaps the possibility of accelerating it to higher speeds, for instance 1,000 kilometers per second directed toward Alpha-Centauri in whose neighborhood our descendants then might arrive a thousand years hence. All of these projects could be realized through the action of nuclear fusion jets, using the matter constituting the Sun and the planets as nuclear propellants.”

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“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.


Animation of the SETI ellipsoid with Earth at the far right and a potential technosignature civilization at the upper left. (Credit: Zayna Sheikh)

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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.”

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