Lifeboat Foundation

In a recent study published in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, researchers provide an overview of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) in treating recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection (rCDI).

Study: Fecal microbiota transplantation for the treatment of recurrent Clostridioides difficile (Clostridium difficile). Image Credit: Prrrettty / Shutterstock.com.

The robotic dog is officially named Bergh, after Henry Bergh, who founded the ASPCA.

Bergh weighs 70 pounds and can go up stairs. It can fall or get knocked over and get back up. It can even open doors.

Last week, Bergh was put into action for the first time at the building collapse. Officials say there was no way to know if other people were trapped. Bergh entered the first floor and second floor, going about 25 feet into the building and stopping so the operator could use a thermal camera to detect heat. One of the robotic dogs was able to find the garage’s general manager, 59-year-old Willis Moore, who was killed.

In Big Tech’s AI chatbot race, Meta may be up to the task.

OpenAI started the chatbot trend with ChatGPT, Microsoft brought it to search with the Bing chatbot, and Google is following suit with Bard and Project Magi.

Wow. Spoiler, quasars are galaxies colliding and part of the gases reacting with black holes in the middle of the galaxies. Does that mean we’re all doomed though we could galaxy hop in the distant future I suppose. And the rest of the dispersed gases will take millions or was it billions of years to make new stars again. Kinda reminds me of human life. We are born only to return to the Earth.

Scientists have unlocked one of the biggest mysteries of quasars—the brightest, most powerful objects in the universe—by discovering that they are ignited by galaxies colliding.

First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our solar system. In the decades since they were first observed, what could trigger such powerful activity has remained a mystery. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.

Continue reading “Astronomers solve the 60-year mystery of quasars, the most powerful objects in the universe” »

You can only read this with chrome or a browser that translates to English unless you speak Portuguese. Fascinating read about artificial uteruses in the possible future bought to bring peace to the abortion debate or not, and as a safety measure for an apocalyptic event. This was shared by Zoltan, I think that’s his name, a transhumanist that at one time was hoping to be the first transhumanist elected as president and to base decisions on science or something like that. It’s been a while but he wanted equality and ethics through science/transhumanists goals.

O útero artificial está chegando, para o bem e para o mal. Feministas radicais já lutam pelo direito de matar seus fetos.

Continue reading “‘A gravidez fora do corpo está perto de se tornar realidade’, por Dagomir Marquezi” »

Machines that consist of two coupled biomolecules trade thermodynamic efficiency for operating speed.

Liquid-crystal elastomers (LCEs) are shape-shifting materials that stretch or squeeze when stimulated by an external input such as heat, light, or a voltage. Designing these materials to produce desired shapes is a challenging math problem, but Daniel Castro and Hillel Aharoni from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, have now provided an analytical solution for flat materials that shape-shift within a single plane—like font-changing letters on a page [1]. Such “planar” designs could help in producing rods that change their cross section (from, say, round to square) without buckling.

LCEs consist of networks of polymer fibers containing liquid-crystal molecules. When exposed to a stimulus, the molecules align in a way that causes the material to shrink or extend in a predefined direction—called the director. Researchers can design an LCE by choosing the director orientation at each point in the material. However, calculating the “director field” for an arbitrary shape change is difficult, so approximate methods are typically used.

Castro and Aharoni focused on a specific design problem: how to create an LCE that stretches only in two dimensions. These planar LCEs often suffer from residual stress that causes the material to wrinkle or buckle out of the plane. The researchers showed that finding a buckle-free design is similar to a well-known mathematical problem that has been studied in other contexts, such as minimizing the mass of load-carrying structures. Taking inspiration from these previous studies, Castro and Aharoni provided a method for exactly deriving the director field for any desired planar LCE. “Our results could be readily implemented by a wide range of experimentalists, as well as by engineers and designers,” Aharoni says.

A lightweight structure made of rubber and metal layers can provide an object with underwater acoustic stealth over a broad frequency range.

An acoustic “cloak” could hide an underwater object from detection by sonar devices or by echolocating marine animals. Much like camouflage clothing allows figures to fade into a background, acoustic camouflage can make an object indistinguishable from the surrounding water. Underwater acoustic cloaks have previously been demonstrated, but they typically work over a narrow range of frequencies or are too bulky to be practical. Now Hao-Wen Dong at the Beijing Institute of Technology and colleagues demonstrate a lightweight, broadband cloak made of a thin shell of layered material. The cloak achieves acoustic stealth by both blocking the reflection of sonar pings off the surface and preventing the escape of sound generated from within the cloaked object [1].

Dong and colleagues designed a 4-cm-thick structure—combining an outer rubber layer and a “metamaterial” made of porous aluminum—which covered a steel plate. Using a genetic algorithm, they optimized the metamaterial’s elastic properties to tailor the interaction with underwater sound waves. Specifically, the metamaterial converts impinging longitudinal sound waves, which can travel long distances underwater, to transverse sound waves, which cannot propagate through water. These transverse waves get trapped in the rubber layer, where they get absorbed, eliminating reflected and transmitted waves simultaneously. The researchers built and tested a prototype cloak, confirming that it behaved as predicted. In particular, it absorbed 80% of the energy of incoming sound waves while offering 100-fold attenuation of acoustic noise produced on the side of the steel plate.

The experimental realization of a recently proposed technique points to new possibilities for imaging molecules using x rays.

Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) interferometry [1] is a versatile technique widely used in various fields of physics, such as astronomy, quantum optics, and particle physics. By measuring the correlation of photon arrival times on two detectors as a function of the photons’ spatial separation, HBT interferometry enables the determination of the size and spatial distribution of a light source. Recently, a novel x-ray imaging technique based on the HBT method was proposed to image the spatial arrangement of heavy elements in a crystal or molecule by inducing those elements to fluoresce at x-ray wavelengths [2].