Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have discovered that an inflammatory cytokine known as LIGHT is a major factor in the deadly airway damage that can affect people with severe asthma. This research has suggested that such airway damage could be reversed by therapeutics that halt LIGHT, and the molecule could offer a way to treat asthma. The study, which used a mouse model and human tissue, has been reported in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

“This is a very, very significant finding,” said senior study author and LJI Professor Michael Croft, Ph.D. “This research gives us a better understanding of the potential of therapeutic targeting of LIGHT and what we might do to relieve some of the symptoms and some of the inflammatory features seen in patients who have severe asthma.”

What seems to stand out above anything else is that death is different for each of us.

One of the most contemplated questions across all of the man kind is “what happens when we die?” And while we may not have all of the answers, scientists have recently found that death may not be as cut and dry as we all may have thought.

Many of us have heard the notion that our life flashes before our eyes as we die. Others talk of crossing over from life into the afterlife, and some even say there is light at the end of a tunnel. We all have ideas and beliefs surrounding what happens during our final moments, but what happens?

Continue reading “When You Die You Know You Are Dead, According to Scientists” »

Impact Of EVs On Power Supply: Even when EVs become mainstream, their cumulative demand for power would be a small fraction of India’s overall capacity. Power sector actually needs more consumers but the concern is whether the grid will be flexible enough to handle EVs.

You’d think that existing exclusively within the human body would give way to a complete knowledge of the organs hidden within. Instead, we’re constantly discovering new parts of the weird and glorious biological machine we each call home. The latest in these discoveries are the “tubarial glands,” a pair of small organs responsible for producing saliva.

We may think we invented mathematics but we actually only discover it. It’s the immaterial underpinning of material nature.

Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them.

“M-PESA”: that is a name in global fintech history that can never be erased. Not that anybody would want to. Forever it will be the perfect example of a viable financial ecosystem based on rules unthinkable before. A living masterpiece that was created by a mosaic of unique circumstances, choices and risks taken at a particular time and place, and that continues to evolve in the changes it brought to the country.

Since I’m neither a local, nor deeply involved with the African markets (yet), I would not dare to simply impose my DIY analytics on my readers. Instead, I invite you to listen to my conversation with M-PESA’s own Kevin Amateshe reflecting on Kenya’s digital financial services space, M-PESA’s role, the past, present and future: https://youtu.be/QlZuKwnsAS4

Continue reading “Kenya Case Study Part I: M-PESA story” »

Chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing plans to start mass production of chips using its 3-nanometer process technology.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics celebrated the fundamental interest of quantum entanglement, and also envisioned the potential applications in “the second quantum revolution”—a new age when we are able to manipulate the weirdness of quantum mechanics, including quantum superposition and entanglement. A large-scale and fully functional quantum network is the holy grail of quantum information sciences. It will open a new frontier of physics, with new possibilities for quantum computation, communication, and metrology.

One of the most significant challenges is to extend the distance of quantum communication to a practically useful scale. Unlike classical signals that can be noiselessly amplified, quantum states in superposition cannot be amplified because they cannot be perfectly cloned. Therefore, a high-performance quantum network requires not only ultra-low-loss quantum channels and quantum memory, but also high-performance quantum light sources. There has been exciting recent progress in satellite-based quantum communications and quantum repeaters, but a lack of suitable single-photon sources has hampered further advances.

What is required of a single-photon source for quantum network applications? First, it should emit one (only one) photon at a time. Second, to attain brightness, the single-photon sources should have high system efficiency and a high repetition rate. Third, for applications such as in quantum teleportation that require interfering with independent photons, the single photons should be indistinguishable. Additional requirements include a scalable platform, tunable and narrowband linewidth (favorable for temporal synchronization), and interconnectivity with matter qubits.