Lifeboat Foundation

A step towards advancing quantum information processing.

In a surprise finding, researchers have found that getting at least one flu shot makes it 40 percent less likely for people over the age of 65 to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, up to four years later.

While it’s still far too early to determine if there are any direct causal links between the common vaccine and neurological health outcomes like Alzheimer’s — in other words, we don’t know if it’s the flu vaccine itself or something else responsible for the results — the research is certainly an eyebrow-raising new development that could, potentially, point in the direction of easily accessible treatments.

In a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, researchers at UTHealth Houston compared the incidence rate of the disease in patients with and without at least one flu vaccination in a nationwide sample of US adults aged 65 and up, which included 935,887 vaccinated and 935,887 non-vaccinated individuals.

Neurograins might be the future of implantable Brain Computer Interfaces due to their advantages in terms of abilities and safety in terms of implantation. Due to being the smallest Microchips ever made, in addition to being very powerful, they can make very high resolution recordings of brain activity and even stimulate areas in the brain for medical treatments for people suffering from brain disorders.

The field of neuroscience is developing at a rapid pace, which constantly improves on our BCI Technology and enabling more and more treatments and applications for Brain Computer Interface. It’s clear that this is very advanced future technology and who knows, maybe these new Neurograin Brain Computer Interfaces may play a part in it. Or maybe Elon Musk’s Neuralink’s approach will win in the end. People willingly microchipping their brains will be more common in the future.
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Continue reading “Why People are Microchipping their Brains — Next-Gen BCI’s: Neurograins” »

The preclinical drug works by inhibiting the kinase Cdk5 which is found in mature neurons. Cdk5 has long been linked to neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders, but prior inhibitors have largely failed to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the brain.

A new preclinical drug reported by James Bibb, Ph.D., and colleagues has the potential to combat depression, brain injury, and cognitive disorders. The drug, which is notable for being brain-permeable, works by inhibiting the kinase enzyme Cdk5.

Cdk5 is an important signaling regulator in brain neurons. Over three decades of research, it has been linked to neuropsychiatric and degenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s.

Amino acids don’t last long near the Martian surface. Future rovers may need to go deeper underground to find them.

Photosynthesis has evolved in plants for millions of years to turn water, carbon dioxide, and the energy from sunlight into plant biomass and the foods we eat. This process, however, is very inefficient, with only about 1% of the energy found in sunlight ending up in the plant. Scientists at UC Riverside and the University of Delaware have found a way to bypass the need for biological photosynthesis altogether and create food independent of sunlight by using artificial photosynthesis.

The research, published in Nature Food, uses a two-step electrocatalytic process to convert carbon dioxide, electricity, and water into acetate, the form of the main component of vinegar. Food-producing organisms then consume acetate in the dark to grow. Combined with solar panels to generate the electricity to power the electrocatalysis, this hybrid organic-inorganic system could increase the conversion efficiency of sunlight into food, up to 18 times more efficient for some foods.

“With our approach we sought to identify a new way of producing food that could break through the limits normally imposed by biological photosynthesis,” said corresponding author Robert Jinkerson, a UC Riverside assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering.

Ever considered the notion that everything around you was cooked up by aliens in a lab? Theoretical physicist and former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, has proposed a wild – if unsettling – theory that our universe was intentionally created by a more advanced class of lifeform.

In an op-ed for Scientific American, “Was Our Universe Created In A Laboratory?”, Loeb suggested that aliens could have created a ‘baby universe’ using ‘quantum tunneling’, which would explain our universe’s ‘flat geometry’ with zero net energy. If this discovery were proven true, then the universe humans live in would be shown to be “like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations,” Loeb wrote.

Loeb put forward the idea of a scale of developed civilisations (A, B, etc.) and, due to that fact that on Earth we currently don’t have the ability to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to our existence, “we are a low-level technological civilisation, graded class C on the cosmic scale” (essentially: dumb). We would be higher up, he added, if we possessed the ability to recreate the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. But, due to our tendency to “carelessly destroy the natural habitat” on Earth through climate change, we should really be downgraded to class D.

The ever-increasing production and use of plastics over the last half century has created a huge environmental problem for the world. Currently, most of the 4.9 billion tonnes of plastics ever produced will end up in landfills or the natural environment, and this number is expected to increase to around 12 billion tonnes by 2050.

In collaboration with colleagues at universities and institutions in the UK, China and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, researchers in the Edwards/ Xiao group at Oxford’s Department of Chemistry have developed a method of converting plastic waste into hydrogen gas which can be used as a clean fuel, and high-value solid carbon. This was achieved with a new type of catalysis developed by the group which uses microwaves to activate catalyst particles to effectively ‘strip’ hydrogen from polymers.

The findings, published in Nature Catalysis, detail how the researchers mixed mechanically-pulverised plastic particles with a microwave-susceptor catalyst of iron oxide and aluminium oxide. The mixture was subjected to microwave treatment and yielded a large volume of hydrogen gas and a residue of carbonaceous materials, the bulk of which were identified as carbon nanotubes.

Circa 2017

Zipline, a U.S. startup, is helping deliver life-saving blood supplies to rural areas of Rwanda by drones in record time.