Lifeboat Foundation

Is de-extinction realistic?

Scientists in the US and Australia have announced a multi-million dollar project — resurrecting the extinct Tasmanian tiger. The last known marsupial officially called a thylacine, died in the 1930s. According to the team, the extinct thylacine can be recreated using stem cells and gene-editing technology, and the first one could be “reintroduced” to the wild within 10 years.

We would strongly advocate that first and foremost we need to protect our biodiversity from further extinctions, but unfortunately we are not seeing a slowing down in species loss.

Continue reading “‘Jurassic Park’? Scientists want to resurrect Australia’s Tasmanian tiger” »

Its Biosentinel mission will launch aboard Artemis I.

NASA’s sending living cells to deep space for the first time. The BioSentinel mission will be the first long-duration biology experiment in deep space, a NASA post.

BioSentinel will monitor the growth and activity of yeast cells as they get bombarded by high-energy radiation particles in deep space and beam the data back to NASA researchers on Earth to help safeguard astronaut heath.

Continue reading “Artemis I to Launch First-of-a-Kind Deep Space Biology Mission” »

A new approach to an age-old question.

Black holes are among some of the most mysterious objects in the Universe. They are the remnants of massive stars that have reached the end of their life cycles and collapsed into a region of spacetime that is incredibly dense. Their gravitational force is so strong that nothing can escape their surface.

Continue reading “Black Holes Are the Terrifying Behemoths of Space. Here’s How They Tick” »

Speaking at the Longevity Leaders conference earlier this year, King’s College London Professor Georgina Ellison-Hughes shared a fascinating insight into her work to establish the adult heart as a self-renewing organ with regenerative capacity.

Longevity. Technology: The heart is generally considered a “post-mitotic” organ, or one without regenerative capacity. As we age and encounter chronic disease, senescent cells accumulate in the heart, just as they do in other tissues and organs. Ellison-Hughes’ work has shown that cellular senescence may impact the efficacy of regenerative therapies, and that senolytics have the potential to rejuvenate the heart’s capacity to regenerate. We caught up with the professor to learn more.

Cellular senescence is one of the nine hallmarks of aging. It occurs when our cells stop reproducing and enter a zombie state where they refuse to die – hanging around and causing problems throughout our bodies. Ellison-Hughes is professor of regenerative muscle physiology at King’s and in 2019 was co-author of a study in Aging Cell, which found that senescent cells impaired regeneration in the human heart.

Chiral polymer made from completely achiral chemicals using only electrons’ angular momentum.

One way for small businesses to tackle carbon emissions is to go down the route of purchasing carbon offsets.

Guest contributor describes what carbon offsets are all about and how small businesses can contribute to emission reductions.

The judge overseeing the case ordered documents from one employee, Kayvon Beykpour. Musk is now seeking more information on data through an additional motion filed confidentially.

Current severe heatwaves that will likely increase in severity and frequency in the future are driving a rise in the use of air conditioners, threatening the environment with their high energy consumption and refrigerants with high warming potential. A new study finds that switching to propane as a refrigerant could lessen the global temperature increase from space cooling.

We spend enormous amounts of energy on fighting off the heat in the summer, or throughout the whole year at lower latitudes—about one-tenth of the total worldwide electricity supply. If current temperature trends continue, the energy demands of space-coolers will more than triple by 2050. Apart from the rise in energy consumption, space-coolers also threaten the environment in different ways: by using halogenated refrigerants with high global warming potential.

Split-air conditioners (Split ACs) that use an indoor and an outdoor air unit connected by pipes are the most common appliances used for space-cooling. They mostly utilize HCFC-22 and HFC-410 as refrigerants, both of them characterized by a very high global warming potential score, up to 2,256—meaning that they trap up to 2,256 times more heat than carbon dioxide over 100 years. Urged by the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol, many manufacturers are looking for alternative refrigerants with lower global warming potential scores, such as HFC-32. However, with a global warming potential score of 771, HFC-32 still poses a significant climate hazard.

Our podcast on science and technology. This week, we explore whether artificial intelligence could become sentient—and the legal and ethical implications if it did | Podcasts.