Lifeboat Foundation

Sleep, fasting, exercise, green porridge, black coffee, a healthy social life …

There is an abundance of advice out there on how to live a good, long life. Researchers are working hard to determine why some people live longer than others, and how we get the most out of our increasingly long lives.

One startup is planning to place a nuclear reactor one mile below the Earth’s surface to generate cleaner energy.

A newly developed transistor device has shown exceptional levels of resilience in tests, performing so well, in fact, that it promises to transform the electronics and gadgets we make use of each day.

These tiny toggles are essential in just about every modern day electronic device, involved in storing data and processing information in a binary ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, switching back and forth multiple times a second.

Thanks to its remarkable combination of speed, size, and resilience to wear, this latest design potentially represents a huge upgrade for consumer devices like phones and laptops, as well as the data centers that store all of our information in the cloud.

With mechanical recycling, “if you mix the sandwich bag and the milk jug together and then try to remake an object from that, you can’t make a very good milk jug and you can’t make a very good sandwich bag,” he said. “We’re trying to bring the plastics back to the chemicals from which they’re made in the first place,” Hartwig said.

The researchers use a catalyst, a component of a chemical reaction that makes it go faster, to vaporize both polyethylene and polypropylene plastics — two of the largest volumes of plastics in existence — transforming the solid waste into gases.

The polymers are reduced to their chemical precursors, which can then be reconstructed. In a press release, the university said the process brings “a circular economy for plastics one step closer to reality.”

By the ‘strength’ of a material, we usually mean the degree to which it can withstand deformation by an external force. So, the strongest materials are generally those with high densities because the closer the constituent atoms are, the greater the resistance they have to further compression.

A geology professor from the University of South Florida discovered a 5600-year-old stone bridge in an ancient cave that proves humans were present on the island of Mallorca much earlier than previously believed.

This discovery will change everything we thought and knew about early human history in the Western Mediterranean.

The question confounded archaeologists for decades. Logically, being so close to the mainland, the first signs of human settlement offshore should be on Mallorca. Instead, smaller islands farther out to sea suggest that humans skipped this island.

This gene therapy treats LCA1, causing early childhood vision loss, affecting under 100,000 people:

“One patient reported for the first time being able to navigate at midnight outdoors only with the light of a bonfire,” said Cideciyan, who is also co-director of the Center for Hereditary Retinal Degenerations.

Continue reading “Gene therapy restores sight with up to 10,000-fold vision improvement” »

Quantum Teleportation Over 44 Kilometers Achieved, Paving the Way for a Quantum Internet Revolution

A team from Fermilab and the University of Calgary has achieved long-distance quantum teleportation over 44 kilometers, setting a new record. This breakthrough, detailed in Physical Review, advances the goal of creating a quantum internet—where qubits can be shared instantly through entanglement. This new capability could revolutionize data storage, precision sensing, and computing. The research demonstrates the potential for scaling up quantum systems and contributes to developing a blueprint for a national quantum internet. The previous record was only six kilometers, highlighting the significant progress made.

The material displays characteristics across a wide temperature range aiding versatile applications:

There is always a trade-off when balancing strength and flexibility. One is achieved at the cost of the other. While a flexible, shape-shifting aircraft can deliver benefits for higher energy efficiency and faster transportation, these cannot be achieved by risking the safety of the passengers using a material that lacks proper strength.

Continue reading “New titanium-nickel alloy could enable shape-shifting aircraft” »