Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3

Link :

Clinical trials are underway for a drug that could potentially prevent Alzheimer’s long before it kicks in. Researchers from Washington University School of Medicine are studying the effects of an experimental antibody called remternetug.

The drug was developed by pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. It is designed for genetically predisposed people to develop Alzheimer’s and its study focuses on young people aged 18 and up.

Remternetug targets amyloid beta, a protein that forms plaque in the brain. The presence of plaque is one of the key hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Other recently approved drugs, like donanemab, also target amyloid plaque, since that seems to be what you attack if you want to chip away at Alzheimer’s.

Continue reading “This Drug Could Potentially Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease” | >

A 2020 assessment of IKN by the National Planning and Development Agency highlighted the risks, citing data including the abundance of disease-carrying mosquitoes. At least two construction workers caught malaria in 2022 while at the site, according to the Ministry of Health. Last year, 54 cases were reported there, but the ministry claimed the patients were infected elsewhere. Although the construction authority has taken some control measures, such as handing out mosquito nets to workers, it’s not well-equipped for the job, says Mirza Buana, a legal scholar at Lambung Mangkurat University in South Kalimantan: “It has all the authorities but no capabilities.” The agency has shifted most of the tasks—such as vector control and screening workers entering or leaving IKN—to district health officials, who have struggled to keep up.

Surendra is particularly worried about the potential spread of P. knowlesi, a parasite first discovered in the 1930s. It emerged as a public health threat in the early 2000s, in areas in the Malaysian part of Borneo where forests were cleared for oil palm plantations. It has since been identified in many Southeast Asian countries.

P. knowlesi primarily infects long-tailed macaques, highly adaptable monkeys that thrive at the forest edge, and is spread by forest-dwelling Anopheles mosquitoes that occasionally bite humans as well. People working in or near the forest, including hunters and loggers, are at the highest risk. Because it has an animal reservoir, the disease is impossible to eliminate completely. Mosquitoes don’t transmit P. knowlesi between people—or very poorly—but some scientists worry that could change.

Read more | >

Synthetic biologists from Yale were able to re-write the genetic code of an organism—a novel genomically recoded organism (GRO) with one stop codon—using a cellular platform that they developed enabling the production of new classes of synthetic proteins. These synthetic proteins, researchers say, offer the promise of innumerable medical and industrial applications that can benefit society and human health.

The creation of the landmark GRO, known as “Ochre”—which fully compresses redundant, or “degenerate” codons, into a single codon—is described in a new study published in the journal Nature. A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides in DNA or RNA that codes for a specific amino acid, which serves as the biochemical building blocks for proteins.

“This research allows us to ask fundamental questions about the malleability of genetic codes,” said Farren Isaacs, professor of molecular, cellular and at Yale School of Medicine and of biomedical engineering at Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who is co-senior author of the paper. “It also demonstrates the ability to engineer the genetic code to endow multi-functionality into proteins and usher in a new era of programmable biotherapeutics and biomaterials.”

Read more | >

Researchers have designed a single-photon time-of-flight LiDAR system that can acquire a high-resolution 3D image of an object or scene up to 1 kilometer away. The new system could help enhance security, monitoring, and remote sensing by enabling detailed imaging even in challenging environmental conditions or when objects are obscured by foliage or camouflage netting.

“Our system uses a single-photon detector approximately twice as efficient as detectors deployed in similar LiDAR systems reported by other research groups and has a system timing resolution at least 10 times better,” said research team member Aongus McCarthy, from Heriot-Watt University in the UK.

“These improvements allow the to collect more scattered photons from the target and achieve a much higher spatial resolution.”

Read more | >

We all know that time seems to pass at different speeds in different situations. For example, time appears to go slowly when we travel to unfamiliar places. A week in a foreign country seems much longer than week at home.

Time also seems to pass slowly when we are bored, or in pain. It seems to speed up when we’re in a state of absorption, such as when we play music or chess, or paint or dance. More generally, most people report time seems to speed up as they get older.

However, these variations in time perception are quite mild. Our experience of time can change in a much more radical way. In my new book, I describe what I call “time expansion experiences” – in which seconds can stretch out into minutes.

Read more | >

For the first time, astronomers have succeeded in observing the magnetic field around a young star where planets are thought to be forming. The team was able to use dust to measure the three-dimensional structure “fingerprint” of the magnetic field. This will help improve our understanding of planet formation.

The study is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Planets form in turbulent disks of gas and called around . It is thought that the first step in planet formation is dust grains colliding and sticking together.

Read more | >

Aurora, the exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, is now available to researchers worldwide, as announced by the system’s operators from the U.S. Department of Energy on January 28, 2025. One of the goals for Aurora is to train large language models for science.

According to official reports, among the world’s fastest supercomputers, there are currently only three systems that reach at least one exaflop. An exaflop is a quintillion (10¹⁸) calculations per second—that’s like a regular calculator computing continuously for 31 billion years, but completing everything in just a single second. Or, to put it briefly: exaflop supercomputers are incredibly fast.

The fastest among the swift three is El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with 1.742 exaflops per second under the HPL benchmark (High-Performance Linpack, a standardized test for measuring the computing power of supercomputers). It is followed by Frontier with 1.353 exaflops/s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The trio is completed by Aurora with 1.012 exaflops/s. Incidentally, all three laboratories belong to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Read more | >

Veteran comet hunters have called G3 (ATLAS) the “Great Comet of 2025” due to its daytime visibility and spectacular nighttime sightings. In these gorgeous photos from the Paranal Observatory, it’s not hard to see why.

Photographer Yuri Beletsky caught comet G3 (ATLAS) looking almost like a watercolor painting, ESO wrote in a statement accompanying Beletsky’s photo. The scene was captured on Jan. 19 beside one of the auxiliary telescopes that contribute to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer, a system of four telescopes working in unison.

Read more | >

Scientists have developed a new type of compact camera engineered for computer vision. Developed by scientists from the University of Washington and Princeton University, the prototype uses optics for computing and reduces power consumption. It also enables the camera to identify objects at the speed of light.

Their device also represents a new approach to the field of computer vision, a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize objects in images and video.

Read more | >