Lifeboat Foundation

Ancient engineers might have built a canal on the Nile.

No one has solved the mystery of the Giza pyramids for centuries. Although archaeologists and scientists have tried to reveal how they were made over the years, it is difficult to say the “exact method” for sure. However, very recently, an idea has been put forward by researchers about how the pyramids were built.

According to a recent study — published in PNAS in August. 29 —the pyramids of Giza may have been built using a former arm of the Nile River. This river branch would have served as a navigable route for the transportation of goods not previously known.

Continue reading “Nile waterscapes facilitated the construction of the Giza pyramids during the 3rd millennium BCE” »

The world record comes as a result of a new standard-setting collaboration.

Vision Marine Technologies, a manufacturer of electric recreational marine propulsion for OEMs, broke the 100 mph (160 kph) speed barrier on an electric watercraft and set a new world record, the company announced.

To pull off such a feat, a coalition of numerous significant, well-known players from around the world had to unite. With the sole purpose of setting new standards, Vision Marine, in collaboration with Hellkat Powerboats, created the V32, a 32-inch (9.75 meters) catamaran hull made to hold the required battery banks to power a pair of Vision Marine’s signature E-MotionTM electric outboards.

Continue reading “Electric Outboard Engines & Boats” »

Inside a living cell, proteins and other molecules are often tightly packed together. These dense clusters can be difficult to image because the fluorescent labels used to make them visible can’t wedge themselves in between the molecules.

MIT researchers have now developed a novel way to overcome this limitation and make those “invisible” molecules visible. Their technique allows them to “de-crowd” the molecules by expanding a cell or tissue sample before labeling the molecules, which makes the molecules more accessible to fluorescent tags.

This method, which builds on a widely used technique known as expansion microscopy previously developed at MIT, should allow scientists to visualize molecules and cellular structures that have never been seen before.

Space is a constant reminder of how little we truly know about our universe. A new international project is hoping to help make a little more sense of things. Next year, researchers from 13 countries will launch a balloon to, hopefully, find high-energy particles that couldn’t have come from Earth.

That’s some repair job.

14.6 billion miles from one another, NASA engineers have found and fixed a computer glitch that had caused Voyager 1 to transmit garbled telemetry data since May.

Why was NASA’s Artemis launch date rescheduled for 3 Sep 22? Get the real skinny here.

Why was NASA’s Artemis Iaunch date rescheduled for 3 Sep 22? Get the real skinny here.

Continue reading “Artemis I New Launch Date and Starship Launch” »

Israeli startup Future Meat Technologies has opened what it says is the first industrial-scale cultured meat production facility — a move designed to finally get lab-grown meat onto consumers’ plates.

“Our goal is to make cultured meat affordable for everyone,” CSO Yaakov Nahmias said in a press release, “while ensuring we produce delicious food that is both healthy and sustainable, helping to secure the future of coming generations.”

Why it matters: Demand for meat is higher than ever before, but the traditional means of producing it — by raising and slaughtering animals — is bad for the environment and arguably unethical.

The Silurian Hypothesis is not a work of science fiction. It was proposed by two scientists who posed a thought question about how would we know if a previous civilization rose and fell in Earth’s past.

Would we know the signs in geological records dating millions of years if an advanced technical civilization once existed on this planet?

Immortality exists – but to get it, you need to be a jellyfish, not a god or a vampire. Moreover, only one species of cnidarian, Turritopsis dohrnii, is known to have found the secret of eternal life. Geneticists hope comparing T. dornii’s DNA with its close relative, T. rubra, will help us understand the aging process and how to evade it.

Turritopsis are warm water jellyfish half a centimeter (0.2 inches) long. At least three species of hydra have the capacity to age backwards like Benjamin Button, going from adult to juvenile stage, before eventually growing up again. However, two of these can only go from the hydra equivalent of adolescent to child; like the victim in some uncensored fairytale, sexual reproduction locks them into adulthood. T. dohrnii, on the other hand, appears able to go from its free-floating adult stage to bottom-living polyp, known as life cycle reversal (LCR), as many times as it wants.

A paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides a comparison of T. dorhnii and T. rubra in the hope the differences will prove enlightening, throwing in a few more distantly related types of cnidarians as well.