Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 4732

Basically the United States has alerts for the west Nile as it seems to be spreading across many states.

As temperatures warm, US health officials are braced for rising rates of West Nile virus, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes that can cause meningitis, paralysis, and death.

Oklahoma reported its first West Nile death of the year on Thursday, in a resident who had been hospitalized with the illness.

In 2021, eight people got sick and one died of West Nile virus in Oklahoma, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The virus often infects people without causing symptoms, but can be deadly if it reaches the brain.

Continue reading “US health officials brace for mosquito-borne virus that can cause paralysis and death as temperatures rise” | >

The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex that the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

The atoms in the experiment belong to a larger group called fermions and were “the coldest fermions in the universe”, says Hazzard. “Thinking about experimenting on this 10 years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” he says.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high-temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.

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A multinational group of scientists has made progress in the use of antiferromagnetic materials in memory storage devices.

Antiferromagnets are materials with an internal magnetic field induced by electron spin but virtually no external magnetic field. Since there is no external (or “long-range”) magnetic field, the data units, or bits, may be packed more densely inside the material, making them potentially useful for data storage.

The ferromagnets commonly utilized in typical magnetic memory devices are the opposite. These devices do have long-range magnetic fields produced by the bits that prevent them from being packed too tightly together since otherwise they would interact.

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A future kitchen appliance could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

That is the long-term vision at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, an engineering group that uses insight from biology to research and develop autonomous systems that “create and are creative.” The engineers have spent years working to digitize and automate the cooking process.

A recent study suggests that future kitchen appliances could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

Continue reading “3D-printed, laser-cooked meat may be the future of cooking” | >

Last week, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made the first ever detection of CO2 on an exoplanet. Following that scientific milestone, it has now captured a direct image of another planet – HIP 65,426 b, which orbits the large A-type star HIP 65426. The system is 355 light years from Earth.

Astronomers first discovered this gas giant in July 2017, using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument belonging to the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

NASA made a follow-up observation to test Webb’s capabilities, using the mid-infrared part of the spectrum to reveal new information that previous telescopes would be unable to detect. The spacecraft’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are both equipped with coronagraphs to block the glare of starlight, which can be 10,000 times brighter than planets. This enables Webb to take direct images of exoplanets.

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As space travel for recreational purposes is becoming a very real possibility, there could come a time when we are travelling to other planets for holidays, or perhaps even to live. Commercial space company Blue Origin has already started sending paying customers on sub-orbital flights. And Elon Musk hopes to start a base on Mars with his firm SpaceX.

This means we need to start thinking about what it will be like to live in space – but also what will happen if someone dies there.

After death here on Earth the human body progresses through a number of stages of decomposition. These were described as early as 1,247 in Song Ci’s The Washing Away of Wrongs, essentially the first forensic science handbook.

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