Lifeboat Foundation

MIT engineers have discovered a way to generate electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create an electric current simply by interacting with an organic solvent in which they’re floating. The particles are made from crushed carbon nanotubes (blue) coated with a Teflon-like polymer (green). Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on a figure courtesy of the researchers.

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The high levels of serotonin seen in the blood of some autistic people have confounded scientists for more than half a century. Despite so little progress, some researchers refuse to give up.

Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen’s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she’s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn’t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.

Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals — other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals — point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.

Sarah Schaack, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have “a pretty big wow factor” even among scientists, “because the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.” But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.

David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan.

Nature – Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice

Continue reading “Age Resetting Genes Going to Human Studies in Two Years” »

A strategy for the long fight against COVID-19.

Global herd immunity is now unreachable. How should governments’ strategy in the fight against COVID-19 change in response?

Gosiame Thamara Sithole, 37, was astonished by decuplets after scans only showed eight in the womb.

The Yara Birkeland, the world’s first net-zero, battery-powered autonomous container ship, is undergoing further preparations for autonomous operation and a late 2021 launch.

The Norwegian ship Yara Birkeland, the world’s first net-zero, battery-powered autonomous container ship, is looking at a late 2021 launch.

Summary: The resting brain repeatedly and rapidly replays faster memories of what a person has recently learned and practiced. The more a person replays the memory during rest, the better they become during subsequent sessions where they practice their newly learned skill.

Source: NIH

In a study of healthy volunteers, National Institutes of Health researchers have mapped out the brain activity that flows when we learn a new skill, such as playing a new song on the piano, and discovered why taking short breaks from practice is a key to learning.

An international team of scientists says it has sequenced and assembled the entirety of the human genome, including parts that were missed in the sequencing of the first human genome two decades ago.

The claim, if confirmed, surpasses the achievement laid out by leaders from the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics on the White House lawn in 2000, when they announced the sequencing of the first draft human genome. That historic draft, and subsequent human DNA sequences, have all missed about 8% of the genome.

The sequencing of the new genome fills in these gaps using new technology. It has different limitations, however, including the type of cell line that the researchers used in order to speed up their effort.