Lifeboat Foundation

Creating next-gen technology to supercharge the second space race.

Honda has recently released their plans to build eVTOLs, robots, and even potentially help colonize the moon. All very noble and ambitious plans, but those, Honda says, that are being put in place to help solve issues beyond just transportation.

What is this world with a simple idea and lots of engineering? Father-son duo power regular trucks with military jet engines and almost make them fly.

Brains aren’t the easiest of organs to study, what with their delicate wiring and subtle whispering of neurotransmitter messages. Now, this research could be made a little easier, as we’ve learned we can swap some critical chemical systems with the host animal being none the wiser.

In a proof-of-concept study run by a team of US researchers, the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans was genetically gifted pieces of a nervous system taken from a radically different creature – a curious freshwater organism known as Hydra.

The swap wasn’t unlike teaching a specific brain circuit a foreign language, and finding it performs its job just as well as before.

Genetic information can be messy. Mapping proteins could offer a clearer view of what’s driving cancer.

Scientists have unveiled new maps of the protein networks underlying different types of cancer, offering a potentially clearer way to see what’s driving the disease and to find therapeutic targets.

Sequencing the genetic information of tumors can provide a trove of data about the mutations contained in those cancer cells. Some of those mutations help doctors figure out the best way to treat a patient, but others remain more of a mystery than a clear instruction manual. Many are exceedingly rare, or there are so many mutations it’s not clear what’s fueling the cancer.

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A new resource profiles gene expression and the accessibility of DNA in single cells across the developing human cerebral cortex and may help scientists decipher the effects of noncoding mutations linked to autism.

Researchers at McGill University have developed the strongest and toughest glass ever known. Inspired, in part, by the inner layer of mollusk shells, this glass does not shatter when hit, and acts more like plastic.

The material, once commercially viable, could be used to improve cell phone screens, among other applications in the future.

Interestingly, this may be an example of modern science rediscovering an old technology, now long lost.

A new kind of concrete can self-repair without sacrificing durability! It’s undergoing tests in a structure, to prepare for aggressive environments.

We can consider white holes and black holes to be the two sides of the same coin. A perfect pair of antonyms. White holes first found their place, like many others, in Einstein’s theory of relativity. But it was left just there until theorists began pondering over its existence quite recently.

What is a white hole?

Insight, a white hole looks exactly like a black hole. It has mass, probably a ring of dust and gas around it. But the similarities end there. According to Carlo Ravelli, a theoretical physicist at the Centre de Physique Theorique in France, “It’s only in the moment when things come out that you can say, ‘ah, this is a white hole,”.

There can be other kinds of black holes that trap other physical phenomena, like sound waves, and these kinds of black holes, known as sonic black holes, might be critical to understanding their light-consuming counterparts in the wider universe.

Most important of all, what can sonic black holes tell us about one of modern physics’ most contentious debates, the so-called Information Paradox? A recent study attempted to find out, and its results seem to make the problem more complicated, not less.