Lifeboat Foundation

At the time the proposed planet signal is strongest, stellar activity on the surface of the star was Also strong, says Lubin. Thus, he notes, the signal associated with the planet can be explained by activity emanating from stellar activity instead of from the telltale periodic tug on Barnard’s Star from a putative super-earth.

As I noted here previously, Barnard’s Star, which lies only 6 light years away in Ophiuchus, has long fascinated astronomers both due to its proximity to Earth and the fact that it has the largest apparent motion across our line of sight as any known stellar object. In the 105 years since its discovery by astronomer E.E. Barnard, it is the nearest star to our own Sun in the Northern Celestial Hemisphere, the authors note.

One of the more infamous claims of planets around barnard’s star came in in 1963, when Swarthmore College astronomer Peter van de Kamp announced that he had detected a planet using Swarthmore’s 24-inch refractor at Sproul Observatory. Van de Kamp later updated his findings three more times, proposing a second planet in the system with periods of 12 and 20 years, respectively, the authors note.

Giving COVID survivors just one dose of the vaccine could help end the pandemic faster In South Korea, an analysis that included more than 500000 people age 60 and older found that the Pfizer vaccine was 89% effective in preventing infection just two weeks after the first shot. AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has not been authorized for emergency use in the U.S., was found to be 86% effective in that same time period. Again, that’s after a single dose, and it’s regardless of prior COVID history.

Commentary: Getting a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine might not be necessary for COVID survivors.

On 27 June 1918, two young German soldiers—one age 18, the other 17—died in Berlin from a new influenza strain that had emerged earlier that year. Their lungs ended up in the collection of the Berlin Museum of Medical History, where they rested, fixed in formalin, for 100 years. Now, researchers have managed to sequence large parts of the virus that infected the two men, giving a glimpse into the early days of the most devastating pandemic of the 20th century. The partial genomes hold some tantalizing clues that the infamous flu strain may have adapted to humans between the pandemic’s first and second waves.

The researchers also managed to sequence an entire genome of the pathogen from a young woman who died in Munich at an unknown time in 1918. It is only the third full genome of the virus that caused that pandemic and the first from outside North America, the authors write in a preprint posted on bioRxiv.

“It’s absolutely fantastic work,” says Hendrik Poinar, who runs an ancient DNA lab at McMaster University. “The researchers have made reviving RNA viruses from archival material an achievable goal. Not long ago this was, like much ancient DNA work, a fantasy.”

Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, is an innovative conservation biologist, who is Founder and President of the non-profit Amazon Biodiversity Center, the renowned Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, and the person who coined the term “biological diversity”.

Dr. Lovejoy currently serves as Professor in the department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, and as a senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation based in Washington, DC.

Continue reading “Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, Founder / President, Amazon Biodiversity Ctr — Snr. Fellow, United Nations Fnd” »

Google detailed TPUv4 at Google I/O 2021. They’re accelerator chips that deliver high performance on AI workloads.

Companies caught in the middle of the global semiconductor shortage, which is roiling the car business, are starting to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have tapped into a poltergeist-like property of electrons to design devices that can capture excess heat from their environment — and turn it into usable electricity.

The researchers have described their new “optical rectennas” in a paper published today (May 18, 2021) in the journal Nature Communications. These devices, which are too small to see with the naked eye, are roughly 100 times more efficient than similar tools used for energy harvesting. And they achieve that feat through a mysterious process called “resonant tunneling” — in which electrons pass through solid matter without spending any energy.

“They go in like ghosts,” said lead author Amina Belkadi, who recently earned her PhD from the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering (ECEE).

Tune in to find out about how we’re furthering our mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

0:00 Opening Film.
1:26 Introduction, Sundar Pichai.
7:07 Workspace.
34:54 Safer With Google.
43:00 Helpful Information.
1:13:30 Design + Android.
1:41:29 Health.
1:50:43 Sustainability.

Continue reading “Google Keynote (Google I/O ‘21)” »

Rapamycin has been proven to extend the lifespan of mice, warms and yeast. Lifespan.io is starting a large clinical trial named Participatory Evaluation (of) Aging (with) Rapamycin (for) Longevity Study, or PEARL, to see if the antiaging effects of Rapamycin apply to humans. This will be the first study to see if Rapamycin works as well in humans as it does in mice.

The PEARL trial will follow up to 200 participants over 12 months testing four different Rapamycin dosing regimens. It will be double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled and registered with clinicaltrials.gov. The principal investigator is Dr. James P Watson at UCLA, who was also a PI for the famous TRIIM trial.

Continue reading “Lifespan.io Starting Rapamycin Antiaging Human Trials” »