Lifeboat Foundation

April 2020…

Daszak says the China bat sampling project has already racked up quite a number of successes. The team and its collaborators at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have collected about 15000 samples from bats. From these they have already identified about 400 wholly new coronaviruses. About 50 of those fall into a category that caused the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and, now, the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers were also able to demonstrate that at least some of the new bat coronaviruses they have found are capable of infecting a human cell in a petri dish. Then the team sampled the blood of people in China who live near various bat caves. They found evidence that for some time now, these bat coronaviruses have been spilling over into the human population.

Continue reading “Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research Project On Bats And Coronaviruses” »

Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who’s Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, is now predicting a 50% chance that people will begin retaining their youthful state via advanced science and technologies by the year 2036.

This is roughly around the same timeline that The Last Generation to Die is based on. Nailed it (hopefully)!

who’s Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation, is now predicting a 50% chance that people will begin retaining their youthful state via advanced science and technologies by the year 2036.

This is roughly around the same timeline that The Last Generation to Die is based on. Nailed it (hopefully)!

A UCLA-led research team has identified a chemical cocktail that enables the production of large numbers of muscle stem cells, which can self-renew and give rise to all types of skeletal muscle cells.

Progress in the field of integrated circuits is measured by matching, exceeding, or falling behind the rate set forth by Gordon Moore, former CEO and co-founder of Intel, who said the number of electronic components, or transistors, per integrated circuit would double every year. That was more than 50 years ago, and surprisingly his prediction, now called Moore’s Law, came true.

In recent years, it was thought that the pace had slowed; one of the biggest challenges of putting more circuits and power on a smaller chip is managing heat.

A multidisciplinary group that includes Patrick E. Hopkins, a professor in the University of Virginia’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Will Dichtel, a professor in Northwestern University’s Department of Chemistry, is inventing a new class of material with the potential to keep chips cool as they keep shrinking in size—and to help Moore’s Law remain true. Their work was recently published in Nature Materials.

The gas-giant orbiter is illuminating the provenance of Jovian polar light shows.

New results from the Ultraviolet Spectrograph instrument on NASA ’s Juno mission reveal for the first time the birth of auroral dawn storms – the early morning brightening unique to Jupiter ’s spectacular aurorae. These immense, transient displays of light occur at both Jovian poles and had previously been observed only by ground-based and Earth-orbiting observatories, notably NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Results of this study were published March 16 in the journal AGU Advances.

First discovered by Hubble’s Faint Object Camera in 1994, dawn storms consist of short-lived but intense brightening and broadening of Jupiter’s main auroral oval – an oblong curtain of light that surrounds both poles – near where the atmosphere emerges from darkness in the early morning region. Before Juno, observations of Jovian ultraviolet aurora had offered only side views, hiding everything happening on the nightside of the planet.

Radio observations of a cold, dense cloud of molecular gas reveal more than a dozen unexpected molecules.

Scientists have discovered a vast, previously unknown reservoir of new aromatic material in a cold, dark molecular cloud by detecting individual polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules in the interstellar medium for the first time, and in doing so are beginning to answer a three-decades-old scientific mystery: how and where are these molecules formed in space?

“We had always thought polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were primarily formed in the atmospheres of dying stars,” said Brett McGuire, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Project Principal Investigator for GOTHAM, or Green Bank Telescope (GBT) Observations of TMC-1: Hunting Aromatic Molecules. “In this study, we found them in cold, dark clouds where stars haven’t even started forming yet.”

High-precision delivery of microrobots at the whole-body scale is of considerable importance for efforts toward targeted therapeutic intervention. However, vision-based control of microrobots, to deep and narrow spaces inside the body, remains a challenge. Here, we report a soft and resilient magnetic cell microrobot with high biocompatibility that can interface with the human body and adapt to the complex surroundings while navigating inside the body. We achieve time-efficient delivery of soft microrobots using an integrated platform called endoscopy-assisted magnetic actuation with dual imaging system (EMADIS).

A massive rocket booster for a massive Starship.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk showed off the company’s first Starship Super Heavy booster in a Twitter post on Thursday (March 18).