Lifeboat Foundation

These contact lenses can help correct color blindness.

Don’t lift a finger — using only your mind!

Don’t lift a finger — this headset lets you control your TV using only your mind!

The detectors have sensed dozens of such cataclysms over the past 5 years, but the one on 21 May 2019 was different. Not only was it the most powerful and distant merger ever seen, but the resulting black hole also belongs to a class of long-sought middleweight black holes, members of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration report today in two new studies. Puzzlingly, however, the two black holes that merged are heavier than expected: Their masses fall in a gap in which theorists … See More.

These fog catching nets could be the answer to the world’s water crisis.

Another bit of science fiction is coming to life as scientists develop a highly elastic and adhesive surgical glue similar to the one Ryan Gosling used to seal his wound in Blade Runner 2049.

Surgeons use sutures, staples, and wires (sometimes in combination with adhesive substances) to facilitate healing of external and internal wounds. These methods, however, are not optimal, especially for reconnecting contracting tissues like those of lungs, arteries and the heart.

Continue reading “Glue Made of Human Protein Heals Wounds Faster and Better” »

From the understated opulence of a Bentley to the stalwart family minivan to the utilitarian pickup, Americans know that the car you drive is an outward statement of personality. You are what you drive, as the saying goes, and researchers at Stanford have just taken that maxim to a new level.

Using computer algorithms that can see and learn, they have analyzed millions of publicly available images on Google Street View. The researchers say they can use that knowledge to determine the political leanings of a given neighborhood just by looking at the cars on the streets.

“Using easily obtainable visual data, we can learn so much about our communities, on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys. More importantly, this research opens up more possibilities of virtually continuous study of our society using sometimes cheaply available visual data,” said Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab, where the work was done.

Read more

The Buck Institute for Research on Aging scientists behind the research found that female mice that were fed enough AKG to maintain a younger mouse’s blood levels of the compound lived eight to 20 percent longer than the control group, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Cell Metabolism. On top of that, male and female mice who ate AKG had better fur color, stronger grips, and improved gait compared to others.

There’s a long and bumpy road between a successful mouse experiment and any sort of clinical applications for humans, but scientists are encouraged because AKG is already considered safe for humans to take.

“The big thing about this is that its safety profile is so good,” Holly Brown-Borg, a University of North Carolina aging researcher who didn’t work on the study told Science Magazine. “It has potential and should be explored further, for sure.”