Lifeboat Foundation

Like many who grew up in East Germany, Dr. Gert Lube always yearned to travel and explore different places. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he was a first-year geology student at the University of Greifswald, he heard about a field trip to Iceland and seized the opportunity.

Notwithstanding that the trip was only open to second- and third-year students, Dr. Lube managed to talk his way into tagging along. It was a journey that would change the course of his life forever and spark his interest in volcanology.

I was brought up in a country with closed borders and so I grabbed every opportunity that came my way to go abroad and see landscapes that I hadn’t seen before. I saw my first volcano on this field trip, and I was quite astounded by how different a volcanic landscape was to anything I had experienced up until then.

Lil bits of info on DNA methylation, clocks.

Breakthrough advances in medicine and better nutrition have dramatically improved the longevity of the average human over the past two centuries. But that’s not to say that some couldn’t go on to live a long life even before the advent of modern medicine. As long as they were spared by disease, wars, and other risks that can bring an untimely death, humans could live to see their 70s, 80s, and even reach 100 years old as far back as ancient Rome.

The longevity of humans is somewhat exceptional among primates. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, rarely make it past age 50, despite them sharing over 99% of our DNA. In a new study, researchers think they’ve found our secret: chemical changes along our genome that occurred around 7–8 million years ago when our ancestors branched away from the lineage of chimps.

Continue reading “Humans live much longer than chimps due to a slower epigenetic ‘clock’” »

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In 16 subsequent trials, Ebisu accurately copied her owner more than 81% of the time, the team reports this month in (see video, above). The fact that the cat used her paw and face to touch the box when her owner used her hand and face, respectively, indicates she was able to “map” her owner’s body parts onto her own anatomy, the team says.

Fugazza says only dolphins, parrots, apes, and killer whales have so far been shown to imitate people. Cats having the same ability, she says, suggests it may be widespread in the animal kingdom, evolving early in animal evolution. And even though the study was conducted on a single cat, Fugazza thinks it’s likely that most cats can imitate people. “I don’t think Ebisu was a genius.”

Continue reading “Kitty see, kitty do: cat imitates human, in first scientific demonstration of behavior” »

Robot Babe.

O,.o.

New measurements of a weird but simple atom, one without a nucleus, suggest it may have unexpected properties. Scientists find this troubling.

The upgraded toilet could be used on moon flights one day.

The bathroom on the International Space System is getting a major upgrade with a new, high-tech, compact space toilet to be delivered next week.

Researchers demonstrate efficient generation of hydrogen using sunlight.

Gravitational wave detectors have opened a new window to the universe by measuring the ripples in spacetime produced by colliding black holes and neutron stars, but they are ultimately limited by quantum fluctuations induced by light reflecting off of mirrors. LSU Ph.D. physics alumnus Jonathan Cripe and his team of LSU researchers have conducted a new experiment with scientists from Caltech and Thorlabs to explore a way to cancel this quantum backaction and improve detector sensitivity.

In a new paper in Physical Review X, the investigators present a method for removing quantum backaction in a simplified system using a mirror the size of a human hair and show the motion of the mirror is reduced in agreement with theoretical predictions. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Despite using 40-kilogram mirrors for detecting passing gravitational waves, quantum fluctuations of light disturb the position of the mirrors when the light is reflected. As gravitational wave detectors continue to grow more sensitive with incremental upgrades, this quantum backaction will become a fundamental limit to the detectors’ sensitivity, hampering their ability to extract astrophysical information from gravitational waves.