Lifeboat Foundation

So, stars are a lot more mobile than I expected. 😃 Hopefully, it doesn’t cause too much damage next time it happens, if humans are still here by then.

Every 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system. Most brush by without incident. But, every once in a while, one comes so close that it gains a prominent place in Earth’s night sky, as well as knocks distant comets loose from their orbits.

The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. This small binary star system was discovered in 2013. Its orbital path indicated that, about 70,000 years ago, it passed through the Oort Cloud, the extended sphere of icy bodies that surrounds the fringes of our solar system. Some astronomers even think Scholz’s Star could have sent some of these objects tumbling into the inner solar system when it passed.

Continue reading “Wandering stars pass through our solar system surprisingly often” »

The saying “You are what you eat” may soon become a lot more literal.

A “DIY meal kit” for growing steaks made from human cells was recently nominated for “design of the year” by the London-based Design Museum.

Named the Ouroboros Steak after the circular symbol of a snake eating itself tail-first, the hypothetical kit would come with everything one needs to use their own cells to grow miniature human meat steaks.

Important that people read this given how much this spread.

If you have been following the mainstream media recently, you have probably seen a story about hyperbaric oxygen treatment and claims that it can reverse aging. Unfortunately, the media hype surrounding the results is nothing like the reality of the actual research paper, and this is another example of how shoddy journalism harms our field.

Welcome to the media circus

Continue reading “Media Circus Surrounds Hyperbaric Oxygen Study” »

Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have discovered a new method to treat human herpes viruses. The new broad-spectrum method targets physical properties in the genome of the virus rather than viral proteins, which have previously been targeted. The treatment consists of new molecules that penetrate the protein shell of the virus and prevent genes from leaving the virus to infect the cell. It does not lead to resistance and acts independently of mutations in the genome of the virus. The results are published in the journal PLOS Pathogens.

Herpes virus infections are lifelong, with latency periods between recurring reactivations, making treatment difficult. The major challenge lies in the fact that all existing antiviral drugs to treat herpes viruses lead to rapid development of resistance in patients with compromised immune systems where the need for herpes treatment is the greatest (e.g. newborn children, patients with HIV, cancer or who have undergone organ transplantation). Both the molecular and physical properties of a virus determine the course of infection. However, the physical properties have so far received little attention, according to researcher Alex Evilevitch.

“We have a new and unique approach to studying viruses based on their specific physical properties. Our discovery marks a breakthrough in the development of antiviral drugs as it does not target specific viral proteins that can rapidly mutate, causing the development of drug resistance — something that remains unresolved by current antiviral drugs against herpes and other viruses. We hope that our research will contribute to the fight against viral infections that have so far been incurable,” says Alex Evilevitch, Associate Professor and senior lecturer at Lund University who, together with his research team, Virus Biophysics, has published the new findings.

In the years since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system—more than 4,000 have been observed. Usually, their presence is given away by the slight effects they have on their parent stars, which vastly outshine them. For a decade and half, scientists have been trying to image exoplanets directly, but the Earth’s atmosphere presents a major impediment when they attempt to leverage large ground-based telescopes.

Now, a team of U.S. and Japanese scientists and engineers that includes researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new exoplanet-hunting camera. Deployed at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawai’I, the device is the world’s largest superconducting camera by pixel count and will pave the way for direct imaging of extra-solar planets in the near future. An instrument paper appearing in Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific announced the new device to the astronomical community.

Constructed by researchers in the lab of Professor Ben Mazin, the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC) uses Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) to enable scientists to directly image exoplanets and disks around bright stars. The detector runs at a brisk 90 millikelvin—just a touch over absolute zero—and is the first permanently deployed superconducting camera that operates in the optical and near infrared spectrum.

O,.o this reveals the hertz of the spacetime continuum: 3.

In the biggest events in the universe, massive black holes collide with a chirp and a ring. Physicists are finding ways to listen in.

Finally, the way the story was originally meant to be told.

It might be possible, physicists say, but not anytime soon. And there’s no guarantee that we humans will understand the result.

A hacker managed to develop a new key cloning relay attack for Tesla vehicles and demonstrated it on a Tesla Model X.

Tesla was informed of the new attack and it is reportedly pushing a new patch for it.

Thefts of Tesla vehicles are quite rare in North America, but in Europe, they have some more sophisticated thieves that managed a string of Tesla vehicle thefts through relay attacks, and most vehicles haven’t been recovered.