Lifeboat Foundation

In a bitter paradox, antibiotics fuelled the growth of the twentieth century’s most profitable pharmaceutical companies, and are one of society’s most desperately needed classes of drug. Yet the market for them is broken. For almost two decades, the large corporations that once dominated antibiotic discovery have been fleeing the business, saying that the prices they can charge for these life-saving medicines are too low to support the cost of developing them. Most of the companies now working on antibiotics are small biotechnology firms, many of them running on credit, and many are failing.

Paratek Pharmaceuticals successfully brought a new antibiotic to the market. So why is the company’s long-term survival in question?

Astrophysical detectives point to a cosmic supernova explosion or explosions to explain ancient extinction events here on Earth.

An asteroid the size of a car has flown past Earth closer than any seen before without hitting the planet — and NASA admits: “We didn’t see it coming.”

Known as asteroid 2020 QG, NASA said the space rock passed 1,830 miles (2,950 km) above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday.

If it had actually been on an impact trajectory, it would likely have become a “fireball” as it broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the US space agency said.

Two mathematicians say they’ve untangled the first part of Paul Erdos’s famously thorny and unproven conjecture. In a new paper they’ve uploaded to arXiv and submitted to journals, mathematicians Thomas Bloom and Olof Sisask say they’ve jumped the first hurdle in the Erdos conjecture. If this is true, the next generation of researchers could start from that point with the first part finished and in hand.

➗ You love numbers. So do we. Let’s nerd out over numbers together.

Circa 2017

Imagine you took all sunlight that hits our planet at any given moment, and focussed it on one (unfortunate) piece of Earth the size of a thumbnail. Now times that blistering intensity by 100, and you’re beginning to understand the insanity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

In a surprise result, scientists have focussed the full intensity of this laser onto a single molecule, and the aftermath has given rise to a phenomenon no one’s ever seen before — a molecular ‘black hole’, which consumes anything in its path.

Continue reading “The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Just Gave Rise to a ‘Molecular Black Hole’” »

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Astronomers have seen what appears to the first light ever detected from a black hole merger.

When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. Because black holes do not give off light, these events are not expected to shine with any light waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Graduate Center, CUNY astrophysicists K. E. Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan have posited ways in which a black hole merger might explode with light. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen evidence of one of these light-producing scenarios. Their findings are available in the current issues of Physical Review Letters.

A team consisting of scientists from The Graduate Center, CUNY; Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF); Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC); and The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) spotted what appears to be a flare of light from a pair of coalescing black holes. The event (called S190521g) was first identified by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019. As the black holes merged, jiggling space and time, they sent out gravitational waves. Shortly thereafter, scientists at ZTF — which is located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego — reviewed their recordings of the same the event and spotted what may be a flare of light coming from the coalescing black holes.

Continue reading “Black hole collision may have exploded with light” »

Circa 2017

Positron emission tomography (PET) image synthesis plays an important role, which can be used to boost the training data for computer aided diagnosis systems. However, existing image synthesis methods have problems in synthesizing the low resolution PET images. To address these limitations, we propose multi-channel generative adversarial networks (M-GAN) based PET image synthesis method. Different to the existing methods which rely on using low-level features, the proposed M-GAN is capable to represent the features in a high-level of semantic based on the adversarial learning concept. In addition, M-GAN enables to take the input from the annotation (label) to synthesize the high uptake regions e.g., tumors and from the computed tomography (CT) images to constrain the appearance consistency and output the synthetic PET images directly.

Circa 2012

Back in 1871, James Clerk Maxwell predicted that light exerts a force on any surface it hits. This radiation pressure was experimentally discovered some 30 years later and has since emerged as a hugely important force that is now exploited in systems such as solar sails and laser cooling.

Today, John Zhang and buddies at the University of Southampton in the UK go one better. These guys predict that a far more powerful optical force can exist between a metal or dielectric plate and a metamaterial, a substance with optical properties that have been engineered to control light in specific ways.

Continue reading “Metamaterials Generate Gecko-Like Adhesive Force” »

Circa 2016

A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.

The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.

Continue reading “Scientists create new super-hard metal” »