Lifeboat Foundation

Great new podcast episode on our strange planet Mercury with planetary geophysicist Catherine Johnson, who eloquently explains what’s known about our tiny, innermost planet’s many remaining mysteries. Please have a listen.

Guest Catherine Johnson, a planetary geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, discusses this bizarre little world; the innermost planet in our solar system. A planet that’s so close to our Sun that its surface temperatures can hit 800 F. But surprisingly, its poles harbor enough water ice to completely bury a major metropolis. Some have even argued that Mercury may have once been habitable. Where it formed still remains a mystery, but it does have a tiny magnetic field, a very oversized iron core, and one of the largest impact basins in the solar system. A European mission is currently en route to orbit the planet in 2025.

Continue reading “Episode 19 --- Cracking The Code On Mercury, Our Solar System’s Innermost Mystery” »

Perhaps in the future, gene editing may allow retinal regeneration in humans to reverse age-related vision deterioration.

Damage to the retina is the leading cause of blindness in humans, affecting millions of people around the world. Unfortunately, the retina is one of the few tissues we humans can’t grow back.

Unlike us, other animals such as zebrafish are able to regenerate this tissue that’s so crucial to our power of sight. We share 70 percent of our genes with these tiny little zebrafish, and scientists have just discovered some of the shared genes include the ones that grant zebrafish the ability to grow back their retinas.

Continue reading “Some Fish Can Regenerate Their Eyes. Turns Out, Mammals Have Those Genes Too” »

Whenever I tell my friends about the potential of Quantum Computing, for example, how a Quantum Computer (QC) can do a large number of calculations in parallel worlds, they look at me like I’m kind of crazy.

“At first, we thought it was absurd. How else could you respond to the idea that black holes generate swirling clouds of planet-sized particles that could be the dark matter thought to hold galaxies together? We tend to think about particles as being tiny but, theoretically, there is no reason they can’t be as big as a galaxy,” said theoretical physicist Asimina Arvanitaki, at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics referring to the heated debate about the standard model for dark matter that proposes that it is ‘cold,’ meaning that the particles move slowly compared to the speed of light which is tied to the mass of dark matter particles. The lower the mass of the particle, the ‘warmer’ it is and the faster it will move.

On January 9, NASA physicists using the Hubble Space Telescope reported that although the type of particle that makes up dark matter is still a mystery, a compelling observational test for the cold dark matter passed “with flying colors,” The NASA team used a new “cosmic magnifying glasses” technique that found that dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known, confirming one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted “cold dark matter” theory.

Physicists at the University of California, Davis, taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe now report that the model of cold (more massive) dark matter holds at very large scales” said Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis, “but doesn’t work so well on the scale of individual galaxies.” That’s led to other models including ‘warm’ dark matter with lighter, faster-moving particles and ‘hot’ dark matter with particles moving close to the speed of light that have been ruled out by observations.

A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego have built a squid robot that can propel itself through the water untethered, just like the real thing.

“Essentially, we recreated all the key features that squids use for high-speed swimming,” Michael T. Tolley, co-author of the paper published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics last month.

Continue reading “This Swimming Squid Robot Looks Absolutely Amazing” »

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Sir Roger Penrose: ‘The Big Bang was not the beginning. There was something before, and that something is what we will have in our future’

Vaccines could take years, and preventative drugs could help bridge the gap.

Though many people are pinning their hopes on a COVID-19 vaccine, another option is available: preventive treatment. At a Senate hearing this week, Anthony Fauci noted that a vaccine — which is probably months or years away — isn’t the only way to protect someone from a life-threatening virus.

These treatments could protect people against infection for a few weeks or months, said Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. While most ongoing research studies are focused on finding treatments for people who are already sick with COVID-19, some researchers are looking to see if they can stop people who are at high risk from getting sick in the first place.

Continue reading “An HIV-fighting strategy might help against COVID-19” »

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When you need to tell the future how cool you were, data longevity is key. A team of researches might have created a data storage medium for the ages with tungsten and silicon nitride.

The discovery is being used to make a drug for potential therapeutic and preventive use against COVID-19.