Lifeboat Foundation

An old photo of a human-sized bat in the Philippines has resurfaced on Twitter, puzzling social media users.

On June 24, a Twitter user with the handle @AlexJoestar622 shared an image of a giant golden-crowned flying fox hanging from a wire attached to the roof of a building.

“Remember when I told y’all about the Philippines having human-sized bats?” the user asked. “Yeah, this was what I was talking about.”

👨‍🚀 🌔 A historic first on the Moon 🛰️ 🪐 Spacecraft arrivals at Jupiter and Saturn 🚀 🔴 Mars launches and landings.

Space exploration doesn’t take a summer break! A look at NASA History milestones from the month of July:

Click on photo to start video.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Elon musk from failures to success!

The Starship, SpaceX’s giant ship destined for the moon and Mars, overshadows its Falcon 9 predecessor in more ways than one.

Kate Rubins, the first Napa native to go to space, is entering the final three months of preparation for her return trip to the International Space Station where she served four years ago.

Starting Oct. 14 and continuing for about six months, her schedule will be replete with scientific work 250 miles above the Earth, dealing with materials ranging from supercold gases to stem cells. And unlike during her first stay in 2016, Rubins expects to get to work quickly, without the awkward introduction to moving about in microgravity.

“As a rookie you’re not so good at navigating and flying through the space station, so you tend to crawl hand over hand on the handrails,” the biochemist-turned-space traveler quipped during a NASA news conference last week in Houston, while recalling her original 115-day stint aboard the orbiting space platform.

A new study has explored whether AI can provide more attractive answers to humanity’s most profound questions than history’s most influential thinkers.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales first fed a series of moral questions to Salesforce’s CTRL system, a text generator trained on millions of documents and websites, including all of Wikipedia. They added its responses to a collection of reflections from the likes of Plato, Jesus Christ, and, err, Elon Musk.

The team then asked more than 1,000 people which musings they liked best — and whether they could identify the source of the quotes.

Every second, a star dies in the universe. But these stellar beings don’t just completely vanish, stars always leave something behind.

Some stars explode in a supernova, turning into a black hole or a neutron star, while the majority of stars become white dwarfs, a core of the star it once used to be. However, a new study reveals that these white dwarfs contribute more to life in the cosmos than previously believed.

New observations of white dwarf stars reveal their stellar contribution to carbon atoms in the cosmos, one of the building blocks of life.

Once an ecosystem is disturbed, restoring it can be difficult. And when the disturbed ecosystem is a patient’s microbiome, restoring the patient to health can be even more difficult. Just one ecosystem element that proliferates or diminishes beyond bounds may throw multiple elements into disarray, creating a dysbiosis that resists simple remedies.

Because a patient’s microbiome consists of interacting elements—including elements that extend beyond the microbiome itself—these elements cannot be seen in isolation. Rather, they are dynamic parts of a systemic whole. Touch any one of them, and the effects of doing so may ripple outward in unpredictable ways—unless the elements and their interactions are thoroughly understood.

…

Continue reading “Translational Microbiomics Offsets Ecological Disruptions” »

As the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic mounts, scientists worldwide continue their push to develop effective treatments and a vaccine for the highly contagious respiratory virus.

University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine scientists recently worked with colleagues at the University of Arizona College of Pharmacy to identify several existing compounds that block replication of the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) within human cells grown in the laboratory. The inhibitors all demonstrated potent chemical and structural interactions with a viral protein critical to the virus’s ability to proliferate.

The research team’s drug discovery study appeared June 15 in Cell Research, a high-impact Nature journal.