Lifeboat Foundation

The legislation aims to tackle drone-related incidents such as the one which caused chaos at Gatwick Airport last year.

Earth’s magnetic North Pole has drifted so fast that authorities have had to officially redefine the location of the magnetic North Pole. The extreme wandering of the North Pole caused increasing concerns over navigation, especially in high latitudes.

Earth’s magnetic field is known to have wandered and flipped in the geologic past. Earth’s magnetic field is a result of spinning molten iron and nickel 1,800 miles below the surface. As the constant flow of molten metals in the outer core changes over time, it alters the external magnetic field.

What we’ve seen in the past hundred years is that the location of the magnetic North Pole has moved northward. That migration of the magnetic North Pole was switched into overdrive in the past few years, causing the pole to rapidly move. The increased speed with which the magnetic North Pole has moved prompted authorities to officially update its location. The official location of the magnetic poles is specified by the World Magnetic Model, which acts as the basis for navigation, communication, GPS, etc. around the globe.

This episode will take you through Dr. Aubrey de Grey’s Seven Pillars of aging, the research that he’s currently doing, his opinion on biological age, AGEs and the different sources, and the impact of growth hormone on biological age.

Who is Dr. Aubrey de Grey?

Continue reading “How to Live Forever with Dr. Aubrey de Grey” »

New research makes a molecular connection between the brain and aging — and shows that overactive neurons can shorten life span.

A team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in China has found that the makeup of the gut microbiome can be a determiner for the efficacy of exercise with prediabetics. In their paper published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the group describes their study of prediabetic volunteers and exercise and what they found.

In the medical community, type 2 diabetes is considered to be preventable in most people—all it takes is a change in diet and an increase in exercise. But things may not be as simple as that as the researchers with this new effort discovered—they found that exercise does not always lead to reductions in glucose metabolism.

The study by the team involved asking 29 male prediabetic volunteers to undergo glucose metabolism and gut microbe testing. Then the group was divided into two—20 volunteers were asked to undergo an exercise regimen for three months while the other 19 were asked to maintain their normal eating and exercise habits. At the end of the three-month period, all of the volunteers once again underwent glucose and gut microbe metabolic testing.

Forget Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Pilot Waves and all the others. What you’re left with is reality.

This is one of the most challenging book reviews I have ever written, not because I did not enjoy ‘The Posthuman Child’, quite the contrary: this is one of the most interesting and stimulating books I have read in a long time, thus I am in the position of trying to ensure that I do this book the justice it deserves in this review. For me, Murris is utterly captivating in her writing as she guides the reader through a ‘labyrinth’ (p.23) of challenging philosophical ideas stemming from posthumanism. Ideas which encourage deep and existential questions, particularly in relation to dominant Western figurations of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. Despite the deep intensity of the philosophical and theoretical content, Murris manages to take the reader through this process of questioning, unpicking and ‘diffracting’ (p.14) in a highly supportive manner.

As I became increasingly engrossed in reading, I found myself trying to fathom how Murris managed to achieve this level of challenge and stimulation in such a supportive way, when it suddenly became clear to me: Murris achieved this seemingly impossible balancing act by remaining entirely committed to the very philosophical ideas she has written about. From a Posthuman perspective, traditional binaries and dualisms do not exist: binaries, such as those that have been constructed to separate: ontology and epistemology; body and mind; theory and practice. It is her embodiment of this completely entangled and relational ‘ontoepitemological’ (p.51) view of the world that provides the level of support I experienced while reading: challenging philosophical ideas and practical examples and insights from her own lived experiences as a teacher, teacher educator and mother are seamlessly woven together.

The first ever integrated nanoscale device which can be programmed with either photons or electrons has been developed by scientists in Harish Bhaskaran’s Advanced Nanoscale Engineering research group at the University of Oxford.

In collaboration with researchers at the universities of Münster and Exeter, scientists have created a first-of-a-kind electro–optical device which bridges the fields of optical and electronic computing. This provides an elegant solution to achieving faster and more energy efficient memories and processors.

Computing at the speed of light has been an enticing but elusive prospect, but with this development it’s now in tangible proximity. Using light to encode as well as transfer information enables these processes to occur at the ultimate speed limit—that of light. While as of recently, using light for certain processes has been experimentally demonstrated, a compact device to interface with the electronic architecture of traditional computers has been lacking. The incompatibility of electrical and light-based computing fundamentally stems from the different interaction volumes that electrons and photons operate in. Electrical chips need to be small to operate efficiently, whereas optical chips need to be large, as the wavelength of light is larger than that of electrons.

CRISPR-Cas9 is an efficient and versatile tool for genome engineering in many species. However, inducible CRISPR-Cas9 editing systems that regulate Cas9 activity or sgRNA expression often suffer from significant limitations, including reduced editing capacity, off-target effects, or leaky expression. Here, we develop a precisely controlled sgRNA expression cassette that can be combined with widely-used Cre systems, termed CRISPR-Switch (SgRNA With Induction/Termination by Cre Homologous recombination). Switch-ON facilitates controlled, rapid induction of sgRNA activity. In turn, Switch-OFF-mediated termination of editing improves generation of heterozygous genotypes and can limit off-target effects. Furthermore, we design sequential CRISPR-Switch-based editing of two loci in a strictly programmable manner and determined the order of mutagenic events that leads to development of glioblastoma in mice. Thus, CRISPR-Switch substantially increases the versatility of gene editing through precise and rapid switching ON or OFF sgRNA activity, as well as switching OVER to secondary sgRNAs.