Lifeboat Foundation

Every time you inhale through your nose, olfactory receptors in your nasal passages enable your sense of smell to function. These receptors consist of protein complexes that help you detect chemicals floating in the air.

But research now shows that those types of receptors aren’t only found along your breathing passages. They’re all over the body in a wide variety of organs, and they influence what organs like your liver and intestines are doing.

Added to that, cancer cells possess their own collection of olfactory receptors that affect how they function. And those receptors, some researchers believe, might represent one of cancer’s vulnerabilities – and a key to destroying cancers with scents.

This wearable gill could help you breathe underwater.

A new study suggests that seniors should be doing high-intensity exercise to improve their memory.

Researchers have created an AI that draws what a person in looking at in real time just by reading and decoding their brain waves. Perhaps most impressive of all, the technique is noninvasive, with all the brainwave information gathered through a cyberpunk-looking, electrode-covered electroencephalography (EEG) headset.

“Researchers used to think that studying brain processes via EEG is like figuring out the internal structure of a steam engine by analyzing the smoke left behind by a steam train,” researcher Grigory Rashkov said in a press release. “We did not expect that it contains sufficient information to even partially reconstruct an image observed by a person. Yet it turned out to be quite possible.”

Would you trust Facebook with public health information?

The method has been trialled successfully, and could be ready for use in as little as four years.

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in France has revisited the idea of improving on estimates of the upper limit of the mass of a graviton. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their accurate measurement of the parameters of planetary bodies and what they found.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity suggests that the gravity of large masses that warps spacetime comes from a theoretical massless particle called the graviton. Scientists have been trying for many years to either prove the theory correct or disprove it by finding a way to show that it has mass. One approach to such a proof involves studying the speed of the expansion of the universe—this approach has suggested that if the graviton does have a mass, its upper limit would be approximately 10 ⁻³² electron-volts. Unfortunately, this result is based on a lot of assumptions, many of which are still controversial. Another way to do it is by studying planetary orbital deviations that could only come from a nonzero graviton mass—and starting with the assumption that if a graviton has zero mass, then like the photon, it should travel at the speed of light. In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to improve the accuracy of this approach.

The work involved temporarily freezing the motion of the stars and planets at different points in time—the first was the year 2000. The researchers found the masses, positions and speed of the sun, the planets and several asteroids for that year. They then ran equations that allowed them to roll forward in time to 2017 and back to 1913 and forward again as needed. These time periods were chosen because the team was able to find usable data for them. In running the calculations, the researchers found that they were able to come up with an estimation for the upper limit of the graviton of 6.76 × 10 ⁻²³—with a probability of 90 percent. The researchers note that their number was very close to that found by a team using data from the LIGO interferometers, but suggest that any similarities were purely coincidence.

The company OffWorld wants to build mining robots to send to the moon and beyond.

We know little about how brains produce happiness or anger. One scientist’s work is helping to explain why, revealing a possible link between sex and violence.