Lifeboat Foundation

The fruit flies in Noah Whiteman’s lab may be hazardous to your health.

Whiteman and his University of California, Berkeley, colleagues have turned perfectly palatable fruit flies—palatable, at least, to frogs and birds—into potentially poisonous prey that may cause anything that eats them to puke. In large enough quantities, the flies likely would make a human puke, too, much like the emetic effect of ipecac syrup.

That’s because the team genetically engineered the flies, using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, to be able to eat milkweed without dying and to sequester its toxins, just as America’s most beloved butterfly, the monarch, does to deter predators.

Official video for possibly maybe by björk.
directed by stéphane sednaoui
written by björk/nellee hooper/ marius de vries.

® 1996 BjörkOverseas Ltd/One Little Indian Records Ltd.

Scientists have a new explanation for Tabby’s Star’s mysterious dimming. Rather than an alien megastructure, a dying icy moon might be to blame.

Scientists have unraveled the biological mechanisms behind what they describe as the extraordinary “superpower” ability of jellyfish to regenerate body parts.

Jellyfish are primitive animals which evolved in the oceans around 600 million years ago. Part of the reason for their evolutionary success is that some species are able to grow back tissue that has been lost—a trait that is rare in the animal kingdom.

To learn more about this poorly understood ability, a team of researchers from Tohoku University in Japan investigated the biology of a jellyfish species known as Cladonema pacificum—which has tentacles that spread out like tree branches—for a study published in the journal PeerJ.

“This work shows that Enceladus’ ocean has reactive building blocks in abundance, and it’s another green light in the investigation of the habitability of Enceladus,” added co-author Frank Postberg.

Google and Facebook are releasing troves of deepfakes to teach algorithms how to detect them. But the human eye will be needed for a long time.

If you’re going to do right by DC Comics’ “Crisis on Infinite Earths” saga, you need the Monitor, yes. But you also need a Harbinger at his side. And now, it has been confirmed that Lyla Michaels, a character who has been played on Arrow over the years by Audrey Marie Anderson, will fill that role in the Arrowverse’s next, five-part crossover.

We say “confirmed” because while it did seem that Oliver Queen, in fulfilling his deal with the Monitor, might serve as an ersatz Harbinger, the fact is that in the comic books Lyla Michaels became Harbinger, and the Arrow character has used that codename since Season 1.

You can get a look at Anderson’s full costume here; Arrowverse EP Marc Guggenheim said they explored the idea of a comics-accurate helmet but it “didn’t look right.”

You may think that lithium-ion batteries are the best man can create, but researchers believe otherwise. There are other combinations of elements that are very promising. What about a cell with potential for seven times more energy density than Li-Ion could ever achieve? State of the art for current batteries would be 256 Wh/kg. Lithium-Carbon Dioxide batteries – or Li-CO₂, for short – can theoretically reach 1,876 Wh/kg. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago created the first usable Li-CO₂ battery. It was tested to up to 500 cycles, and it worked, which is great news.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago created the first usable Li-CO₂ battery. It has 7 times the energy density of a Li-Ion battery.

New interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.

Interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog ‘Aging Matters’.

Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die?

Continue reading “Josh Mitteldorf — Cracking the Aging Code” »