Lifeboat Foundation

Concept car or Mars lunar rover? You decide.

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don’t yet understand why.

“We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole,” said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. “It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast.”

A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In an underground vault enclosed by six-foot concrete walls and accessed by a rolling, 25-ton concrete-and-steel door, University of California, Berkeley, students are making neutrons dance to a new tune: one better suited to producing isotopes required for geological dating, police forensics, hospital diagnosis and treatment.

Dating and forensics rely on a spray of neutrons to convert atoms to radioactive isotopes, which betray the chemical composition of a substance, helping to trace a gun or reveal the age of a rock, for example. Hospitals use isotopes produced by neutron irradiation to kill tumors or pinpoint diseases like cancer in the body.

For these applications, however, only nuclear reactors can produce a strong enough spray of neutrons, and there are only two such reactors west of the Mississippi.

EPFL scientists are developing new approaches for improved control of robotic hands—in particular for amputees—that combines individual finger control and automation for improved grasping and manipulation. This interdisciplinary proof of concept between neuroengineering and robotics was successfully tested on three amputees and seven healthy subjects. The results are published in today’s issue of Nature Machine Intelligence.

The technology merges two concepts from two different fields. Implementing them both together had never been done before for robotic hand control, and contributes to the emerging field of shared control in neuroprosthetics.

Continue reading “A smart artificial hand for amputees merges user and robotic control” »

The Netherlands is building roads out of plastic waste. Take a journey down the plastic highway 😍😍.

The Netherlands is building roads out of plastic waste. Take a journey down the plastic highway 😍 😍

🎥 : World Economic Forum #lovethenetherlands #1sttheworld

Harley-Davidson has released full specs for its Livewire electric motorcycle, with the 15.5-kwh battery pack providing a city range of 146 miles and DC fast-charging cutting charge times to an hour.

By Sayer Ji

Contributing writer for Wake Up World.

In July of 2017, doctors in Beijing blasted the patient with chemicals and radiation to wipe out his bone marrow, making space for millions of stem cells they then pumped into his body through an IV. These new stem cells, donated by a healthy fellow countryman, would replace the patient’s unhealthy ones, hopefully resolving his cancer. But unlike any other routine bone marrow transplant, this time researchers edited those stem cells with Crispr to cripple a gene called CCR5, without which HIV can’t infiltrate immune cells.

For the first time, a patient got treated for HIV and cancer at the same time, with an infusion of gene-edited stem cells. The results? Mixed.

LONDON (Reuters) — Scientists for the first time have detected water in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet orbiting a distant star, evidence that a key ingredient for life exists beyond our solar system, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Water vapor was found in the atmosphere of K2-18b, one of hundreds of “super-Earths” — worlds ranging in size between Earth and Neptune — documented in a growing new field of astronomy devoted to the exploration of so-called exoplanets elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy.

More than 4,000 exoplanets of all types and sizes have been detected overall.