Lifeboat Foundation

In the dark and lonely place that is space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has managed to reach a new level of proximity as it studies an asteroid.

After a manoeuvre, the spacecraft in NASA’s asteroid study mission is orbiting closer to a planetary body than any spacecraft has ever come, the space agency said.

The mission recently entered a new phase where the spacecraft will orbit about 2,231 feet above the asteroid Bennu’s surface.

The internet is rife with myths and articles making dubious claims about certain foods and their anti-cancer properties. We have all seen the articles of questionable scientific merit gracing social media suggesting that such-and-such foods can cure cancer, the majority of which are highly questionable. A new study offers a unique kind of insight into the potential true effectiveness of food in fighting cancer [1].

Investigating molecules in food with machine learning

There is no doubt that there are many foods that contain a myriad of active molecules, and perhaps some of these food myths may have a grain of truth to them. A team of researchers decided to do some real myth-busting and put a variety of bioactive molecules found in foods to the test to see if they might potentially help to combat cancer.

Auditory stimulus reconstruction is a technique that finds the best approximation of the acoustic stimulus from the population of evoked neural activity. Reconstructing speech from the human auditory cortex creates the possibility of a speech neuroprosthetic to establish a direct communication with the brain and has been shown to be possible in both overt and covert conditions. However, the low quality of the reconstructed speech has severely limited the utility of this method for brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. To advance the state-of-the-art in speech neuroprosthesis, we combined the recent advances in deep learning with the latest innovations in speech synthesis technologies to reconstruct closed-set intelligible speech from the human auditory cortex. We investigated the dependence of reconstruction accuracy on linear and nonlinear (deep neural network) regression methods and the acoustic representation that is used as the target of reconstruction, including auditory spectrogram and speech synthesis parameters. In addition, we compared the reconstruction accuracy from low and high neural frequency ranges. Our results show that a deep neural network model that directly estimates the parameters of a speech synthesizer from all neural frequencies achieves the highest subjective and objective scores on a digit recognition task, improving the intelligibility by 65% over the baseline method which used linear regression to reconstruct the auditory spectrogram. These results demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning and speech synthesis algorithms for designing the next generation of speech BCI systems, which not only can restore communications for paralyzed patients but also have the potential to transform human-computer interaction technologies.

CRISPR-Cas9 shows incredible promise, but the long term effects of cutting DNA in living organisms isn’t known. Now scientists from the Salk Institute have modified it to work without cutting, switching targeted genes on and off instead, and used it to treat diabetes and muscular dystrophy in mice.

The future is here. Technology that used to exist strictly in the realm of Sci-Fi movies, and for astronauts, is now available to all.

Developed by NASA in the late 1960s to help astronauts stay alive while in orbit and away from the earth’s magnetic field, PEMF (Pulsed Electromagnetic Field) Therapy is a treatment designed to help the health of the body’s cells by pulsing magnetic waves.

A few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was so dense and hot that the quarks and gluons that make up protons, neutrons and other hadrons existed freely in what is known as the quark–gluon plasma. The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can recreate this plasma in high-energy collisions of beams of heavy ions of lead. However, ALICE, as well as any other collision experiments that can recreate the plasma, cannot observe this state of matter directly. The presence and properties of the plasma can only be deduced from the signatures it leaves on the particles that are produced in the collisions.

In a new article, presented at the ongoing European Physical Society conference on High-Energy Physics, the ALICE collaboration reports the first measurement of one such signature—the elliptic flow—for upsilon particles produced in lead–lead LHC collisions.

The upsilon is a bottomonium particle, consisting of a bottom (often also called beauty) quark and its antiquark. Bottomonia and their charm-quark counterparts, charmonium particles, are excellent probes of the quark–gluon plasma. They are created in the initial stages of a heavy-ion collision and therefore experience the entire evolution of the plasma, from the moment it is produced to the moment it cools down and gives way to a state in which hadrons can form.

The secret locations of US nuclear weapons hidden in Europe have been revealed in a NATO document.

A draft report for the NATO parliamentary assembly’s defence and security committee seen by AFP gave details of six air bases in Europe and Turkey where it said the US stores 150 nuclear weapons, specifically B-61 gravity bombs.

The news comes amid fears of a new nuclear arms race in Europe, as a landmark Cold War treaty between Moscow and Washington is on the brink of collapse.

The science of cryogenics has long been viewed as a bit of a joke.

A newly discovered type of stem cell could help brains repair themselves from injury or even debilitating diseases like Alzheimer’s, according to the latest research.

Called the “G2 quiescent stem cell”, it’s one of several ‘sleeping’ (or quiescent) stem cells in the brain.

But this one is showing more potential for regeneration than the others have so far. Like other stem cells, it can produce cells of all different types on demand – whatever the body needs.