Lifeboat Foundation

I believe people are dying because the response to this is surreal. You can spend over $1.5 Trillion on an F-35 that has been grounded more times than grass, yet this is happening 😳. Cheap test kits were offered by startups, nanotech protective gear was offered by an Israeli startup. Yet for some reason bailing out Mar a Lago makes more sense.

The shortage of safety gear at one Manhattan hospital is so dire that desperate nurses have resorted to wearing trash bags — and some blame the situation for the coronavirus death of a beloved colleague.

A newly developed metallic foam can stop even the biggest of bullets, but as with steel, there’s still a margin for death.

The Defense Department will provide 5 million medical-grade air-filtering masks — 1 million of them available immediately — as well as 2,000 ventilators as it steps up its role in the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said.

The Pentagon can also make the Navy’s two hospital ships available on the East and West coasts, Esper told reporters Tuesday. But he emphasized that the ships and other military resources would best be able to treat some trauma cases to make room for coronavirus patients at civilian hospitals that are properly equipped to handle infections.

“They don’t have necessarily the space, the segregated spaces, you need to deal with infectious diseases,” Esper said at the Pentagon. “So one of the ways by which you could use either field hospitals, the hospital ships or things in between, is to take the pressure off of civilian hospitals when it comes to trauma cases, is to open up civilian hospital rooms for infectious diseases.”

Researchers at the Center for Axion and Precision Physics Research (CAPP), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea), have reported the first results of their search of axions, elusive, ultra-lightweight particles that are considered dark matter candidates. IBS-CAPP is located at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Published in Physical Review Letters, the analysis combines data taken over three months with a new axion-hunting apparatus developed over the last two years.

Proving the existence of axions could solve two of the biggest mysteries in modern physics at once: why galaxies orbiting within galaxy clusters are moving far faster than expected, and why two fundamental forces of nature follow different symmetry rules. The first conundrum was raised back in the 1930s, and was confirmed in the 1970s when astronomers noticed that the observed mass of the Milky Way galaxy could not explain the strong gravitational pull experienced by the stars in the galaxies. The second enigma, known as the strong CP problem, was dubbed by Forbes magazine as “the most underrated puzzle in all of physics” in 2019.

Symmetry is an important element of particle physics and CP refers to the Charge+Parity symmetry, where the laws of physics are the same if particles are interchanged with their corresponding antiparticles © in their mirror images ℗. In the case of the strong force, which is responsible for keeping nuclei together, CP violation is allowed theoretically, but has never been detected, even in the most sensitive experiments. On the other hand, CP symmetry is violated both theoretically and experimentally in the weak force, which underlies some types of radioactive decays. In 1977, theoretical physicists Roberto Peccei and Helen Quinn proposed the Peccei-Quinn symmetry as a theoretical solution to this problem, and two Nobel laureates in Physics, Frank Wilczek and Steven Weinberg, showed that the Peccei-Quinn symmetry results in a new particle: the axion. The particle was named after an American detergent, because it should clean the strong interactions mess.

Read more

Some prime examples of how humanity’s expected return to the lunar surface in the years to come could help life here on Earth.

“That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

Continue reading “Six Reasons Why Humans Should Return to the Moon” »

CENTENNIAL, Colo. (KDVR) — Gov. Jared Polis issued a statewide stay-at-home order Wednesday afternoon. It goes into effect 6 a.m. Thursday and will last until April 11.

Many Coloradans, including the vast majority of people in metro Denver, live in counties where stay-at-home orders have already been announced.

Polis said he is issuing the order to save Coloradans’ lives.

The Curious Case of Sickle-Cell Anemia

Even those uninterested in biology have likely heard of the disorder. Sickle-cell anemia holds the crown as the first genetic disorder to be traced to its molecular roots nearly a hundred years ago.

The root of the disorder is a single genetic mutation that drastically changes the structure of the oxygen-carrying protein, beta-globin, in red blood cells. The result is that the cells, rather than forming their usual slick disc-shape, turn into jagged, sickle-shaped daggers that damage blood vessels or block them altogether. The symptoms aren’t always uniform; rather, they come in “crisis episodes” during which the pain becomes nearly intolerable.

Old human cells can become more youthful by coaxing them to briefly express proteins used to make induced pluripotent cells, Stanford researchers and their colleagues have found. The finding may have implications for aging research.