Lifeboat Foundation

Two former top special operations officials say their job was too junior and the Pentagon isn’t taking information warfare seriously enough.

Despite shifting military budgets to better keep up with competitors, there’s one area where countries like China, Russia, and even Iran are proving nimble and frustrating for the Department of Defense: influence operations.

In this new age of information warfare, the military art of influence ops — otherwise sometimes called psychological ops, information ops, or most-recently, military information support ops — lacks the senior level leadership it deserves, say two former Pentagon officials who were in charge of special operations policies. According to them, the position they once held is too junior for the seriousness of the threat and mission, and influence ops is spread so wide, that nobody is sure who is really in charge.

Scientists studying a distant galaxy cluster have discovered the biggest explosion seen in the Universe since the Big Bang.

Last week, the Department of Energy gave a commercial company the green light to test fuel made from spent uranium.

Humans have been studying electric charge for thousands of years, and the results have shaped modern civilization. Our daily lives depend on electric lighting, smartphones, cars, and computers, in ways that the first individuals to take note of a static shock or a bolt of lightning could never have imagined.

Now, physicists at Northeastern have discovered a new way to manipulate electric charge. And the changes to the future of our technology could be monumental.

“When such phenomena are discovered, imagination is the limit,” says Swastik Kar, an associate professor of physics. “It could change the way we can detect and communicate signals. It could change the way we can sense things and the storage of information, and possibilities that we may not have even thought of yet.”

Frequently used to change scenery in science fiction, parallel universes and the multiverse are indeed possible, but jumping from one to another might be a little tricky.

The team compared germ-free (sterile) mice and mice with normal microbes. They used a laboratory technique called mass spectrometry to characterize the non-living molecules in every mouse organ. They identified as many molecules as possible by comparing them to reference structures in the GNPS database, a crowdsourced mass spectrometry repository developed by Dorrestein and collaborators. They also determined which living microbes co-locate with these molecules by sequencing a specific genetic region that acts as a barcode for bacterial types.

In total, they analyzed 768 samples from 96 sites of 29 different organs from four germ-free mice and four mice with normal microbes. The result was a map of all of the molecules found throughout the body of a normal mouse with microbes, and a map of molecules throughout a mouse without microbes.

A comparison of the maps revealed that as much as 70 percent of a mouse’s gut chemistry is determined by its gut microbiome. Even in distant organs, such as the uterus or the brain, approximately 20 percent of molecules were different in the mice with gut microbes.

Drug overdoses can be life threatening, but for two women who accidentally took massive hits of LSD the experience was life changing — and in a good way.

A 46-year-old woman snorted a staggering 550 times the normal recreational dose of LSD and not only survived, but found that the foot pain she had suffered from since her 20s was dramatically reduced.

Separately, a 15-year-old girl with bipolar disorder overdosed on 10 times the normal dose of the drug, which she said resulted in a massive improvement in her mental health.

Research by team from Nankai University shows new virus has mutated gene similar to those found in HIV and Ebola.

What if you went to the pharmacy and there was no medicine? What if you brought your kid to the hospital and they couldn’t treat them?