Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook is aggressively being used by anti-vaccination advocates to target pregnant women with sponsored advertisements to spread false information and conspiracy theories as the US battles a climbing measles outbreak.

A sponsored ad found by Quartz journalist Jeremy Merrill shows the anti-vaccination organisation Stop Mandatory Vaccination targeting women ages 20 to 60 who have expressed interest in pregnancy living in the state of Washington – where the governor recently declared a state of emergency over the measles outbreak.

Nearly 50 children and young adults in Clark County, Washington have become sickened by the disease since January.

Continue reading “Pregnant Women Are Being Targeted by Antivax Ads Online During a Measles Outbreak” »

Absence of light exerts a weird cooling effect.

Gene-edited white blood cells could let us hack our immune systems to prevent infections with pathogens like HIV, flu, and the virus that causes glandular fever.

An impressive new language AI writes product reviews and news articles. Its creators are worried about misuse.

A new study shows that Mars may very well be volcanically active. Nobody’s seen direct evidence of volcanism; no eruptions or magma or anything like that. Rather, the proof is in the water.

In the past, Mars was a much warmer and wetter place. Now, Mars is still home to lots of water, mostly as vapor and ice. But in August 2018, a study published in Science showed a 20-km-wide (12-mile-wide) lake of liquid water underneath solid ice at the Martian South Pole.

The authors of that study suggested that the water was probably kept in liquid state by the pressure from above, and by dissolved salt content.

Continue reading “We Just Got Evidence That Mars Could Have Volcanic Activity” »

Earth is getting a special celestial visitor this week in the shape of comet C/2018 Y1 Iwamoto — this sparkling, green-hued hunk of ice and minerals is already visible in the night sky through telescopes and even binoculars.

It’s the first binocular comet of 2019 – which means a comet that’s visible from Earth through binoculars, as you might have guessed from the name; we only get a few of them each year.

This particular comet was only discovered a couple of months ago – credit due to amateur astronomer Masayuki Iwamoto – and the icy rock is calculated to take 1,371 years to orbit the Sun on a stretched out, elliptical path.

Continue reading “Don’t Miss This Newly Discovered, Bright Green Comet Streaking Past Earth This Week” »

Too many people believe that art and science exist as polar opposites and have delineated the disciplines as existing in an irreconcilable dichotomy that acts to drive the two types of knowledge apart. This conceptualization of the knowledge cultures is akin to placing two magnets next to each other such that their same poles when aligned repel each other: it foolishly denies the absolute attraction that exists when you simply flip one magnet the other way. Centuries ago, this attraction between art and science was understood as a given. The most easily identifiable product of this was a person such as Leonard da Vinci, whose work didn’t move back and forth between science and art, but rather understood the two as inextricably interwoven.

In the world of 3D printing, there appears to be developing an understanding that the bubbles of art and science are actually simply contorted ways of viewing a larger field of human knowledge. Dutch designer Iris van Herpen likes to play in the field and apply her understanding to the creation of fashion collections. Her pieces are explorations that encourage collaborative efforts because of the breadth of expertise in a wide variety of fields needed to create the pieces she has in mind. For a 2013 collection, she worked with photographer Nick Knight, who had captured images of the way water moved when splashed upon the nude body, in order to turn those images into garments. It became clear to Knight that van Herpen understood the inseparable nature of art and science, as he explained in an interview with the New York Times:

Continue reading “3D Printed Dress from Iris van Herpen Pushes Boundaries of Fashion” »

And it could violate inmates’ rights.

This NIR photo immune therapy is to be licensed to Rakuten Aspyrian Therapeutics, in San Mateo, California.

by Ford Burkhart in San Francisco