Lifeboat Foundation

Chameleons, salamanders and many toads use stored elastic energy to launch their sticky tongues at unsuspecting insects located up to one-and-a-half body lengths away, catching them within a tenth of a second.

Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue’s School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue University’s College of Engineering and other Purdue researchers at the FlexiLab have developed a new class of entirely soft robots and actuators capable of re-creating bioinspired high-powered and high-speed motions using stored elastic energy. These robots are fabricated using stretchable polymers similar to rubber bands, with internal pneumatic channels that expand upon pressurization.

Continue reading “Chameleon’s tongue strike inspires fast-acting robots” »

Hundreds of millions of people in India depend on farming for their livelihoods, but many of them struggle with losing crops to disease, getting them to market or achieving the right price when they do. Several startups are trying to change that.

Piggybacking on India’s mobile boom, these companies are using smartphones and the internet to help farmers grow, harvest and sell their crops more efficiently. India is self-sufficient in food staples, but faces a constant challenge to feed its population of 1.3 billion and rising. The country accounts for a quarter of the world’s hungry people and is home to over 190 million undernourished people, according to the latest estimates by the United Nations.

“There is a lot of financing and talent which is coming in this space,” says Rikin Gandhi, co-founder and executive director of Digital Green, a social enterprise that began as a research project backed by Microsoft ( MSFT ).

A new analysis using data from more than 1.4 million people concludes that eating an ample amount of fiber and yogurt may protect against lung cancer.

The calls started pouring in soon after word spread that Dr. Valerie Taylor was testing fecal microbiota transplantation — transferring poop from one body to another — for bipolar disorder.

The mental health condition is different from depression. It comes with mania, the “up” swings that can make people feel superhuman. “But so many people with depression called wanting to take part in the study we felt we had an obligation to try,” said Taylor, chief of psychiatry at the University of Calgary.

Two years after spearheading the bipolar study, the first of its kind in the world, Taylor has now launched a second study testing fecal transplants in people with depression, as well as a third for depression in people who also have irritable bowel syndrome.

Wormholes, passageways that connect one universe or time to another, are still only theoretical — but that doesn’t mean physicists aren’t looking for them. In a new study, researchers describe how to find wormholes in the folds of our galaxy.

These hypothetical passageways, created by folding a region of space like a piece of paper, are predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But they require extreme gravitational conditions, such as those around supermassive black holes.

In the new study, two researchers came up with a method to search for wormholes close to home, around the Milky Way’s central, supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*. If a wormhole were to exist around Sagittarius A*, the stars on one side of the passage would be influenced by the gravity of stars on the other side, the researchers said.

Will we have to rewrite Einstein’s theory of gravity? The DESI experiment could find out.

The Big Bang theory is so widespread that most people think of it as the way the universe began. However, we’ve yet to prove the Big Bang theory, and there are other models of how the universe began that are vying for the limelight; namely, the Big Bounce theory.

Correlations between pain phenotypes and psychiatric traits such as depression and the personality trait of neuroticism are not fully understood. In this study, we estimated the genetic correlations of eight pain phenotypes (defined by the UK Biobank, n = 151,922–226,683) with depressive symptoms, major depressive disorders and neuroticism using the cross-trait linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC) method integrated in the LD Hub. We also used the LDSC software to calculate the genetic correlations among pain phenotypes. All pain phenotypes, except hip pain and knee pain, had significant and positive genetic correlations with depressive symptoms, major depressive disorders and neuroticism. All pain phenotypes were heritable, with pain all over the body showing the highest heritability (h² = 0.31, standard error = 0.072). Many pain phenotypes had positive and significant genetic correlations with each other indicating shared genetic mechanisms. Our results suggest that pain, neuroticism and depression share partially overlapping genetic risk factors.

Our diets are overly refined. Eating more whole fruits, especially apples, pears and prunes, can help our digestive health.