Lifeboat Foundation

Turbulence in this sea of charged particles can interfere with satellites 🛰 as well as communication 📡 and navigation 📶 signals. When it launches tomorrow, our #NASAICON mission will watch and image airglow, helping scientists better understand the extreme variability of the region where Earth meets space.

A new study by Calico found that our genes determine our lifespan much less than previously accepted and lifespan heritability is less than seven percent.

Although long life tends to run in families, genetics has far less influence on life span than previously thought, according to a new analysis of an aggregated set of family trees of more than 400 million people. The results suggest that the heritability of life span is well below past estimates, which failed to account for our tendency to select partners with similar traits to our own. The research, from Calico Life Sciences and Ancestry, was published in Genetics.

“We can potentially learn many things about the biology of aging from human genetics, but if the heritability of life span is low, it tempers our expectations about what types of things we can learn and how easy it will be,” says lead author Graham Ruby. “It helps contextualize the questions that scientists studying aging can effectively ask.”

Continue reading “Family tree of 400 million people shows genetics has limited influence on longevity” »

The Solar Decathlon deadline is today! (And actually, you have until 5 p.m. Eastern. smile ) Teams, we want to see you at the National Showcase Build Challenge culminating at the 2020 @SmithsonianFolk Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC. https://www.solardecathlon.gov/about-apply.html

Through a new approach dubbed AMBAR, the biotechnology company Grifols has attempted to reduce the amount of harmful, Alzheimer’s disease-causing amyloid beta in the brain by collecting it with a blood protein called albumin and draining it out of the bloodstream. This approach differs from the previous antibody and catabody approaches and offers new hope for sufferers of this neurodegenerative disease.

What is Alzheimer’s disease?

Alzheimer’s disease, named after its discoverer, is a slow and progressive disease that causes the degradation of the brains of its sufferers. This leads to memory loss, a decrease in problem-solving abilities, changes in personality, and other symptoms. It is associated with the accumulation of tau and amyloid beta in the brain.

‘’Until now, scientists assumed this all happened in a smooth, coordinated way. ‘’… silly scientists 🤔🙈🤦‍♂️.

Hitting a material with laser light sends vibrations rippling through its latticework of atoms, and at the same time can nudge the lattice into a new configuration with potentially useful properties – turning an insulator into a metal, for instance.

Until now, scientists assumed this all happened in a smooth, coordinated way. But two new studies show it doesn’t: When you look beyond the average response of atoms and vibrations to see what they do individually, the response, they found, is disorderly.

Continue reading “In materials hit with light, individual atoms and vibrations take disorderly paths” »

The Wellcome Trust, which gave out £1.1 billion (US$1.4 billion) in grants in 2016–17, is also the first funder to detail how it intends to implement Plan S. Its approach suggests that journals may not need to switch wholesale to open-access (OA) models by 2020 to be compliant with Plan S — if the initiative’s other backers decide on a similar line.

The Wellcome Trust has also announced how it will implement the plan, which could provide a blueprint for others.

A mysterious cigar-shaped object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth, astronomers from Harvard University have suggested.

The object, nicknamed ‘Oumuamua, meaning “a messenger that reaches out from the distant past” in Hawaiian, was first discovered in October 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii.

Since its discovery, scientists have been at odds to explain its unusual features and precise origins, with researchers first calling it a comet and then an asteroid, before finally deeming it the first of its kind: a new class of “interstellar objects.”

Continue reading “Cigar-shaped interstellar object may have been an alien probe, Harvard paper claims” »

Should we start to tinker with the human genome and alter our own biology?

https://youtu.be/FgrX4PiI_F8

Artificial intelligence: the singularity as the road to dystopia