Lifeboat Foundation

The scene in a normally quiet neighborhood on Hawaii’s Big Island is like something out of an overwrought disaster movie: volcanic fissures have opened up, spraying smoke and hot lava in the air where just last week there was a road and people’s backyards.

On Friday morning, Hawaii County Mayor Harry Kim told reporters that two homes have been destroyed by the lava.

Eruptions began in the rift zone to the east of the Kilauea volcano Thursday, prompting evacuations of the Leilani Estates and Lanipuna Gardens subdivisions in Puna on the island’s southeastern corner.

Continue reading “Hawaii’s Kilauea Volcano Erupts, Flooding Streets With Lava, Destroying 2 Homes” »

A new study published by researchers at Western University and Lawson Health Research Institute has shown a link between the gut microbiome and atherosclerosis.

During the study, the team examined blood levels of metabolic products in the gut microbiomes of 316 people from three groups: those with regular levels of plaque for their age, those who had low levels of plaque despite being at high risk, and those who had unusually high levels of plaque.

They discovered that in the patients with unusually high levels of plaque, there were significantly higher blood levels of harmful metabolic products. Specifically, these were the metabolites TMAO, p-cresyl sulfate, p-cresyl glucuronide, and phenylacetylglutamine, which are created by gut bacteria. They also assessed the development of plaques in the arteries via carotid ultrasound.

Continue reading “The Gut Microbiome Contributes to Atherosclerosis” »

Ironically, my more popular posts are ones furthest from my passion and core interests. They are larks—never intended to go viral. This is about one of them…

Apart from family, I typically steer clear of religious topics. I identify with a mainstream religion, but it is completely beside the purpose of Lifeboat Foundation, and it is a personal affair.^[1]

Yet, here we discuss a religious topic, after all. Let’s get started…

Question

Continue reading “Does Mystery of Quantum Physics Prove God Exists?” »

Earthquakes continue to shake the east side of the Big Island and at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 3, 2018, a 4.6-magnitude earthquake struck the Volcano area of the island.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center reported that the earthquake was not large enough to cause a tsunami for the island of Hawai’i.

Preliminary data indicates that the earthquake measuring a magnitude of 4.6 was centered in the vicinity of the south flank of Kīlauea Volcano.

Continue reading “UPDATE: 5.0 Magnitude Quake Shakes Volcano Area: No Tsunami Generated” »

Yes!

New research from North Carolina State University and the University of Colorado Boulder finds that steep declines in the use of coal for power generation over the past decade were caused largely by less expensive natural gas and the availability of wind energy – not by environmental regulations.

“From 2008 to 2013, coal dropped from about 50 percent of U.S. power generation to around 30 percent,” says Harrison Fell, an associate professor of resource economics at NC State and co-lead author of a paper on the work.

Continue reading “Natural gas prices, not ‘war on coal,’ were key to coal power decline” »

A membrane made up of block polymers has the customizable and uniform pore sizes needed for filtering or recovering particular substances from wastewater, researchers say in a review published in npj Clean Water.

Some parts of the world have an increasing need to generate drinkable water from wastewater due to excessive chemical discharge into typical water sources or lack of rainfall. Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame believe that a block polymer membrane could not only improve desalination and filtration of wastewater, but could also be used in forthcoming hybrid water treatment processes that simultaneously recover substances for other purposes.

“Current nanofiltration membranes used for desalination tend to separate things based on size and electrostatic interactions, but not chemical identity,” said Bryan Boudouris, Purdue’s Robert and Sally Weist Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering. “If we tailor the right membrane to the right application to begin with, then less energy is used.”

Continue reading “Membrane can better treat wastewater, recover valuable resources” »

NASA’s next Red Planet explorer has arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California — a big step forward in the countdown to T-zero. The spacecraft is called InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — and it’s being tested, fueled and encapsulated for launch aboard the powerful United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. The upcoming liftoff will mark the first time an interplanetary mission has launched from the West Coast.

And that’s just one of the ways bad guys are putting drones to use, law enforcement officials say.

DENVER, Colorado — Last winter, on the outskirts of a large U.S. city, an FBI hostage rescue team set up an elevated observation post to assess an unfolding situation. Soon they heard the buzz of small drones — and then the tiny aircraft were all around them, swooping past in a series of “high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them,” the head of the agency’s operational technology law unit told attendees of the AUVSI Xponential conference here. Result: “We were then blind,” said Joe Mazel, meaning the group lost situational awareness of the target. “It definitely presented some challenges.”

The incident remains “law enforcement-sensitive,” Mazel said Wednesday, declining to say just where or when it took place. But it shows how criminal groups are using small drones for increasingly elaborate crimes.

Continue reading “A Criminal Gang Used a Drone Swarm To Obstruct an FBI Hostage Raid” »