Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Mar 31
2020

One Step Closer to a Batsuit for Soldiers

O„.o carbon nanotube suit.

Researchers announce new military funding in search for body armor skin that could be 300 percent stronger than anything we’ve seen before.

In Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, there’s a scene where inventor Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman, explains that Wayne Enterprises has created a prototype body armor for the U.S. infantry that’s as light as Kevlar but bullet- and knife-proof. Bruce Wayne asks why it never went into production. “The bean counters figured a soldier’s life wasn’t worth the 300 grand,” Fox replies.

In real life, and with Defense Department money, researchers from Florida Atlantic University, or FAU, are using advanced polymers and carbon nanotubes to engineer a new type of body fabric that could prove 300 percent as strong as today’s state of the art, but just as light.

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Mar 31
2020

To Protect Ourselves From Bioweapons, We May Have to Reinvent Science Itself

Getting far better at predicting what research will produce may be the only way to save the world.

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Mar 31
2020

Animal that doesn’t need oxygen to survive discovered

All animals rely on oxygen at least at some stage of their life, but a parasite that infects fish seems to have completely lost the ability to use it – where it gets its energy from is still a mystery.

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Mar 31
2020

Philip Anderson, legendary theorist whose ideas shaped modern physics, dies

Philip Anderson, the theoretical physicist whose ideas reshaped condensed matter physics and stretched to the forefront of other fields, died yesterday in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 96. Anderson had spent the past 45 years at Princeton University, which confirmed his death in a statement.

Combative savant made contributions—and enemies—across many fields.

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Mar 31
2020

Machine translates brainwaves into sentences

Scientists have taken a step forward in their ability to decode what a person is saying just by looking at their brainwaves when they speak.

They trained algorithms to transfer the brain patterns into sentences in real-time and with word error rates as low as 3%.

Previously, these so-called “brain-machine interfaces” have had limited success in decoding neural activity.

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Mar 30
2020

Over-Actuated Hexapod Robot

“Proprioceptive Control of an Over-Actuated Hexapod Robot in Unstructured Terrain,” by Marko Bjelonic, Navinda Kottege and Philipp Beckerle from Technische Universitat Darmstadt and CSIRO, Brisbane, Australia was presented at IROS 2016 in Daejeon, South Korea.

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Mar 30
2020

Viet Nam shows how you can contain COVID-19 with limited resources

Despite significant limitations, Viet Nam has defied expectations and is tackling the spread of coronavirus. Here’s how.

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Mar 30
2020

Scientists Created a “Hologram” That You Can Feel and Hear

Circa 2019

The Star Wars-like tactile 3D display isn’t a conventional hologram.

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Mar 30
2020

Coronavirus patients taken off ventilators after getting experimental HIV drug

Two coronavirus patients in New York City are off ventilators and out of intensive care after they received an experimental drug to treat HIV and breast cancer.

As the skyrocketing number of cases stretches city hospitals to the limit, doctors are racing to find out which drugs on the market or in development might help in fighting the infection.

The drug, leronlimab, is delivered by injection twice in the abdomen, the Daily Mail reported.

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Mar 30
2020

Some COVID-19 patients still have coronavirus after symptoms disappear

Just a quick update on a new study:

“Researchers found that half of the patients they treated for mild COVID-19 infection still had coronavirus for up to eight days after symptoms disappeared.”

“If you had mild respiratory symptoms from COVID-19 and were staying at home so as not to infect people, extend your quarantine for another two weeks after recovery to ensure that you don’t infect other people,” recommended corresponding author Lixin Xie, MD, professor, College of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Chinese PLA General Hospital, Beijing.

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