Lifeboat Foundation

A second male birth control pill succeeded in preliminary testing, suggesting that a new form of contraception may eventually exist.

The new pill, which works similarly to female contraception, passed initial safety tests and produced hormone responses consistent with effective birth control in 30 men, according to research presented by the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute and the University of Washington at the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting. (The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.) It’s early days for the drug — which has not yet been submitted for approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) — but co-principal investigator Dr. Christina Wang, lead researcher at LA BioMed, says it’s an important step toward effective, reversible male hormonal contraception.

“In females you have many, many methods. You have the pill, you have the patch, you have the vaginal ring, you have intrauterine devices, injections,” Wang says. “In men there is nothing that is like hormonal contraception. The standard is not equal for the genders.”

Scientists are still debating how, and whether, drugs called checkpoint inhibitors trigger tumor “hyperprogression”.

Another possibility for an alternative to traditional plastics?

A substance made by solitary bees.

Sometimes the answers to life’s most complicated questions are hidden in the smallest details. That’s a truth Veronica Harwood-Stevenson discovered when she found there might be a way to create a sustainable alternative to plastic products by mimicking a natural substance produced by bees.

Continue reading “EHF Fellow: Veronica Harwood-Stevenson” »

Surprised I haven’t seen more about this:

Tabloids reported over the weekend that a “bombshell” report found moving water on the Moon which could lead to “Moon colonization.” Obviously those headlines are misleading—there are no rivers flowing along the lunar surface. Let’s talk about what really happened.

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a probe that has orbited the Moon since 2009, spotted water molecules being absorbed and released from grains of dust on the lunar surface throughout the day, based on the temperature. These results mark the only dataset recording the distribution of water during the lunar day, according to the paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Continue reading “The Moon Has ‘Moving Water,’ but Don’t Break Out Your Swimsuit” »

Robotics are going to become common in farming, reducing the need for back-breaking labor.

Feeling excited for Day 3 to start with Molecular Vandalism and what to do about it!

UA 2019: fb.com/events/2044104465916196/

UC Berkeley chemists have proved that three carbon structures recently created by scientists in South Korea and Japan are in fact the long-sought schwarzites, which researchers predict will have unique electrical and storage properties like those now being discovered in buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs or fullerenes for short), nanotubes and graphene.

The new structures were built inside the pores of zeolites, crystalline forms of silicon dioxide – sand – more commonly used as water softeners in laundry detergents and to catalytically crack petroleum into gasoline. Called zeolite-templated carbons (ZTC), the structures were being investigated for possible interesting properties, though the creators were unaware of their identity as schwarzites, which theoretical chemists have worked on for decades.

Continue reading “Schwarzites: Long-sought carbon structure joins graphene, fullerene family” »

The latest creation from Softbank’s Boston Dynamics looks ready for actual work.

E-mail address: [email protected]

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3440-9774

Department of internal medicine, UT southwestern medical center, dallas, texas.