Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews (St Andrews, Scotland) has achieved a breakthrough in the measurement of lasers that they say could revolutionize the future of fiber-optic communications. They also say the wavelength meter (or wavemeter) will boost optical and quantum sensing technology, enhance the performance of next-generation sensors, and expand the information-carrying capacity of fiber-optic networks.

A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews has achieved a breakthrough in the measurement of lasers which could revolutionise the future of fiber-optic communications.

The new research, published in Optics Letters (Wednesday 6 March), reveals the team of scientists has developed a low-cost and highly-sensitive device capable of measuring the wavelength of light with unprecedented accuracy.

Continue reading “Don’t adjust your sets – new research could revolutionise fiber-optic communications” »

Will there be another El Niño this 2019? Check out these data from the TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason missions of NASA!

To keep pacemakers and insulin pumps secure.

“Back To the Future” fans will swoon over this ‘DeLorean’ hovercraft. 🆒.

Engineers want the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge to last 120 years… And it just might. (via Seeker)

China’s decision to no longer be the dumping ground for the world’s recycled waste has left municipalities and waste companies from Australia to the U.S. scrambling for alternatives. But experts say it offers an opportunity to develop better solutions for a growing throwaway culture.

In April of 2019 Google+ is going away. However, if you have stuff that you really want to save someone created a workaround. You can now move your content to Discourse.

Google+ is dead. Granted people have been saying that much for years now, but this time it’s really true. As of April, Google’s social media experiment will officially go the way of Reader, Buzz, Wave, Notebook, and all the other products that the search giant decided they were no longer interested in maintaining. Unfortunately in the case of Google+, the shutdown means losing a lot of valuable content that was buried in the “Communities” section of the service. Or at least that’s what we all thought.

Thanks to the efforts of [Michael Johnson], many of those Google+ communities now have a second chance at life. After taking a deep dive into the data from his own personal Google+ account, he realized it should be possible to write some code that would allow pulling the content out of Google’s service and transplanting it into a Discourse instance. With some more work, he was even able to figure out how to preserve the ownership of the comments and posts. This is no simple web archive; you can actually log into Discourse with your Google account and have all of your old content attributed to you.

Continue reading “Google+ Communities Won’t Go Down Without a Fight” »

Dr. Snyder is Director of the Center for Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine at Sanford-Burnham Medical Discovery Institute.

“Evan needs no introduction to anyone who works in regenerative medicine; he has been at the pinnacle of that field for decades. I’ve been delighted that SENS Research Foundation has been able to work closely with him over the past few years, especially in the form of his annual hosting of some of our outstanding summer interns — he doesn’t even vet them himself anymore, because he knows how stellar our recruits invariably are! I’m intensely proud to have such a titan of our field on the Undoing Aging program”, says Aubrey de Grey.

The threat of pandemic influenza is ever-present. A pandemic can arise when a new influenza virus that hasn’t affected humans before emerges, spreads and causes illness in humans.

Influenza viruses are unpredictable – we can never be certain of when or from where the next pandemic will arise. However, another influenza pandemic is inevitable. In this interconnected world, the question is not if we will have another pandemic, but when.

To protect people across the globe from this threat, the WHO has released a Global Influenza Strategy for 2019–2030. The new strategy is the most comprehensive and far reaching influenza strategy that WHO has developed. The strategy outlines a framework for WHO, countries and partners to work together to prepare for, prevent, and control the influenza.

Continue reading “8 Things to know about pandemic influenza” »