Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9604

For nearly 200 years, Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa has inspired wonder partly because the event it depicts, a towering freak wave, has defied scientific explanation.

Now, a team at Oxford and Edinburgh universities claim to have laid the mystery to rest by successfully creating one for themselves — and it looks remarkably similar.

The achievement is being hailed as a significant breakthrough because, so far, meteorologists and sailors have had no means of predicting the likelihood of violent waves that are unexpectedly large compared to their surroundings.

Read more

We’ve all seen the stark headlines: “Being Rich and Successful Is in Your DNA” (Guardian, July 12); “A New Genetic Test Could Help Determine Children’s Success” (Newsweek, July 10); “Our Fortunetelling Genes” make us (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16); and so on.

The problem is, many of these headlines are not discussing real genes at all, but a crude statistical model of them, involving dozens of unlikely assumptions. Now, slowly but surely, that whole conceptual model of the gene is being challenged.

We have reached peak gene, and passed it.

Read more

The formal handover of the Chinese payload to NanoRacks at the Space Life Sciences Lab in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photo credit: NanoRacks.

Small effort, big gains

Clearly, a lot of progress has been made toward making the space lab more analogous to the Earth lab in the past few years, and NanoRacks has played no small part in those improvements. Despite the challenges that still remain for microgravity research, some truly significant work has been accomplished. With just a little more investment, Carruthers believes, much larger gains can be made.

Read more

Just as plastic tips protect the ends of shoelaces and keep them from fraying when we tie them, molecular tips called telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes and keep them from fusing when cells continually divide and duplicate their DNA. But while losing the plastic tips may lead to messy laces, telomere loss may lead to cancer.

Salk Institute scientists studying the relationship of telomeres to cancer made a surprising discovery: a cellular recycling process called autophagy—generally thought of as a —actually promotes the death of cells, thereby preventing cancer initiation.

The work, which appeared in the journal Nature on January 23, 2019, reveals autophagy to be a completely novel tumor-suppressing pathway and suggests that treatments to block the process in an effort to curb cancer may unintentionally promote it very early on.

Read more

The energy use of data centers is a major drag on resources, but they also use a lot of water. Any technology that increases their efficiency while reducing resource waste is a good thing.

“Now, Forced Physics, a company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., has developed a low-power system that it says could slash a data center’s energy requirements for cooling by 90 percent. The company’s JouleForce conductor is a passive system that uses ambient, filtered, nonrefrigerated air to whisk heat away from computer chips.”

The company that created it, Forced Physics, plans to install the technology in a pilot plant in February.

Read more

What if woolly mammoths could walk the planet once again? De-extinction – or the process of creating an organism which is a member of, or closely resembles, an extinct species – was once a sci-fi fantasy only imaginable in films like “Jurassic Park.” But recent biological and technological breakthroughs indicate that reviving extinct creatures could become a reality. Even if advancements get us there, should we do it?

Read more

Food additives known as dietary emulsifiers, commonly found in processed foods to improve texture and extend shelf life, may adversely affect anxiety-related and social behaviors in mice, Georgia State researchers have found.

The scientists also observed sex differences in the mice’s behavioral patterns, suggesting that emulsifiers affect the brain via distinct mechanisms in males and females.

The study, published in Scientific Reports, was led by Geert de Vries, professor of neuroscience and associate vice president for research at Georgia State, and Benoit Chassaing, assistant professor of neuroscience. Andrew T. Gewirtz, professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences, also contributed.

Read more