Lifeboat Foundation

I don’t remember what it feels like to live without pain. At 15, I began feeling aching, stabbing, and burning sensations in my lower back and down my legs. Swallowing a few Aleve didn’t help—in fact, nothing did. If I sit or stand for any period of time, or lift something heavy or fall, I pay for it, sometimes for weeks or months. I’ve slept on the kitchen linoleum, because the carpet felt too soft to stand.

For 17 years, I went to doctor after doctor, undergoing scans, physical therapy, and just about every “alternative” treatment that promised relief. Despite some amazing doctors and the expensive tests at their disposal, they could never see anything wrong, so I never got a diagnosis.

That is, until a couple of years ago, when a routine CAT scan finally caught a structural problem with my spine. Because of that, I qualified to have a spinal cord stimulator, an electronic device used to treat chronic pain, implanted into my back. Although I was scared to go under the knife, I was more than willing to become a cyborg in order to find even partial relief. And this type of therapy might also be able to help some of the 100 million Americans who suffer from chronic pain.

The latest in a series of small but significant steps puts the Philippines much closer to making a giant leap into the space age.

National Space Development Program (NSDP) lead Dr. Rogel Mari Sese revealed that Senate Bill 1983, which aims to establish the country’s very own space agency, was successfully sponsored by Sen. Bam Aquino to the Senate Plenary Session. Sen. Loren Legarda and Sen. Tito Sotto co-authored the bill, which has been in the works for years.

JUST IN: Senate Bill 1983 An Act Establishing the Philippine Space Development and Utilization Policy and Creating the…

Continue reading “Launch imminent: Philippine space agency rockets closer to reality” »

Maybe AI is talking to AI?

ARTIFICIAL intelligence has helped scientists find mysterious signals from deep space and experts hope it could help decipher whether the signals are a result of extra-terrestrial technology.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TiZuG9K_xso

NASA recently delivered $10 million in funding to Ad Astra Rocket Company of Texas for further development of its Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR), an electromagnetic thruster proficient of propelling a spaceship to Mars in just 39 days. NASA’s funding was part of the “12 Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnership.”

“Philosophers Have Been Preparing for this Moment for Thousands of Years.” ~ Yuval Noah Harari.

Bari Weiss, Op-Ed staff editor and writer at The New York Times, will join Yuval Noah Harari, historian, philosopher and international best-selling author of “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus” for a thought-provoking evening of conversation. Harari’s new book, “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” untangles political, technological, social and existential issues. It clarifies the most important questions humankind faces today, and empowers all of us to help answer them. His provocative insights on the most pressing issues of the day have won him fans ranging from Bill Gates and Barack Obama to Natalie Portman and Janelle Monáe.

A system made of just a handful of particles acts just like larger systems, allowing scientists to study quantum behaviour more easily.

Most substances physicists study are made up of huge numbers of particles—so large that there is essentially no difference between the behavioural properties of a drop or a swimming pool’s worth of pure water. Even a single drop can contain more than a quadrillion particles.

This makes understanding their collective behaviour relatively easy. For example, both the water in the drop and in the pool will freeze at 0C and boil at 100C.

Laser sucks energy out of atoms as fast as nearby surface puts it in.

Researchers don’t know much about whether people who aren’t diabetic should avoid having glucose spikes after meals, or whether, by contrast, average glucose levels are more important — things that need to be studied, he said.

“They’re right to be asking it. I don’t have data to give guidance on how to interpret it,” Bergenstal said. “I think they’re right to say it can’t be bad if I keep my blood sugars more stable. It’s a reasonable assumption, but we don’t have the data for it.”

It’s generally accepted that non-diabetics are better able to regulate their glucose levels. A higher than normal level, meanwhile, indicates prediabetes. But a new study out of Stanford University in late July that used CGMs on 57 participants, including diabetics and non-diabetics, had a surprising finding.

Continue reading “Non-diabetics are using diabetes technology to track their blood sugar and improve their health” »

ATLANTA—A molecule produced during fasting or calorie restriction has anti-aging effects on the vascular system, which could reduce the occurrence and severity of human diseases related to blood vessels, such as cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by Georgia State University.

“As people become older, they are more susceptible to disease, like cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr. Ming-Hui Zou, senior author of the study, director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Medicine. “Age is the most important so-called risk factor for human disease. How to actually delay aging is a major pathway to reducing the incident and severity of human disease.

”The most important part of aging is vascular aging. When people become older, the vessels that supply different organs are the most sensitive and more subject to aging damage, so studying vascular aging is very important. This study is focused on vascular aging, and in old age, what kind of changes happen and how to prevent vascular aging.”

Continue reading “Researchers Identify Molecule With Anti-Aging Effects On Vascular System” »