Lifeboat Foundation

An adjustable shading system that adapts itself independently over the course of the day, without sensors or motors and largely maintenance-free? It really is possible: an ETH doctoral student at the Institute for Building Materials has developed an alternative to motor-driven sunshades.

It gets hot in the city in summer, and buildings in direct sunlight get particularly warm. At night, it can then be difficult to get rid of that accumulated heat. These days, many people dream of efficient air conditioning. Chiara Vailati had a different dream: after completing her studies in Italy, the civil engineer pursued the idea of creating an adjustable and autonomous sunshade for houses, to reduce the amount of heat that enters a building and therefore the need for cooling. She had high requirements: “I wanted the system to be made of environmentally friendly materials, use very little energy and have low installation and maintenance costs,” remembers Vailati.

Continue reading “From pine cones to an adaptive shading system” »

Kelsey Moody, CEO of Ichor Therapeutics, discusses the creation of a gut-stable antibody mimetic for Parkinson’s disease and announces 10 million dollars in investment from Juvenescence into Ichor portfolio company Antoxerene Inc. at the Ending Age-Related Diseases conference in NYC.

More at: https://www.leafscience.org/ending-age-related-diseases-2018/

A major new study involving researchers from the University of York has measured a global shift towards more sustainable agricultural systems that provide environmental improvements at the same time as increases in food production.

The study shows that the sustainable intensification of agriculture, a term that was once considered paradoxical, delivers considerable benefits to both farmers and the environment.

The study, published in the leading journal Nature Sustainability, involved researchers from 17 universities and research institutes in the UK, USA, Sweden, Ethiopia and New Zealand.

Continue reading “Global study shows environmentally friendly farming can increase productivity” »

A global plastic waste crisis is building, with major implications for health and the environment. Under its so-called “National Sword” policy, China has sharply reduced imports of foreign scrap materials. As a result, piles of plastic waste are building up in ports and recycling facilities across the United States.

In response, support is growing nationally and worldwide for banning or restricting single-use consumer plastics, such as straws and grocery bags. These efforts are also spurred by chilling findings about how micro-plastics travel through oceans and waterways and up the food chain.

Continue reading “The plastic waste crisis is an opportunity for the U.S. to get serious about recycling at home” »

Physicists reveal a new approach to resolving different predictions from relativity and quantum physics. Phil Dooley reports.

A new study is offering an exciting new clue into the origins of autism spectrum disorder finding a single dysfunctional protein may be responsible for coordinating expression in all the genes that are known to result in autism susceptibility.

Scientists find vaporized iron and titanium in the atmosphere of Kelt-9b, an exoplanet in the constellation Cygnus that is the hottest ever discovered.

One of the fundamental pathological markers seen in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease is a build-up of two proteins — amyloid beta and tau — in the brain. It’s this action that many researchers hypothesize is the key symptomatic cause of cognitive decline associated with the disease. However, not all people with a build-up of these proteins display neurological damage and cognitive decline. New research from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston may have finally homed in on the reason behind this strange observation, and the results could lead to a whole new way to battle this devastating disease.