Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Australian Autonomous Train Is The “World’s Largest Robot”

Posted by Shane Hinshaw in robotics/AI, transportation

Dec 28
2018

Automation is on the right track.

The bot is helping automate mining operations Down Under.

Bad Plumbing Helped Cause a Strange Outbreak of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria at a Maryland Hospital

Posted by Genevieve Klien in biotech/medical, government, health

Dec 28
2018

In 2016, a mysterious illness spread inside the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, the U.S. government’s most prominent research hospital, in Bethesda, Maryland. Patients were somehow being sickened by an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria that practically never causes disease in humans. Two years later, a new study seems to finally have confirmed where this bug likely came from: the hospital’s own plumbing.

During a six-month period in 2016, six patients came down with infections caused by Sphingomonas bacteria. Four of the patients had an antibiotic-resistant strain of a particular species, Sphingomonas koreensis, which was first discovered in some of Korea’s natural mineral water spots in the early 2000s.

The world’s first no-kill eggs have gone on sale after scientists found a way to determine a chick’s sex before it hatches

Posted by Genevieve Klien in sex

Dec 28
2018

German scientists have found a way to determine a chick’s sex while it is still an embryo. This could help end the culling of billions of male chicks.

Portland Now Generates Electricity From Turbines Installed In City Water Pipes

Posted by Marcia Wiegand in futurism

Dec 28
2018

Water flowing through the city’s pipes will generate electricity like a dam with none of the environmental consequences.

Scientists just used rabbit DNA to create a new kind of powerful, air purifying plant

Posted by Marcia Wiegand in biotech/medical, space travel

Dec 28
2018

Great for a spaceship?

It cleans the air five times as efficiently as normal plants.

Our universe: An expanding bubble in an extra dimension

Posted by Genevieve Klien in cosmology

Dec 28
2018

Uppsala University researchers have devised a new model for the universe – one that may solve the enigma of dark energy. Their new article, published in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new structural concept, including dark energy, for a universe that rides on an expanding bubble in an additional dimension.

Enormous 18th-Century Ice House Re-Discovered Under London Street

Posted by Genevieve Klien in habitats

Dec 28
2018

Archaeologists in London have re-discovered a subterranean ice house near Regent’s Park. Dating back to the 1780s, the egg-shaped cavern was used to store ice, which was imported from as far away as Norway.

Made from brick, the structure would have been one of the largest of its kind at the time, according to the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA). The egg-shaped chamber measures 25 feet (7.5 meters) wide and 31 feet (9.5 meters) deep. Archaeologists with MOLA found the ice house, also known as an ice well, along with its entrance chamber and vaulted ante-chamber, during preparations for the development of the Regent’s Crescent residential project.