Lifeboat Foundation

EVs are pretty widely accepted as the newer, greener path of the automobile. Sometimes, they’re pitched as a solution to climate change that we can all buy at a dealership. But some haven’t given up on conventional motors yet. Porsche is perhaps the best example. The brand has been exploring synthetic, carbon-neutral fuels for a while now, and being able to run our Porsche 911 on green fuel sounds like a win-win to us.

But it appears that another company might have figured out how to do it better. The firm claims that it can produce a carbon-neutral fuel that’ll also clean the air around us. It sounds like a magic cure-all for personal vehicle emissions, but the technology is solid.

University of Sydney scientists have achieved a technology breakthrough with potentially life-saving applications—all using an improved version of radar.

Traditionally, radar is associated with airport control towers or military fighter jets, but a new, highly sensitive radar developed at the University of Sydney takes this technology into the human range.

Called advanced photonic radar, the ultra-high-resolution device is so sensitive it can detect an object’s location, speed, and/or angle in millimeters as opposed to meters. This could enable usage in hospitals to monitor people’s vital signs such as breathing and heart rate.

NASA’s Swift Observatory Tracks Potential Magnetic Flip of Monster Black Hole A rare and enigmatic outburst from an active galaxy 236 million light-years away may have been sparked by a magnetic reversal, a spontaneous flip of the magnetic field surrounding its central black hole. In a comprehen.

A device, created at Stevens Institute of Technology, uses millimeter-wave imaging — the same technology used in airport security scanners — to scan a patient’s skin to detect if they have skin cancer. Millimeter-wave rays harmlessly penetrate about 2mm into human skin, so the team’s imaging technology provides a clear 3D map of scanned skin lesions.

Continue reading “Spontaneous Magnetic Reversal of Monster Black Hole Sparks Enigmatic Outburst” »

A device, created at Stevens Institute of Technology, uses millimeter-wave imaging — the same technology used in airport security scanners — to scan a patient’s skin to detect if they have skin cancer. Millimeter-wave rays harmlessly penetrate about 2mm into human skin, so the team’s imaging technology provides a clear 3D map of scanned skin lesions.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink rival Synchron has begun human trials of its brain implant that lets the wearer control a computer using thought alone.

The firm’s Stentrode brain implant, about the size of a paperclip, will be implanted in six patients in New York and Pittsburgh who have severe paralysis.

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Neuralink rival Synchron starts human trials of implants” »

The team, part of Surrey’s research program in the exciting new field of quantum biology, have shown that this modification in the bonds between the DNA strands is far more prevalent than has hitherto been thought. The protons can easily jump from their usual site on one side of an energy barrier to land on the other side. If this happens just before the two strands are unzipped in the first step of the copying process, then the error can pass through the replication machinery in the cell, leading to what is called a DNA mismatch and, potentially, a mutation.

In a paper published this week in the journal Communications Physics, the Surrey team based in the Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Center used an approach called open quantum systems to determine the physical mechanisms that might cause the protons to jump across between the DNA strands. But, most intriguingly, it is thanks to a well-known yet almost magical quantum mechanism called tunneling—akin to a phantom passing through a solid wall—that they manage to get across.

The molecules of life, DNA, replicate with astounding precision, yet this process is not immune to mistakes and can lead to mutations. Using sophisticated computer modeling, a team of physicists and chemists at the University of Surrey have shown that such errors in copying can arise due to the strange rules of the quantum world.

Continue reading “Quantum mechanics could explain why DNA can spontaneously mutate” »

Not 6 million but 21 million.

And it has all happened because of a virus that caught the world unprepared.

The WHO report released today states that total deaths as reported by national health authorities attributable to COVID-19 don’t take into account excess mortality, or as it describes, “the mortality above what would be expected based on the non-crisis mortality rate.”

Continue reading “World Health Organization Acknowledges Undercounting of COVID-19 Deaths” »

Scientists have uncovered changes in neurological structure that could underlie the autism spectrum disorder known as Pitt Hopkins syndrome, thanks to the help of lab-grown brains developed from human cells.

Furthermore, the researchers were able to recover lost genetic functions through the use of two different gene therapy strategies – hinting at the possibility of treatments that could one day give those with the condition new options in improving their quality of life.

Pitt Hopkins syndrome is a neurodevelopmental condition stemming from a mutation in a DNA-management gene called transcription factor 4 (TCF4). Classed on the autism spectrum on account of its severe impact on motor skills and sensory integration, it’s a complex condition that presents with a range of severities.

It’s not often that a failed clinical trial leads to a scientific breakthrough.

When patients in the UK started showing adverse side effects during a cancer immunotherapy trial, researchers at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) Center for Cancer Immunotherapy and University of Liverpool went back through the data and worked with patient samples to see what went wrong.

Their findings, published recently in Nature, provide critical clues to why many immunotherapies trigger dangerous side effects—and point to a better strategy for treating patients with solid tumors.