Lifeboat Foundation

Edward Alexander Bouchet (September 15, 1852 – October 28, 1918) was an African American physicist and educator and was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from any American university, completing his dissertation in physics at Yale in 1876. While completing his studies, Bouchet was also the first African American to be inducted in to Phi Beta Kappa for his stellar academic performance in his undergraduate studies. Bouchet’s original research focused on geometrical optics, and he wrote a dissertation entitled “On Measuring Refractive Indices.”

Unfortunately, after completing his dissertation, Bouchet was unable to find a university teaching position after college, probably because of racial discrimination. Bouchet moved to Philadelphia in 1876 and took a position at the Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University of Pennsylvania), where he taught physics and chemistry for the next 26 years. Bouchet spent the next several years in several different teaching positions around the country. In 1916, Bouchet returned home to New Haven in poor health, and died in 1918 at age 66.

Dr. Bouchet’s impact on physics still resonates today around the world. The American Physical Society (APS Physics) confers the Edward A. Bouchet Award on some of the nation’s outstanding physicists for their contribution to physics. The Edward Bouchet Abdus Salam Institute was founded in 1988 by the late Nobel Laureate, Professor Abdus Salam under the direction of the founding Chairman Charles S. Brown. In 2005, Yale and Howard University founded the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society in his name.

Did product safety laws lead to the dumbing down of science toys?

“Users should not take ore samples out of their jars, for they tend to flake and crumble and you would run the risk of having radioactive ore spread out in your laboratory.” Such was the warning that came with the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a 1950s science kit that included four small jars of actual uranium. Budding young nuclear scientists were encouraged to use the enclosed instruments to measure the samples’ radioactivity, observe radioactive decay, and even go prospecting for radioactive ores. Yes, the Gilbert company definitely intended for kids to try this at home. And so the company’s warning was couched not in terms of health risk but rather as bad scientific practice: Removing the ore from its jar would raise the background radiation, thereby invalidating your experimental results.

Continue reading “Fun—and Uranium—for the Whole Family in This 1950s Science Kit” »

Researchers at the Institut Pasteur in France have become the second monitoring team in the world to sequence the entire novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) genome in an effort to better understand its origin and virulent properties.

Nearly 8,000 reported cases and hundreds of deaths have been reported in at least 19 countries since the outbreak began in Wuhan, China, last December, prompting the World Health Organization yesterday to declare a public health emergency after evidence of human-to-human transmission had surfaced. International healthcare experts have since prioritized research surrounding 2019-nCoV in an effort to understand and tame the global outbreak.

“Sequencing the genome of pathogens is crucial for the development of specific diagnostic tests and the identification of potential treatment options,” explained Sylvie van der Werf, director of the National Reference Center (CNR) for Respiratory Viruses at the Institut Pasteur, in a statement.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health are working with biotech company Moderna Therapeutics to develop and test a vaccine against the latest viral outbreak.

The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an object of empirical study and as an opportunity for theoretical innovation. They can play an important role in facilitating the development of research that is socially relevant, that incorporates cultural norms and expectations around microbes and that investigates how social and biological lives intersect. This is a propitious moment to establish lines of collaboration in the study of the microbiome that incorporate the concerns and capabilities of the social sciences and the humanities together with those of the natural sciences and relevant stakeholders outside academia. This paper presents an agenda for the engagement of the social sciences with microbiome research and its implications for public policy and social change. Our methods were informed by existing multidisciplinary science-policy agenda-setting exercises. We recruited 36 academics and stakeholders and asked them to produce a list of important questions about the microbiome that were in need of further social science research. We refined this initial list into an agenda of 32 questions and organised them into eight themes that both complement and extend existing research trajectories. This agenda was further developed through a structured workshop where 21 of our participants refined the agenda and reflected on the challenges and the limitations of the exercise itself. The agenda identifies the need for research that addresses the implications of the human microbiome for human health, public health, public and private sector research and notions of self and identity. It also suggests new lines of research sensitive to the complexity and heterogeneity of human–microbiome relations, and how these intersect with questions of environmental governance, social and spatial inequality and public engagement with science.

O…o welp…

The decision is an acknowledgement of the need for a more coordinated international response to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Essentially you could at this point make a working protoss carrier o.o

Carriers are a late-game Protoss air unit that are the largest and most costly unit available for Protoss. Carriers are produced from the Stargate and requires a pre-existing Fleet Beacon. Carriers have the highest armor, health, and shields of the Protoss race. Their main advantages are their long range and mobility in combat; this potentially incredibly long range is especially notable as unique among Protoss units. On the other hand, their raw attack power is rather low for their price. Perhaps their greatest use is in extreme late-game where their supply efficiency for their staying power is usable, much like Battlecruisers; however, they are hard-countered by the latter since they make volleys of low-damage attacks and due to the Yamato Gun.

Carriers themselves do not, in fact, possess any attack, but like Reavers build and transport unique units –Interceptors in this case- to much the same effect. A Carrier does not come equipped with any Interceptors when first warped in, so it must construct them individually, adding quite a deal of cost and build time to the finished unit. Unlike the Reaver’s Scarabs, however, the units it builds do not immediately sacrifice themselves to attack but attack as would another unit stacking up on a target that it “fires” at until recalled at which point they may still be used again. While targetable, expensive and fairly weak individually Interceptors move quickly around targets, potentially out of range, and can recharge shields instantly upon being recalled meaning they can overwhelm targeted forces (although potentially very, very slowly). Interceptors are all destroyed if the Carrier itself is destroyed.

The World Health Organization said the fast-spreading coronavirus that’s infected more than 8,200 people across the world is a global health emergency — a rare designation that helps the international agency mobilize financial and political support to contain the outbreak.

The announcement comes just hours after the U.S. confirmed its first human-to-human transmission of the virus, which has killed at least 171 people in China and has now spread to at least 18 other countries.

Since emerging less than a month ago in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has infected more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic, which sickened roughly 8,100 people across the globe over nine months. As of Thursday, there are at least eight cases in four countries, outside of China, of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus.