Lifeboat Foundation

Hi everyone, I’m Larry Tabak. I’ve served as NIH’s Principal Deputy Director for over 11 years, and I will be the acting NIH director until a new permanent director is named. In my new role, my day-to-day responsibilities will certainly increase, but I promise to carve out time to blog about some of the latest research progress on COVID-19 and any other areas of science that catch my eye.

I’ve also invited the directors of NIH’s Institutes and Centers (ICs) to join me in the blogosphere and write about some of the cool science in their research portfolios. I will publish a couple of posts to start, then turn the blog over to our first IC director. From there, I envision alternating between posts from me and from various IC directors. That way, we’ll cover a broad array of NIH science and the tremendous opportunities now being pursued in biomedical research.

Since I’m up first, let’s start where the NIH Director’s Blog usually begins each year: by taking a look back at Science’s Breakthroughs of 2021. The breakthroughs were formally announced in December near the height of the holiday bustle. In case you missed the announcement, the biomedical sciences accounted for six of the journal Science’s 10 breakthroughs. Here, I’ll focus on four biomedical breakthroughs, the ones that NIH has played some role in advancing, starting with Science’s editorial and People’s Choice top-prize winner:

High energy density (HED) laboratory plasmas are perhaps the most extreme states of matter ever produced on Earth. Normal plasmas are one of the four basic states of matter, along with solid, gases, and liquids. But HED plasmas have properties not found in normal plasmas under ordinary conditions. For example, matter in this state may simultaneously behave as a solid and a gas. In this state, materials that normally act as insulators for electrical charges instead become conductive metals. To create and study HED plasmas, scientists compress materials in solid or liquid form or bombard them with high energy particles or photons.

Goodbye 2021, and hello 2022!

Despite the ongoing disruption from COVID-19, many impressive breakthroughs in science and technology occurred this year.

Below we have listed our top 20 most viewed blogs of 2021, in reverse order.

A year in review.

This video is sponsored by ResearchHub — https://www.researchhub.com/?ref=eleanorsheeky.

Continue reading “This years biggest breakthroughs in longevity science!!” »

New instrumentation can aid scientists in determining whether recovered material from UAP is of extraterrestrial origin or not.

The Allen Institute for Brain Science is characterizing the cell types and connections that make up our brains and how they change in disease.

Been saying this for years!

A summary of decades of research on a rather ‘out-there’ idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth.

Continue reading “A Weird Paper Tests The Limits of Science” »

These are some of the fun science stories from this year that we couldn’t wait to talk about with friends.

Newsweek spoke to planetary scientist Dr. Amy Mainzer about the “Don’t Look Up” science and coaching Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence for the movie.