Lifeboat Foundation

During the Cold War Era of the 1960s, Russian researchers were looking for ways to support the immune system in conditions running the gamut from cancer to bio-warfare agents. Eastern Europeans, with a cultural love of fermented milk products, logically looked to probiotics, or lactobacillus, for immune support because it was safe, cheap and effective.

A Bulgarian researcher and medical doctor, Dr. Ivan Bogdanov, researched lactobacillus bacteria in the 1960s. Bogdanov believed that specific strains of probiotics could have anti-tumor properties.

The doctor’s research team injected mice with a sarcoma cancer, then administered a crude mixture of cell fragments from a strain of Lactobacillus delbrukii. Bogdanov observed that the cancer disappeared within a few days. Subsequently, researchers attempted to re-grow cancer in the same mice, but without success — the mice seemed immune to the cancer cells.

A single jar of honey can reveal more about our environment than we ever imagined, finds Graham Lawton.

The specimens provide insight into how tardigrades evolved cryptobiosis, a temporary and almost complete shutdown of bodily processes.

People whose eyes dilated more performed better on tests of working memory.

By Kate Graham-Shaw

The hippocampus geometrically represents both physical location and abstract variables on a neural manifold in mice performing a decision-making task in virtual reality.

Microscope images could be obtained much more quickly—rather than one pixel at a time—thanks to a new imaging method for neutral atomic beam microscopes developed by Swansea University researchers. It could ultimately lead to engineers and scientists getting faster results when they are scanning samples.

New research using a decommissioned section of the beam pipe from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has brought scientists closer than ever before to test whether magnetic monopoles exist.

According to the infamous myth, groups of lemmings sometimes run off cliffs to their collective doom. Imagine you are one of these rodents: On a sunny day you join your companions in a joyous climb up a mountain beneath clear skies, traipsing across grass and dirt and rock, glad to be among friends, until suddenly you plunge through the brisk air and all goes black.

For the past century since their discovery, superconductors and their mysterious atomic properties have left researchers in awe. These special materials allow electricity to flow through them without any energy loss. They even allow trains to levitate.