Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley recently unveiled a new experimental device for editing brain activity.

Out of the five volcanoes comprising Hawaii’s Big Island, Kilauea is the most active — and it could erupt following 250 earthquakes in 24 hours. A crater floor has collapsed. With homes nearby, residents have been warned to remain alert. Find out how to stay updated on the volcanic activity.

Holiday in space anyone?

Getty images CARLOS CLARIVAN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Space travel was once something only seen in Sci-Fi movies or experienced by trained astronauts. But now, the possibility of journeying to the stars for us mere mortals is becoming increasingly likely.

Continue reading “The world’s first space travel agent has opened in the UK” »

If you’re like most people, the first biological cell you ever saw was flat: a diagram in a book, or maybe a microscope image on a slide if you were lucky. Same goes for scientists. It’s hard enough to zoom in on something so small, much less capture a 3D image of the thing. As a result, it’s easy to imagine that there are a multitude of two-dimensional discs filling your blood vessels and fighting your infections. That’s why this new development is so eye-opening. Researchers have made an imaging breakthrough that lets them capture 3D footage of cells doing their thing inside the body — and it may look nothing like what you imagined.

The video below depicts the inner ear of a zebrafish — you know, that little inch-and-a-half (4-centimeter) striped thing you see in pet store fish tanks? Suffice it to say, the objects in this footage are very, very small. Here, a fiery yellow immune cell rolls on through gobbling up bright-blue particles of sugar.

Continue reading “Watch the First-Ever HD Footage of a Cell Moving Through the Body” »

Don’t you wish the world was bigger?

Researchers have successfully mimicked the blastocyst stage of development in an artificial embryo created using stem cells.

In addition to filling balloons at birthday parties, helium can be found scattered throughout the cosmos. To date, however, scientists have struggled to detect the ubiquitous element on distant worlds, even though the gas is certain to be there. But that’s now changed, thanks to the discovery of helium on a Jupiter-sized world located 200 light-years from Earth—but that’s only part of the story.

“Helium is the second-most common element in the universe after hydrogen. It is also one of the main constituents of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System,” Jessica Spake, the astronomer who made the discovery, said in a statement. “However, up until now helium had not been detected on exoplanets—despite searches for it.”

But now, using Wide Field Camera 3 on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Spake’s team managed to detect this strangely elusive substance, marking the first time that helium has been detected on a planet outside of our Solar System. The key to the finding was the use of infrared spectra to study the exoplanet’s atmosphere, whereas previous attempts used ultraviolet and optical wavelengths. This study now shows that the composition of exoplanetary atmospheres can indeed be studied at longer wavelengths. The details of this discovery were published yesterday in Nature.

Continue reading “The First Exoplanet Known to Contain Helium Is a Truly Alien World” »

AI is putting Photoshop to shame with this deep learning image correction. (via Mashable)

But if the tiny satellites do successfully work, similar low-cost satellites could be sent to other distant planets and moons, making communication with Earth from these deep reaches of space easier, and in some cases, possible at all.

When NASA lands a spacecraft on another planet, scientists generally need to have a “relay satellite” to beam images and measurements back to Earth.

Space exploration is hugely expensive, and cubesats could provide a much cheaper way to relay this information back home, rather than building and launching heavy spacecraft.

Continue reading “Tiny satellites named Wall-E and Eva are about to take a trip to Mars. Will they survive?” »