Lifeboat Foundation

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# engineering.

Almost a third of working Americans are in some form of medical debt, with nearly a quarter of those with an outstanding balance owing $10,000 or more. Many Americans feel anxious about health care costs and are depleting their own savings to pay the bills, or avoiding going to the doctor due to the cost, and in some cases, as in the case of William Osman, embarking on bizarre projects to highlight the issue.

The YouTuber and engineer, who is known for his bizarre projects that combine engineering and entertainment, posted a video last week outlining how a recent hospital visit requiring X-rays resulted in a staggering $69,210.32 bill.

Continue reading “Engineer Builds His Own X-Ray After Hospital Charges Him $69K” »

The human body can be genetically inclined to attack its own cells, destroying the beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin, which helps convert sugar into energy. Called Type 1 diabetes, this disorder can occur at any age and can be fatal if not carefully managed with insulin shots or an insulin pump to balance the body’s sugar levels.

But there may be another, personalized option on the horizon, according to Xiaojun “Lance” Lian, associate professor of biomedical engineering and biology at Penn State. For the first time, Lian and his team converted human embryonic stem cells into beta cells capable of producing insulin using only small molecules in the laboratory, making the process more efficient and cost-effective.

Stem cells can become other cell types through signals in their environment, and some mature cells can revert to stem cells—induced pluripotency. The researchers found that their approach worked for human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells, both derived from federally approved stem cell lines. According to Lian, the effectiveness of their approach could reduce or eliminate the need for human embryonic stem cells in future work. They published their results today (Aug. 26) in Stem Cell Reports.

What do you do at different times in the day? What do you eat? How do you interact with your neighbors? These are some of the questions that biologists would love to ask communities of microbes, from those that live in extreme environments deep in the ocean to those that cause chronic infections in humans. Now, a new technique developed at Caltech can answer these questions by surveying gene expression across a population of millions of bacterial cells while still preserving the cells’ positions relative to one another.

The technique can be used to understand the wide variety of microbial communities on our planet, including the microbes that live within our gut and influence our health as well as those that colonize the roots of plants and contribute to soil health, to name a few.

The technique was developed at Caltech by Daniel Dar, a former postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and executive officer for biology and biological engineering, and by Dr. Nina Dar, a former senior research technician in the laboratory of Long Cai, professor of biology and biological engineering. Daniel Dar is now an assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. A paper describing the research appears on August 12 in the journal Science.

I will always remember the moments around our first sampling attempt. Longtime friend (and Sampling System Chief Engineer) Louise Jandura and I were in the operations area awaiting the next data downlink. It was “so far, so good” with our earlier morning results showing we had achieved a full-depth borehole. Other members of the team began to filter in as images of the sealed sample tube came up on the ops room monitors. We were all starting to get that feeling you can get in this business when a big milestone comes together because, at first look, it appeared to be our first cored sample. But within minutes, the team noted that the volume probe indicated no sample was in the tube, and we quickly switched to problem-solving mode – once again trying to solve another problem tossed our way from the surface of Mars.

Our team has been working hard over the last 12 days to both ensure we have adequately assessed the data from the first coring attempt and also developed a solid plan forward. After further review of the engineering and imaging data, our final conclusion is the same as our initial assessment: The rock simply wasn’t our kind of rock.

The Sampling and Caching System aboard the rover performed as expected – quite well, as a matter of fact. However, the rock we chose for this first effort did not. The act of coring into it resulted in the rock breaking apart into powder and small fragments of material, which were not retained in the tube due to their size. Although we had successfully acquired over 100 cores in a range of different test rocks on Earth, we had not encountered a rock in our test suite that behaved in quite this manner.

Artificial gravity for spaceflight is a concept older than spaceflight itself, but we’ve only ever seen one small scale test ever flown in space. However decades of research have been performed to show that the human body can adapt to the conditions required for rotating artificial gravity. This shows that it’s an engineering problem that likely solvable for interested parties who want to spend the time, effort and money creating the classic rotating space stations from Science Fiction.

Here’s a couple of papers which were heavily referenced in researching this.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720019454/downloads/19720019454.pdf.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730003384/downloads/19730003384.pdf.

Continue reading “Can The Human Body Handle Rotating Artificial Gravity?” »

Sun, Jul 11

This event is part of Summer Science 2021.

The ExoMars rover is due to launch in 2,022 and will travel across Oxia Planum on Mars drilling for signs of life.

Continue reading “Engineering ExoMars — Summer Science 2021” »

3D printed rockets save on up front tooling, enable rapid iteration, decrease part count, and facilitate radically new designs. For your chance to win 2 seats on one of the first Virgin Galactic flights to Space and support a great cause, go to https://www.omaze.com/veritasium.

Thanks to Tim Ellis and everyone at Relativity Space for the tour!
https://www.relativityspace.com/
https://youtube.com/c/RelativitySpace.

Continue reading “The Genius of 3D Printed Rockets” »

This is interesting. 😃

A new discovery in rats shows that the brain responds differently in immersive virtual reality environments versus the real world. The finding could help scientists understand how the brain brings together sensory information from different sources to create a cohesive picture of the world around us. It could also pave the way for “virtual reality therapy” for learning and memory-related disorders ranging including ADHD, Autism, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and depression.

Continue reading “Virtual reality boosts brain rhythms crucial for neuroplasticity, learning and memory” »