Lifeboat Foundation

In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered something mysterious pushing galaxies apart faster than gravity pulls them together. It seemed like every little bit of space had some amount of energy that spread it away from every other little bit of space, and that strange pushing came to be known as ‘dark energy’ — dark, because no one knows what it is.

And now a group of physicists have shown that dark energy could probably be explained — as long as we’re willing to give up a fundamental piece of our understanding of light…

Most scientists think that dark energy exists because of what’s known as a cosmological constant — something acting throughout the Universe that tells different bits of space to repel each other. It’s sort of like an anti-gravity force, but it acts everywhere instead of just being between two things with mass and it always acts with the same strength.

Interesting…

Odd, but definitely interesting.

For a long time it has been thought that all eukaryotes — organisms in which the DNA is enclosed in a membrane including almost all life we can see — had to contain mitochondria.

Continue reading “Scientists have discovered a cell that does something they thought was impossible” »

Inevitable, but still awesome!

Sony is the latest company to file a patent for a futuristic contact lens that does much more than improve vision.

Competitors are racing to answer Elon Musk’s call to create a capsule that can carry commuters at the speed of sound. MIT unveiled its entry on Friday.

By Larry Greenemeier on May 14, 2016.

A RUSSIAN man who has a debilitating illness has volunteered to become the first person to undergo a head transplant – but experts say the side effects of the procedure could be worse than death.

Valery Spiridonov, 30, suffers from Werdnig-Hoffmann disease, a rare form of spinal muscular atrophy.

The controversial operation will involve cooling his head to around 12 degrees Celsius, cutting it from his body and connecting it to the donated body of a brain-dead person.

Continue reading “Head transplant ops ‘will work’, say experts… but the side effects could be the worst form of insanity ever experienced by a human” »

According to established scientific knowledge, complex cells (called eukaryotic cells) can’t survive without mitochondria — tiny organelles that control respiration and power movement and growth. You can think of them as tiny batteries converting energy so that cells can go about their business, but they perform other key jobs, too. They are, as the common adage goes, the powerhouse of the cell.

Now, scientists working in Canada and the Czech Republic have made a surprising discovery: a eukaryotic cell without these mitochondrial batteries. It’s an unprecedented find that’s likely to change our thinking about how some types of cells can exist and grow. In other words, life is more flexible than we thought.

“[Mitochondria] were considered to be absolutely indispensable components of the eukaryotic cell and the hallmark of the eukaryotic cell,” team leader, Anna Karnkowska from the University of British Columbia told Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR.

Continue reading “Newly discovered microbe does something textbooks say is impossible: it lives without mitochondria” »

Michael Watkins discusses the potential for finding alien life, and how to protect it if we do.

Twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) with van Hove Singularity (VHS) has exhibited novel twist-angle-dependent chemical and physical phenomena. However, scalable production of high-quality tBLG is still in its infancy, especially lacking the angle controlled preparation methods. Here, we report a facile approach to prepare tBLG with large domain sizes (100 μm) and controlled twist angles by a clean layer-by-layer transfer of two constituent graphene monolayers. The whole process without interfacial polymer contamination in two monolayers guarantees the interlayer interaction of the π-bond electrons, which gives rise to the existence of minigaps in electronic structures and the consequent formation of VHSs in density of state. Such perturbation on band structure was directly observed by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy with submicrometer spatial resolution (micro-ARPES). The VHSs lead to a strong light–matter interaction and thus introduce ∼20-fold enhanced intensity of Raman G-band, which is a characteristic of high-quality tBLG. The as-prepared tBLG with strong light–matter interaction was further fabricated into high-performance photodetectors with selectively enhanced photocurrent generation (up to ∼6 times compared with monolayer in our device).

What if low-current electrical brain stimulation could be used to accelerate learning and dramatically reduce training time and costs? The Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded HRL Laboratories, LLC, funding for a two-year project in the RAM Replay program to develop a man-portable system to boost learning during waking and memory consolidation during sleep, thereby increasing a person’s ability to quickly integrate and accurately recall information.

According to Dr. Praveen Pilly, project leader and research staff member in HRL’s Center for Neural and Emergent Systems, the team will be the first to employ next-generation electrode-embedded head caps to apply high-definition transcranial current stimulation (HD-tCS) in order to tag specific memories and skills during learning, and to increase the probability of reactivating those neural representations during sleep for improved consolidation. “We’ll develop a first-of-its-kind cognitive model of memory replays during sleep/wake stages to predict task performance that can be personalized to control the stimulation intervention for each user,” said Pilly.

Continue reading “HRL receives DARPA award to STAMP learning into the brain with accelerated learning from low current brain stimulation” »