Lifeboat Foundation

Volunteer students at Beihang University have reportedly lived in the Lunar Palace 1 biosphere environment for 370 days. Media outlets have reported that two groups of students took turns living in the biosphere over the course of 370 days, and required minimal supplies from the outside.

Many groups have tried building and living in biospheres over the years. The goal has always been to find out if it is possible to build a self-sustaining ecosystem that could be used on another planet. The most well-known was Biosphere 2—it was built in the Arizona desert and hosted people for two years, but ultimately failed in its goal to remain self-supporting. However, such efforts have led to a better understanding of how a real biosphere might work and how plants might be grown beyond Earth.

Over the past several years, the Chinese government has made it clear that they plan to send people to the moon in the coming years. They also plan to build a permanent colony there, to be shared with other countries, as soon as it is feasible. As part of that effort, they have been planning, building and testing biospheres since 2014. In 2017, they finished construction of the Lunar Palace 1 biosphere. Once set up and tested, four volunteers entered the facility and stayed for 110 days. Shortly thereafter, another group moved into the biosphere and stayed for 65 days—they were replaced immediately by another team who spent 200 days in the test environment. That team was then replaced by the first team, which spent an additional 105 days in the facility. Altogether, the two groups spent 370 consecutive days in the biosphere.

This enables scientists to determine an organism’s biological age with high precision. Get the details here.

The Future Of Food And Beverage Innovation And Venturing — Dr. Ellen De Brabander, Ph.D. — Senior Vice President, R&D, PepsiCo

Dr. Ellen de Brabander, is Senior Vice President, Research and Development, at PepsiCo, the American multinational food, snack, and beverage company.

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How do you keep microbes from Earth from contaminating Mars? This NASA scientist, who worked on the Perseverance mission, explains: # CountdowntoMars # Mars2020.

Scientists get dramatically better resolution at X-ray free-electron lasers with a new technique.

Intense, ultrashort X-ray pulses from hard X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) can capture images of biological structures down to the atomic scale and shed light on the fastest processes in nature with a shutter speed of just one femtosecond, a millionth of a billionth of a second.

However, on these miniscule time scales, it is extremely difficult to synchronize the X-ray pulse that sparks a reaction in the sample with the follow-up pulse that observes the reaction. This problem, called timing jitter, is a major hurdle in performing these XFEL experiments with ever-better resolution.

The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.

Scientists have successfully managed to wake a series of microbes that had remained “asleep” for at least 100 million years. The microbes that existed during the dinosaurs’ time have shown traces of growth in the latest studies.

A team of scientists in the US and Japan says that these prehistoric microorganisms began to grow and divide despite having entered an energy-saving state when dinosaurs were still walking on Earth.

The microbes belonged to ten different bacteria groups and were recovered from sediments mined in 2010 at the bottom of the South Pacific Gyre, one of the most deserted parts of the ocean in terms of nutrients.

Check out this amazing video about Synthetic Biology! (Credit: Vasil Hnãtiuk, Denis Sibilev, and Andrei Myshev)

Arsenic may be deadly to us, but now a microbe that can live and grow entirely off the poison has been discovered.