Lifeboat Foundation

The philosopher John Locke, who believed that true knowledge of the world could only stem from sensory experiences, thought that blind individuals could never understand the concepts of light and color. Locke, it turns out, was wrong. In a recent PNAS study, blind people demonstrate that they do understand what sighted people process through vision, proving that “visual” ideas don’t actually require sight.

In the study published Tuesday, scientists demonstrated how blind people make visual sense of what they cannot see. While previous studies suggested that the most efficient way for a blind person to know that, say, a flamingo is pink, is to memorize that fact, this study demonstrates that blind people instead look at the world like scientists and make sense of the visual world through a catalogue of clues.

“First-person experience isn’t the only way to develop a rich understanding of the world around us,” co-author and Johns Hopkins doctoral candidate Judy Kim explains. “People often have the intuition that we can’t know what we can’t see.”

Continue reading “Scientists Discover How Blind People Know So Much About Appearances” »

A volcano erupted on the Indonesian island of Bali Saturday, sending ash into the sky over surrounding villages and lava pouring down its sides.

The island’s Mount Agung put national agencies on notice, causing some flight cancellations but no reported casualties with the eruption, which reportedly spread lava and incandescent rocks over about two miles.

The national disaster agency said Mount Agung’s eruption lasted four minutes and 30 seconds, according to multiple reports.

Continue reading “A Volcano in Bali Along The ‘Ring of Fire’ Erupted on Saturday, And It Looks Terrifying” »

Microorganisms like bacteria and fungi are increasingly becoming resistant to our best drugs, which is hurtling us towards a terrifying future where once-easily-treated infections become potentially life-threatening again. In a new approach to this problem, researchers from the University at Buffalo and Temple University have tested an alternative to antibiotics that uses existing drugs to starve a fungal infection of vital nutrients.

In Japan people can expect to live beyond 84 years on average—yet in Lesotho life expectancy is just 53 years. The age at which people die still depends a lot on where they live.

Finding the time to exercise when you’ve got heaps of housework – and laundry – piling up can be difficult, but this piece of gym kit means you’ve got no excuse!

The Bike Washing Machine is a human-powered washing machine that encourages you to multitask and conserve water while boosting your fitness in a fun, efficient way.

A generator inside the bike also creates electricity which can be stored for future use.

Continue reading “Exercise And Wash Laundry With This Eco-Friendly Washer-Bike!” »

Two programmers played a key role in developing chaos theory and the famous butterfly effect, but they’ve been left out of virtually all accounts of the work.

An international team of scientists has found a wealth of well-preserved stony meteorites in the Atacama Desert that allowed them to reconstruct the rate of falling meteorites over the past two million years.

Boiled in hydrogen peroxide and compressed, the wood can passively manage heat.

The European Union has partially approved the shape of its next giant research-spending programme, but it faces political tensions.