Lifeboat Foundation

Y Combinator announces the first wave of support for biotech startups working on aging.

Earlier this year, the Y Combinator (YC) community showed interest in supporting biotechnology focused on healthspan and age-related disease. The YC community is an influential part of the Bay Area technology-focused industry in California. It was great to hear that it was planning to support biotech startups working on aging through its YC Bio program.

The first area we’re going to focus on is healthspan and age-related disease—we think there’s an enormous opportunity to help people live healthier for longer, and that it could be one of the best ways to address our healthcare crisis.

Continue reading “YC Bio Providing Lab Space for Biotech Startups Working on Aging” »

In the new Netflix series ‘Lost in Space’, the Robinson family land on an unknown planet described as a ‘Goldilocks planet’ by both Maureen Robinson and one of the show’s writers, Burk Sharpless. The term ‘Goldilocks planet’ refers to planets in the ‘habitable zone’ of their solar system.

While NASA has had several female astronauts, the space agency is yet to a put a woman on the moon.

To compensate, a training chief at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston claims that the first person on Mars should be a woman.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5’s Anna Foster, Allison McIntyre said: We have female astronauts, but we haven’t put a woman on the Moon yet.

Giant plasma “tornadoes” raging across the surface of the sun don’t actually spin like astronomers once thought, new research shows.

Massive solar tornadoes, formally known as tornado prominences, which were first observed about 100 years ago, seemed to bear a striking resemblance to tornadoes on Earth. These gigantic structures — each one several times the size of Earth — are made of hot, flowing gas and tangled magnetic field lines, ultimately driven by nuclear reactions in the solar core.

However, using a method known as the Doppler effect, scientists have precisely measured the speed of the moving plasma, as well as its direction, temperature and density, revealing that twisters on the sun do not rotate like earthbound tornadoes do, according to a statement from the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS) conference. [Secrets of Sun Super-Tornadoes Revealed (Gallery)].

Continue reading “Huge solar ‘tornadoes’ don’t spin after all, study shows” »

An unusual discovery in the 1990s paved the way for space telescopes to spot thousands of exoplanets.

Climate models show exoplanets like Venus could hold oceans under the right conditions. Richard A. Lovett reports.

These photos are quite literally out of this world.

The ending of the new Netflix ‘Lost In Space’ reboot puts the Robinson family in far out space. But, the binary star system they see could be a real place in the Milky Way. It bears a strong resemblance to VFTS 352, an actual binary star in the Large Magellanic Cloud in our own milky way galaxy.

Looking at the distant star is literally looking back in time.

Thanks to gravitational lensing, the Hubble telescope captured an image of the most distant star ever seen, 9 million light years away.