Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Jun 8
2019

Synopsis: Scanning Earth’s Interior with Neutrinos

Future neutrino experiments may provide tomographic scans of Earth’s interior by viewing solar neutrinos that pass through our planet’s layers.

The Sun showers Earth with neutrinos, but this “glow” doesn’t dim when the Sun goes down. At night, solar neutrinos penetrate Earth, impinging detectors from below. Like x rays in a medical scanner, these planet-traversing neutrinos might offer information about the material they pass through. New theoretical calculations show that future experiments, such as the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), could characterize the different layers inside Earth with neutrino-based tomography.

Jun 8
2019

Researchers discover meat-eating plant in Ontario, Canada

Call it the “Little Bog of Horrors.” In what is believed to be a first for North America, biologists at the University of Guelph have discovered that meat-eating pitcher plants in Ontario’s Algonquin Park wetlands consume not just bugs but also young salamanders.

Jun 8
2019

“Sun in a box” would store renewable energy for the grid

Design for system that provides solar- or wind-generated power on demand should be cheaper than other leading options.

Jun 8
2019

Undersea Robots Are Helping Save the Great Barrier Reef

The drone is adapted from a robot that killed off coral’s predators.

Jun 8
2019

Scientists Solved Bizarre Mystery Of ‘The Galaxy Without Dark Matter’

The NGC1052-DF2 ultra-diffuse galaxy was first discovered and presented as the ‘galaxy without dark matter’. Astronomers from Spain found new evidence disputing the previous estimates of the galaxy’s mass and distance.

Jun 8
2019

Human body is a mosaic pattern of DNA mutations, say researchers

Researchers have discovered that the human body’s 3 trillion cells aren’t clones of a single DNA sequence, as is widely believed. Instead, the cells of the human body contain a plethora of altered DNA, called mutations. These multiply to produce patches of tissue, called “somatic clones,” inside the ‘normal’ tissue. The scientific term for this phenomenon is mosaicism.

Jun 8
2019

NASA is opening the space station to $35,000-a-night visits. A tourist who paid Russia $30 million to get there a decade ago says it’s a ‘seismic shift.’

Richard Garriott, who spent two weeks visiting the space station in 2008, said NASA used to fight the idea of private ISS visitors.

Jun 8
2019

$180 million DNA ‘barcode’ project aims to discover 2 million new species

For centuries biologists have identified new species at a painstakingly slow pace, describing specimens’ physical features and other defining traits, and often trying to fit a species into the tree of life before naming and publishing it. Now, they have begun to determine whether a specimen is likely a novel species in hours—and will soon do so at a cost of pennies. It’s a revolution driven by short stretches of DNA—dubbed barcodes in a nod to the familiar product identifiers—that vary just enough to provide species-distinguishing markers, combined with fast, cheap DNA sequencers.

As massive global effort launches, portable DNA sequencers also allow species identification in the field.

Jun 7
2019

What You Think is as Important as What You Eat

Recent research in the field of mind-body medicine shows there’s a lot more to health than what you eat, and most of it has to do with your mind.

Jun 7
2019

NASA’s Juno Mission to Jupiter

A beautiful abyss. This view of an area within a Jovian jet stream includes a vortex with an intensely dark center. Nearby, other features display bright, high altitude clouds that have puffed up into the sunlight.

I took this color-enhanced image on May 29, 2019, as I performed my 20th science flyby of Jupiter. At the time, I was about 9,200 miles (14,800 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops. Citizen scientists Gerald EichstÃ¤dt and SeÃ¡n Doran created this image using data from the JunoCam imager. Details: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/jupiter_abyss