Lifeboat Foundation

A core set of genes involved in the responses of honey bees to multiple diseases caused by viruses and parasites has been identified by an international team of researchers. The findings provide a better-defined starting point for future studies of honey-bee health, and may help scientists and beekeepers breed honey bees that are more resilient to stress.

“In the past decade, honey-bee populations have experienced severe and persistent losses across the Northern Hemisphere, mainly due to the effects of pathogens, such as fungi and viruses,” said Vincent Doublet, postdoctoral research fellow, University of Exeter. “The genes that we identified offer new possibilities for the generation of honey-bee stocks that are resistant to these pathogens.”

According to the researchers, recent advances in DNA sequencing have prompted numerous investigations of the genes involved in honey-bee responses to pathogens. Yet, until now, this vast quantity of data has been too cumbersome and idiosyncratic to reveal overarching patterns in honey-bee immunity.

Continue reading “Scientists reveal core genes involved in immunity of honey bees” »

The discovery that living and dead cockroaches have strikingly different magnetic properties could help bioengineers design new magnetic sensors.

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TITAN-III Spider Robot Is WAY Too Quick (Video) ‘My little friends can find you wherever you go!’

Bill Gates Suggests Tax On Robots ‘A worker replaced by a nubot that ‘appears or pretends to be human’ had to be compensated…’

Continue reading “Robotic Physician Assistant Has Steady ‘Hands’” »

China announces that it’s already testing the EmDrive, a completely electric space engine, out in space, and has big plans for the tech.

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TITAN-III Spider Robot Is WAY Too Quick (Video) ‘My little friends can find you wherever you go!’

Continue reading “Roboy 3DPrinted Humanoid Robot” »

The encryption codes that safeguard internet data today won’t be secure forever.

Future quantum computers may have the processing power and algorithms to crack them.

Nathan Hamlin, instructor and director of the WSU Math Learning Center, is helping to prepare for this eventuality.

Research from McMaster University has found that bacteria in the gut impacts both intestinal and behavioural symptoms in patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a finding which could lead to new microbiota-directed treatments.

The new study, published today in Science Translational Medicine, was led by researchers from the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute at McMaster, Drs. Premysl Bercik and Stephen Collins, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Waterloo.

IBS is the most common gastrointestinal disorder in the world. It affects the large intestine and patients suffer from abdominal pain and altered bowel habits like diarrhea and constipation, which are often accompanied by chronic anxiety or depression. Current treatments aimed at improving symptoms have limited efficacy because the underlying causes are unknown.

Continue reading “Intestinal bacteria alter gut and brain function” »

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers have become the first to 3D print aerospace-grade carbon fiber composites, opening the door to greater control and optimization of the lightweight, yet stronger than steel material.

The research, published by the journal Nature Scientific Reports online on Feb. 28, represents a “significant advance” in the development of micro-extrusion 3D printing techniques for carbon fiber, the authors reported.

Continue reading “3D printing with high-performance carbon fiber” »

Gas outflows are common features of active supermassive black holes that reside in the center of large galaxies. Millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, these black holes feed on the large disks of gas that swirl around them. Occasionally the black holes eat too much and burp out an ultra-fast wind, or outflow. These winds may have a strong influence on regulating the growth of the host galaxy by clearing the surrounding gas away and suppressing star formation.

Scientists have now made the most detailed observation yet of such an outflow, coming from an active galaxy named IRAS 13224–3809. The outflow’s temperature changed on time scales of less than an hour, which is hundreds of times faster than ever seen before. The rapid fluctuations in the outflow’s temperature indicated that the outflow was responding to X-ray emissions from the accretion disk, a dense zone of gas and other materials that surrounds the black hole.

The new observations are published in the journal Nature on March 2, 2017.