Lifeboat Foundation

New Horizons has made observations it was never tasked with making; serendipity of the sort that may lead to new and better astronomical missions to observe the distant cosmos from the outer fringes of the solar system, where it’s darkest and astronomers would have the clearest, dust-free view of our own galaxy and the optical light from the universe as a whole.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has unexpectedly made observations of optical light from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers are ecstatic and hoping for more.

While many scientists have shied away from explicitly political actions in recent decades, the community throughout history has spoken publicly on a wide variety of social, technological and ideological issues.

That has included everything from opposing fascism, nuclear proliferation and the Vietnam War to sitting on government panels that advise elected leaders on stem-cell research involving human embryos.

In U.S. history, scientists have been vocal about fascism, nuclear proliferation, the Vietnam War, stem cells and more.

Continue reading “Climate change, other concerns fuel scientists’ in-your-face activism” »

AFTER training a network of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to Antarctica to Spain at the heart of our galaxy for five nights running, astronomers said Wednesday they may have snapped the first-ever picture of a black hole.

It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is made of and how it came into being.

“Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror,” said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope.

Continue reading “The gravity and light-sucking monster weighs as much as 4 million suns” »

I’ve been reading about Gcam, the Google X project that was first sparked by the need for a tiny camera to fit inside Google Glass, before evolving to power the world-beating camera of the Google Pixel. Gcam embodies an atypical approach to photography in seeking to find software solutions for what have traditionally been hardware problems. Well, others have tried, but those have always seemed like inchoate gimmicks, so I guess the unprecedented thing about Gcam is that it actually works. But the most exciting thing is what it portends.

I think we’ll one day be able to capture images without any photographic equipment at all.

Continue reading “The endgame for cameras is having no camera at all” »

• Researchers at UCLA have created an artificial thymic organoid that generates its own cancer-fighting T cells.
• While it has not been tested in humans yet, this artificial organ could reduce the time and cost of T cell immunotherapy and make it a more viable option for patients with low white-blood cell counts.

Many artificial organs are being developed as an alternative to donated organs, which are only temporary solutions that require the recipients to maintain a lifetime regiment of medications. With recent advancements in biomedical technologies, the time may be coming when those who require transplants no longer need to wait on donation lists to replace organs like kidneys and blood vessels. And now, scientists have added the thymus to the list of body parts we can artificially simulate.

The thymus is a gland that is essential to your immune system. T cells, a type of white blood cell that helps to get rid of viruses, bacterial infections, and cancer cells, mature within this gland. When people get sick (or as they age), the thymus becomes worse at its job. In some cases, people with different types of cancer are not getting the biological support and help they need from their T cells.

Continue reading “New Artificial Organ Can Be Implanted in the Body to Create Cancer-Fighting Cells” »

Gene-edited seedless tomatoes don’t need pollinating to produce fruit – which could come in useful at a time when bees are on the decline.

A team of Australian researchers have discovered a new method to fight colon and stomach cancer. Their technique involves inhibiting a protein that cancer cells use to rapidly reproduce.

“Our discovery could potentially offer a new and complementary approach to chemotherapy and immunotherapy as options for treating gastrointestinal cancers,” said professor Matthias Ernst, scientific director at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, in a statement.

Hematopoietic cell kinase (HCK) is an enzyme that helps stem cells become blood cells – hematopoietic cells are the stem cells that all blood cells start as. One type of blood cells that HCK helps to code are macrophages, “big eater” white blood cells whose job is to consume and destroy anything that impedes healthy blood, such as cellular debris, microbes and cancer cells.

Continue reading “Aussies Develop Drug That Stops Deadly Colon and Stomach Tumor Growth Cold” »

Seti using #AI to find ET.

Join IBM’s Graham Mackintosh, SETI Institute CEO Bill Diamond, and SETI Institute Board of Trustees member Jonathan Knowles as we talk about using machine learning to help better understand the volumes of data collected by the SETI Institute Allen Telescope Array.

I wonder if people who were alive when Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1610, when he discovered the moons of Jupiter, realized that it was a seminal moment in human history. The discovery changed everything. It showed that not all celestial objects orbit the Earth and set the stage for adoption of the Copernican theory, which holds, of course, that the Earth orbits the sun and not the other way around. From that date onward, telescopes aimed at the sky became a staple of cosmology and a constant source of discovery and wonder for humanity.

It’s quite possible that people living in the distant future will view last year’s announcement of the discovery of gravitational waves as a similar turning point in humanity’s ability to observe and understand the cosmos.

Related: Earth-Sized Telescope May Let Us See Black Hole for First Time.

Continue reading “These ‘waves’ may let us see the Big Bang’s earliest moments” »