Lifeboat Foundation

Our bodies are home to hundreds or thousands of species of microbes — nobody is sure quite how many. That’s just one of many mysteries about the so-called human microbiome.

Our inner ecosystem fends off pathogens, helps digest food and may even influence behavior. But scientists have yet to figure out exactly which microbes do what or how. Many studies suggest that many species have to work together to do each of the microbiome’s jobs.

To better understand how microbes affect our health, scientists have for the first time created a synthetic human microbiome, combining 119 species of bacteria naturally found in the human body. When the researchers gave the concoction to mice that did not have a microbiome of their own, the bacterial strains established themselves and remained stable — even when the scientists introduced other microbes.

The cat’s out of the bag on crypto regulations, forcing some companies to choose between their principles and their profits.

Drake’s equation may look complicated, but its principles are really rather simple. It states that, in a galaxy as old as ours, the number of civilizations that are detectable by virtue of them broadcasting their presence must equate to the rate at which they arise, multiplied by their average lifetime.

Putting a value on the rate at which civilizations occur might seem to be guesswork, but Drake realized that it can be broken down into more tractable components.

Continue reading “Frank Drake Has Passed Away, but His Equation for Alien Intelligence Is More Important Than Ever” »

Even in the driest climates, though, there is a considerable amount of moisture in the air. The researchers note that even in places like the Sahel desert, relative humidity is still around 20 percent on average. So they set about finding a way to use this untapped water resource to produce hydrogen.

Their device consists of a water harvesting unit that houses a sponge soaked in a water-absorbing liquid that can pull moisture from the air. On either side of this reservoir are electrodes that can be powered by any renewable energy source. When a current runs through the circuit, the water is split via electrolysis into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which can then be collected as gas.

The team showed that the device could run efficiently for 12 consecutive days and produced hydrogen with 99 percent purity. What’s more, the device continues to work in relative humidity as low as four percent.

Astronauts on the space station may seem distant, but they’re only 248 miles from Earth: a little more than the drive from New York City to Washington DC. Everything they need can be delivered in relatively short order. Astronauts visiting Mars won’t have such easy access. The red planet’s average distance from Earth is 140 million miles.

We can plan supply missions, but taking everything along for the ride would be expensive and impractical. Like Mark Watney in The Martian, explorers will have to live off the land too.

There’ve been plenty of proposals for how astronauts might produce the essentials, but until recently no technology had been field tested. Now, thanks to a machine called MOXIE, built by MIT and stowed away on NASA’s Perseverance rover, we can definitively say humans will be able to make oxygen on Mars.

LinkedIn users are being scammed of millions of dollars by fake connections posing as graduates of prestigious universities and employees at top tech companies.

Genius.

March 2019 Workshop

An interview with Dr. Keith Wiley from the Carboncopies Foundation Winter 2020 Workshop held on March 15, 2020.

Water is a key ingredient to all life on Earth, yet tardigrades with their near immortal-like powers can somehow endure being sapped of almost all their H₂O.

Now, researchers have discovered another trick these chubby microscopic anomalies use to survive years of extreme dehydration.

“Although water is essential to all life we know of, some tardigrades can live without it potentially for decades,” says University of Tokyo biologist Takekazu Kunieda.