Lifeboat Foundation

When I was ten years old, I discovered computers. My first machine was a PDP-10 mainframe system at the medical center where my father worked. I taught myself to write simple programs in the BASIC computer language. Like any ten-year-old, I was especially pleased to discover games on the computer. One game was simply labeled “ADVENT.” I opened it and saw:

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

I figured out that I could move around with commands like “go north” and “go south.” I entered the building and got food, water, keys, a lamp. I wandered outside and descended through a grate into a system of underground caves. Soon I was battling snakes, gathering treasures, and throwing axes at pesky attackers. The game used text only, no graphics, but it was easy to imagine the cave system stretching out below ground. I played for months, roaming farther and deeper, gradually mapping out the world.

Geri-Care issued a recall for some aspirin and acetaminophen bottles that are not child-resistant, posing a poisoning risk.

Aspirin and acetaminophen are over-the-counter drugs that countless people have in their medicine cabinets. Many people use them to alleviate pain and reduce fevers, and these drugs might be the first course of action when exhibiting such symptoms. That’s what makes them popular purchases with consumers. And that’s why buyers should pay extra close attention to recalls that involve aspirin and acetaminophen products.

A new recall action involves bottles of Geri-Care Pharmaceuticals aspirin and acetaminophen, as they pose a risk of poisoning to children who might get their hands on these common drugs.

Continue reading “Aspirin recall: There’s a poisoning risk with these recalled meds, so check your home now” »

Biohackers follow a trend originating in the US, using “hacks” to try and turn back their biological clocks.

Proposals in Wyoming and Arizona to accept tax payments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would undermine the dollar’s unique status.

Proposals in Wyoming and Arizona to accept tax payments in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would undermine the dollar’s unique status.

Dr. Arpita Roy, Space Telescope Science Institute.

It has been three decades since astronomers first discovered planets outside our solar system. This profound scientific moment established the field of exoplanet science and has led us on a whirlwind tour of other worlds, none of which (so far) have been quite like our own.

Continue reading “To Catch a Dancing Star: The Story of ‘Extreme Precision’ Spectroscopy” »

About 66 million years ago, a “planet killer” — a 10-kilometer-wide rocky asteroid — hit Earth. The Chicxulub impact caused a mass extinction on a planetary scale, killing off an estimated 76 percent of all species living on Earth at the time, including the dinosaurs. According to a study published by Philip Lubin and Alexander N. Cohen, both physicists at the University of California in Santa Barbara, there is a chance that humanity could survive such a similar impact happening in the near future.

There currently are about 1,200 asteroids on a publicly available asteroid risk list, but all are smaller than one kilometer. The probability of a Chicxulub sized asteroid (5 to 15 kilometers across) hitting Earth is once in a billion years — very low, but not impossible.

The machine-learning model could help scientists speed the development of new medicines.

This technique could help scientists better understand some biological processes that involve protein interactions, like DNA replication and repair; it could also speed up the process of developing new medicines.

“Deep learning is very good at capturing interactions between different proteins that are otherwise difficult for chemists or biologists to write experimentally. Some of these interactions are very complicated, and people haven’t found good ways to express them. This deep-learning model can learn these types of interactions from data,” says Octavian-Eugen Ganea, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-lead author of the paper.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence system rapidly predicts how two proteins will attach” »

Stars are giant balls of gas that emit light and heat. They are mostly made up of hydrogen and helium gases and can have huge masses. For instance, the heaviest star yet found in our universe, called R136a1, has a mass of around 315 times that of our Sun and is almost 9 million times more luminous.

Stars are so heavy that they should collapse due to the inward force of gravity exerted by their own weight but thanks to the nuclear fusion reactions taking place in their cores, the massive inward gravitational force is balanced by the strong heat and pressures found within a star. This balance between gravity and gas pressure from energy generation is called hydrostatic equilibrium, and it is both self-regulating and finely tuned. goes up must come down, as the saying goes, but what is gravity?