Lifeboat Foundation

Essentially from a disposal device to even warp drive hoverboards to even like gravity field control to even like hovering spaceships.

Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat.

The hole is the latest clever device to use ‘metamaterials’, specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build ‘invisibility carpets’ and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University in Nanjing, China, and is described in a paper on the preprint server ArXiv¹.

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What I used to think was a basic suit for batman is anything but normal if it were true. It would cost about 1 million to make a real life one and the fabrics and materials might as well be alien because they are so exotic but look like fabric. If batman were real it would show how genius of science he truly is as his fabric technology is some of the most creative work any material scientist could ever dream of. Essentially it is like having a tank in a lightweight suit.

Happy Batman Day! DC Comics first created Batman Day for Batman’s 75th anniversary in 2014, and has continued to celebrate the Dark Knight on Sept. 23 each year since. While Harley Quinn has been trying to steal Batman’s thunder (happy 25th, Harls) this year, we still want to take a closer look at the guy who started it all.

A few years ago, MoneySupermarket.com put out an excellent infographic about the cost of being Batman. They used numbers based on The Dark Knight trilogy of films from Christopher Nolan, which means they were using modern technology (and values). But they only looked at base costs, not at ongoing numbers, and the base costs alone were astounding: $682 million just to become Batman. Based on those starting numbers, how much has Bruce Wayne spent on being Batman over the years? We’ll start with their numbers, and break it down based on the DC Comics sliding timeline; thanks to the New 52 reboot, where Bruce had been Batman for “about 7 years,” and assuming at least a year or two has passed since then, let’s go with nine years of Batman-ing.

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Wuhan Coronavirus Pandemic Washington State.

More deaths and it looks like they’re going to look at previous deaths at the retirement home that is the epicenter to see if some of those previous deaths were caused by Wuhan Coronavirus.

“Killian went on to say that since February 19, Life Care Center reported 26 deaths. Since that date, 11 additional patients died at the facility. They generally have three to seven deaths a month, Killian said. Life Care Center is still waiting back for reports on post-mortem testing and whether 11 of those patients tested positive for coronavirus.”

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This inflatable wristband could save your life in deep waters.

Sci-fi writer/director Alex Garland has some strong feelings about modern science and technology. If you haven’t yet seen his visually stunning and ideologically complex films, Ex-Machina and Annihilation, let’s just say he holds some skepticism about things that evolve beyond human control. But Garland evidently also has some feelings about dealing with film studios and production companies (many of which may not fancy the unflinching outcomes of his stories). So for his latest idea, he turned to the mini-series masters at FX to make his TV debut: Devs, an eight-part miniseries that seems to take Garland’s emerging mythos and apply it to the tech/research industry itself.

Ex-Machina scribe Alex Garland’s FX show continues his skepticism of things beyond control.

Continue reading “Starring Nick Offerman as bearded tech-bro enigma, FX’s Devs has a lot going on” »

Airlines are running empty “ghost” flights because of European rules forcing operators to run their allocated flights or risk losing their slots.

In the past few decades, researchers discovered that the rate at which we age is strongly influenced by biochemical processes that, at least in animal models, can be controlled in the laboratory. Telomere shortening is one of these processes; another is the ability of cells to detect nutrients mediated by the mTOR protein. Researchers have been able to prolong life in many species by modifying either one of them. But what if they manipulate both?

A team from the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has studied it for the first time, with unexpected results. Blocking nutrient sensing by treatment with rapamycin, an mTOR inhibitor, delays the aging of healthy mice, but curiously, it worsens diseases and premature aging that occur in mice with short telomeres. This finding has important implications for the treatment of diseases associated with short telomeres, but also for age-related diseases that are also associated with short telomeres. The study, done by the Telomeres and Telomerase Group headed by Maria Blasco at the CNIO, is published in Nature Communications with Iole Ferrara-Romeo as the first author.

Telomeres, regions of repetitive nucleotide sequences at the end of chromosomes, preserve the genetic information of the cells. They shorten with age until they can no longer fulfill their function: The cells stop dividing and the tissues age since they are no longer able to regenerate.

An unprecedented human study aims to induce statistically significant and meaningful biological age reversal using multi-model interventions that include metformin, dasatinib, rapamycin, and NAD+ restoration therapy.

By William Faloon.

We’ve been expecting aliens from Mars for decades now, but what if life was vanquished on the red planet before evolution ever got the chance to take hold?

A pair of researchers recently published an analysis of 3.5 billion-years-old soil samples from Mars containing chemical compounds called “thiophenes” that could, potentially, be organic. If they are, it would be highly likely that bacteria once lived on the planet.

Terrestrial thiophenes are considered tell-tale signs of life by Earthbound biologists. The presence of these possibly-organic compounds in Martian soil represents the strongest evidence yet that life may have once existed anywhere other than Earth.