Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomer Dr David Whitehouse said the “enormous” black hole discovered by astronomers in South America showed the whole universe might one day be swallowed by a black hole. He told Sky News: “We’re beginning to realise that we had thought that there was a limit to the size of black holes in the centre of a galaxy because they can only swallow so many stars. Black holes grow by swallowing matter and gas and stars and dust.

An international team of subsurface explorers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland have uncovered a previously undescribed ‘Jurassic World’ of around 100 ancient volcanoes buried deep within the Cooper-Eromanga Basins of central Australia.

The Cooper-Eromanga Basins in the north-eastern corner of South Australia and south-western corner of Queensland is Australia’s largest onshore oil and gas producing region of Australia. But, despite about 60 years of petroleum exploration and production, this ancient Jurassic volcanic underground landscape has gone largely unnoticed.

Published in the journal Gondwana Research, the researchers used advanced subsurface imaging techniques, analogous to medical CT scanning, to identify the plethora of volcanic craters and lava flows, and the deeper magma chambers that fed them. They’ve called the volcanic region the Warnie Volcanic Province, with a nod to Australian cricket legend Shane Warne.

Last September, an American traveling in Kenya suffered a serious stroke, and was hospitalized there for a month. The stay didn’t go well: The person suffered a bout of pneumonia, a urinary tract infection, and a brush with sepsis, a life-threatening immune reaction to infection.

Maryn McKenna (@marynmck) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED, a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and the author of Big Chicken.

Eventually the traveler’s condition stabilized enough to be brought home, to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Maryland. Because they had been in that foreign hospital for so long, the US institution decided to be extra careful. It put the patient (who hasn’t been named publicly, to respect medical privacy) into an isolation room and required that everyone on the treatment team wear a gown and gloves. After consulting the state health department, the hospital also decided to check the patient for any superbugs that might have been picked up overseas.

A team of researchers with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Mälardalen University and Tsinghua University has found that all of China’s major cities are now in a position to produce electricity from solar power more cheaply than can be had from the grid. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group describes how they estimated solar energy costs for all the major Chinese cities, and what they found when they compared them to costs associated with the grid.

In recent years, China has put a significant amount of effort into producing and installing solar technology to the extent that they are now the world’s biggest producer of solar cells, and also the world’s biggest installer of solar panels. Last year, installations in the country accounted for half of all installations worldwide. A lot of that growth has been stimulated by government subsidies, but the Chinese government has made it clear that it wants solar to fly on its own—subsidies are slowly being withdrawn. In this new effort, the researchers wanted to know if China was ready to fly on its own, at least in its major cities.

The researchers started by estimating solar energy system prices and electricity production in all of the major Chinese cities. They then compared what they found with prices from the grid. Next, they estimated solar electricity prices at the grid scale, and compared them to electricity generated strictly from coal. The calculations accounted for estimates of the lifetime of solar systems. They report that they found that all 344 of the major cities they studied were currently in a position to generate electricity at lower costs than the grid supply—without subsidies. They also found that 22 percent of those cities could also produce electricity at a lesser cost than possible with coal.

Thin, flexible fibers made of carbon nanotubes have now proven able to bridge damaged heart tissues and deliver the electrical signals needed to keep those hearts beating.

Scientists at Texas Heart Institute (THI) report they have used those biocompatible fibers in studies that showed sewing them directly into damaged tissue can restore electrical function to hearts.

“Instead of shocking and defibrillating, we are actually correcting diseased conduction of the largest major pumping chamber of the heart by creating a bridge to bypass and conduct over a scarred area of a damaged heart,” said Dr. Mehdi Razavi, a cardiologist and director of Electrophysiology Clinical Research and Innovations at THI, who co-led the study with Rice chemical and biomolecular engineer Matteo Pasquali.

Animal models provide benefits for biomedical research, but translating such findings to human physiology can be difficult. The human heart’s energy needs and functions are difficult to reproduce in other animals, such as mice and rats. One new system looks to circumvent these issues and provide a functional view of how different treatments can help ailing cells in the heart following oxygen and nutrient deprivations.

Researchers have unveiled a new silicon chip that holds human lab-grown heart muscle cells for assessing the effectiveness of new drugs. The system includes heart cells, called cardiomyocytes, patterned on the chip with electrodes that can both stimulate and measure electrical activity within the cells. The researchers discuss their work in this week’s APL Bioengineering.

These capabilities provide a way for determining how the restriction of blood supply, a dangerous state known as ischemia, changes a heart’s conduction velocity, beat frequency and important electrical intervals associated with heart function.

Today, we want to highlight an interview with billionaire investor Jim Mellon that our friend, Adam Ford of Science, Technology, and the Future, has conducted. Like us, Adam was at the Undoing Aging conference in Berlin earlier this year, and, just as we were, he was busy conducting a number of interviews with the researchers and industry thought leaders there.

Jim Mellon is an interesting figure in the industry and the cofounder of Juvenescence, a company that has been investing in a number of promising companies that are developing rejuvenation biotechnology to treat age-related diseases.

Continue reading “Adam Ford Talks With Jim Mellon of Juvenescence” »

With the rise of fad diets, “superfoods,” and a growing range of dietary supplement choices, it’s sometimes hard to know what to eat.

This can be particularly relevant as we grow older and are trying to make the best choices to minimize the risk of health problems such as high blood pressure, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart (cardiovascular) problems.

We now have evidence these health problems also all affect brain function: they increase nerve degeneration in the brain, leading to a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other brain conditions including vascular dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Putin’s robo-nauts prepare for lift-off: Fedor as he gets ready to board the International Space Station crew next week…

Icknamed Fedor, the anthropomorphous machine — which is remarkably agile — was seen undergoing a battery of stress-tests at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, last month.

Continue reading “Russia’s space agency releases eerie footage of human-like android” »