Lifeboat Foundation

Over at Picatinny Arsenal, the research and development facility and proving ground for the U.S. Army’s weaponry, engineers are developing a device that shoots lighting bolts along a laser beam to annihilate its target. That’s right: lighting bolts shot down laser beams. This story could easily end right here and still be the coolest thing we’ve written today, but for the scientifically curious we’ll continue.

The Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC) can be used to destroy anything that conducts electricity better than the air or ground surrounding it (unexploded ordnance seems a good candidate here). It works off of some pretty basic principles of physics, using a laser to carve an electromagnetic path through the air that accommodates a high-voltage beam. Create that path, crank up the voltage, and your target is toast.

It works like this: a high intensity, super-short duration (maybe two-trillionths of a second) laser pulse will actually use air like lens—surrounding air focuses the beam, keeping the laser pulse nice and tight rather than scattering it. If the pulse is strong enough, it actually creates an electromagnetic field around itself that’s so powerful it strips electrons from air molecules, essentially creating a channel of plasma through the air. Since air is composed of neutral particles (that act as insulators) and the plasma channel is a good conductor (relative to the un-ionized air around it) the path of the laser beam becomes a kind of filament.

Continue reading “Army Demonstrates a Weapon That Shoots Laser-Guided Lightning Bolts” »

Denver is set to become the first city in the nation to effectively decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms after final ballot-counting flipped Initiative 301’s margin in favor of narrow passage.

5 Mysterious Photos Taken By NASA On The Moon!
Our curiosity has led us to investigate, every aspect and every corner of the moon.

But sometimes, when you’re looking for something, you can find unpleasant surprises, which may disturb you for a long time.

Scientists think they’ve solved the pressing problem of desalination, which could radically improve water sustainability.

We characterize a novel probe binding-site polymorphism detectable solely by melt curve analysis using the Roche LightCycler HSV 1/2 analyte-specific reagent real-time PCR assay. The frequencies of this novel (47°C) and previously described intermediate (60 to 62°C) melt curves were 0.016% and 4.9%, respectively.

The clinical spectrum of herpes simplex virus (HSV-1, HSV-2) infection ranges from subclinical mucosal shedding to vesicular or ulcerative lesions of skin and mucous membranes, hepatitis, keratitis, pneumonitis, sepsis, and meningoencephalitis. For laboratory diagnosis, laborious cell culture techniques have been largely supplanted with real-time PCR (qPCR) due to marked improvements in test sensitivity and turnaround time. Various laboratory-developed and commercially available qPCR products (analyte-specific reagents [ASR]; FDA approved) exist. In the United States, the LightCycler HSV 1/2 ASR real-time PCR assay (HSV qPCR; Roche Diagnostics, Indianapolis, IN) is commonplace, being used by about 30% of clinical laboratories according to a recent College of American Pathologists (CAP) participant summary.

Circa 2011 Talks about he lightcycler.

Carl T. Wittwer, M.D., Ph.D.

Seminal technology continues to be a work in progress.

Continue reading “Evolution of Polymerase Chain Reaction” »

Physicians making life-and-death decisions about organ transplants, cancer treatments or heart surgeries typically don’t give much thought to how artificial intelligence might help them. And that’s how researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say clinical AI tools should be designed—so doctors don’t need to think about them.

A surgeon might never feel the need to ask an AI for advice, much less allow it to make a clinical decision for them, said John Zimmerman, the Tang Family Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). But an AI might guide decisions if it were embedded in the decision-making routines already used by the clinical team, providing AI-generated predictions and evaluations as part of the overall mix of information.

Zimmerman and his colleagues call this approach “Unremarkable AI.”

Continue reading “Researchers make transformational AI seem ‘unremarkable’” »

Cosmologists propose a groundbreaking model of the universe using string theory.

Biomedical application of quercetin (QT) as an effective flavonoid has limitations due to its low bioavailability. Superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticle (SPION) is a novel drug delivery system that enhances the bioavailability of quercetin. The effect of short time usage of quercetin on learning and memory function and its signaling pathways in the healthy rat is not well understood. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of free quercetin and in conjugation with SPION on learning and memory in healthy rats and to find quercetin target proteins involved in learning and memory using Morris water maze (MWM) and computational methods respectively. Results of MWM show an improvement in learning and memory of rats treated with either quercetin or QT-SPION. Better learning and memory functions using QT-SPION reveal increased bioavailability of quercetin. Comparative molecular docking studies show the better binding affinity of quercetin to RSK2, MSK1, CytC, Cdc42, Apaf1, FADD, CRK proteins. Quercetin in comparison to specific inhibitors of each protein also demonstrates a better QT binding affinity. This suggests that quercetin binds to proteins leading to prevent neural cell apoptosis and improves learning and memory. Therefore, SPIONs could increase the bioavailability of quercetin and by this way improve learning and memory.