Lifeboat Foundation

In the rare books collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a large tome tied with string sits in an ivory box that looks like it came from a bakery. At one point, the book belonged to Edwin Hubble, who revealed that galaxies exist beyond our own and that the universe is expanding, among other things, at nearby Mount Wilson Observatory. Between the well-worn leather cover boards, I find some of the first detailed maps of the lunar surface, illustrated and engraved in the 17^th century. As I delicately place the volume back in the box, the covers leave a light brown residue on my fingertips—a small remnant of one man’s quest to tame the moon.

The book, titled Selenographia, was created by perhaps the most innovative Polish astronomer since Copernicus. But Johannes Hevelius, as we call him in the English-speaking world, has been somewhat more forgotten among history’s great scientists. Selenographia was the first book of lunar maps and diagrams, extensively covering the moon’s various phases. More than 300 years before humans stepped onto the moon’s surface, Hevelius was documenting every crater, slope and valley that he could see with his telescope. He conducted these observations, as well as others for a comprehensive star catalog, using his own equipment in a homemade rooftop observatory.

Published in 1647, Selenographia made Hevelius a celebrity of sorts. The Italian astronomer Niccolo Zucchi even showed a copy of the book to the pope. Of course, like Copernicus before him, Hevelius believed that that the Earth orbited the sun. And according to Johannes Hevelius and His Catalog of Stars, published by Brigham Young University Press, Pope Pius IX said Selenographia “would be a book without parallel, had it not been written by a heretic.”

Continue reading “The 17th-Century Astronomer Who Made the First Atlas of the Moon” »

Death’s Dress Rehearsal: Virtual Reality Explores Dying In A Hospice : Shots — Health News A Maine medical school and nearby hospice center are trying out a VR program aimed at fostering more empathy for dying patients among health workers-in-training. Not everyone is sold on the idea.

Professor Paul Dyson of Swansea University Medical School said:

“This new strain of bacteria is effective against 4 of the top 6 pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA. Our discovery is an important step forward in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Our results show that folklore and traditional medicines are worth investigating in the search for new antibiotics. Scientists, historians and archaeologists can all have something to contribute to this task. It seems that part of the answer to this very modern problem might lie in the wisdom of the past.”

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been speeding through space since early 2006 and it’s about to make what might be its most interesting flyby to date. After speeding past Jupiter and Pluto in the 12 years since its launch, the probe is about to have a very close encounter with a mysterious object in the outer Solar System called Ultima Thule. As luck would have it, it’s going to meet its target on New Year’s Day, and it’s a pretty big deal for NASA.

As we approach the probe’s arrival at Ultima Thule, NASA is announcing its schedule of events related to the probe’s flyby. The big show will begin on the afternoon of Monday, December 31st, and it’ll kick off three days of news and briefings that will give us our best look yet at an extremely distant Solar System object.

May the force be with you…

• A man named Ryan, who asked INSIDER to only use his first name, decided to prank his parents with a Christmas gift this year.
• He told them it was a portrait of Jesus, when really the painting he gave them was of Ewan McGregor’s character Obi-Wan Kenobi from the “Star Wars” films.
• When Ryan spoke to INSIDER, he had admitted the prank to his dad, but his mother still didn’t know the painting wasn’t of Jesus.

A Utah man gave his parents a portrait of Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi for Christmas, and his mother hung it on her wall thinking it was Jesus.

Ryan, who asked INSIDER to only use his first name, shared Click on photo to start video.

Continue reading “A Utah man pranked his parents by giving them a portrait of Obi-Wan Kenobi that looks like Jesus for Christmas” »

A class of drugs used to treat certain breast cancers could help fight lung cancers that have become resistant to targeted therapies, according to a study conducted in mice.

The study, published in the journal Cell Reports, found that lung tumours in mice caused by mutations in a gene called EGFR shrunk significantly when a protein called p110a was blocked.

Researchers in the field of quantum communication have recently made great strides, taking us closer to a perfectly secure method of communication.

For years, researchers struggled to find ways to amplify quantum signals, store large amounts of quantum data, and allow for more than two nodes in a quantum network. However, in the last two months, solutions to all three of these problems have been found using the bizarre properties of the quantum world, in particular quantum entanglement.

Now that these hurdles have been overcome, quantum networks and even a quantum internet seem like real possibilities.

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Physics grappled with the question of whether space is absolute or relative for centuries, before deciding in favor of relativity. But, it is only in recent years that the brain sciences have begun to discuss a parallel set of questions. For many years now, absolute space has ruled neuroscience. In the visual system, for example, it has long been assumed that there are two channels of information flow.4 The first is the “what” channel, carrying information about the identity of objects that an animal sees. The second is the “where” channel, containing information about the absolute position of these objects. It was believed that the “what” channel contained no positional information at all. However, recent work has shown that while no information about the absolute position of an object is present in this channel, there is relative position information.5,6 This relative positional information is likely to be very important for object recognition.

The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location. They called them “place cells.”

Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel proposed that the hippocampus contains an invariant representation of space that does not depend on mood or desire. They called this representation the “cognitive map.” In their view, all of the brain’s place cells together represent the entirety of an animal’s environment, and whichever place cell is active indicates its current location. In other words, the hippocampus is like a GPS. It tells you where you are on a map and that map remains the same whether you are hungry and looking for food or sleepy and looking for a bed. O’Keefe and Nadel suggested that the absolute position represented in the hippocampal place cells provides a mental framework that can be used by an animal to find its way in any situation—be that to find food or a bed.

Continue reading “The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS” »

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