Lifeboat Foundation

Tag your bestie if you’ve ever “been on the same wavelength.”

Even fierce tyrannosaurs would have been afraid of Zuul, a club-tailed Cretaceous beast known as the “destroyer of shins.”

Tornadoes are some of the most destructive weather events on the planet, so understanding how they form is vital in forming early warning systems that give people plenty of time to take cover. It’s long been thought that rotation in storm clouds is the very first sign that a twister is taking shape, but new research suggests that the cloud rotation might actually be the last piece of the tornado puzzle.

While monitoring a large tornado-producing storm in central Oklahoma, meteorologist Jana Houser of Ohio University gathered readings using a mobile Doppler radar that logged wind speeds twice per minute. This painted a detailed picture of the exact moment the clouds began to rotate, but it wasn’t until afterward that Houser and her fellow researchers noticed an anomaly.

#MissUniverse #MissPhilippines #MissUniverse2018 #ParaSaBayan

Would you want your children to become Venusian cloud pirates?

A Dutch couple is traversing Antarctica at 5 miles per hour in their Solar Voyager, which they made from upcycled plastic and solar panels.

A terrifying wargame experiment.

Researchers have discovered a link between the cellular recycling system known as autophagy and the behavior of microglial immune cells during aging.

We have discussed the polarization of macrophages in a number of previous articles, and it has become quite a hot topic among researchers in the last few years. Microglia are tissue-resident macrophages in the central nervous system, and, like other macrophages, they also have a certain polarization state that essentially determines their behavioral patterns and activities.

There are two main polarizations in macrophages that are of interest: M1 and M2. In simple terms, M1 macrophages aggressively intercept pathogens and are proinflammatory, as they use various cellular weapons against invading bacteria and viruses. In contrast, M2 macrophages are focused on reducing inflammation to facilitate tissue repair and healing.

Continue reading “Loss of Autophagy Linked to Changes in Microglia” »

WASHINGTON — The history of maritime vessels in the U.S. is preserved in an unlikely place — at the bottom of a river.

Nearly 200 military shipwrecks — dating as far back as the Revolutionary War and including ships from the Civil War and both World War I and World War II — were deliberately sunk over centuries, in an area of the Potomac River called Mallows Bay, in Maryland. Over time, this so-called ghost fleet of wooden ships has come to serve as habitat for local wildlife.

But is this artificial ecosystem stable? Researchers recently investigated how the shipwrecks have changed over time; their findings, presented here on Dec. 13 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), explained how the bodies of the ships weathered river conditions — in some cases for hundreds of years — and how that might affect the future of the ghost fleet ecosystem. [Mayday! 17 Mysterious Shipwrecks You Can See on Google Earth].