Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover recently attempted its first-ever sample collection of the Martian surface on August 6. However, data shows that while the rover’s drill successfully drilled into the surface, no regolith was collected in the sample tube.

Meanwhile, as Perseverance was preparing for the sample collection event, a team of researchers using ESA’s Mars Express orbiter found evidence that previously thought of lakes of water underneath Mars’ south pole might actually be made of clay.

Perseverance’s sample collection failure

Continue reading “Perseverance’s first sample collection fails, new science points to subsurface Martian clay lakes” »

It’s interesting, but the most advanced robots are acrobatic enough. The Glaring Challenge in robotics right now is copying and duplicating the function of the Human Hand.

Researchers studying rodents’ leaping abilities suggest findings could help them create nimble artificial intelligence systems.

The idea is to offer the predictions for the structure of practically every protein with a known sequence of amino acids free of charge. “We believe that this is the most important contribution to date that artificial intelligence has contributed to scientific knowledge,” he said following the publication of DeepMind’s research in the medical journal Nature.

DeepMind, a company bought by Google, predicts with unprecedented precision the 3D structure of nearly all the proteins made by the human body.

Ever wonder what an atom looks like?

A remarkable photography of a single atom by Ph.D. student David Nadlinger has won the EPSRC science photography contest. The atom photo was captured using a long exposure while the atom emitted light from a laser in a vacuum chamber.

An expanding notion of what “consciousness” is could have profound repercussions.

The Science of Aliens, Part IV: Would they have blood (implying a circulatory system) and if so, what color would it be?

Not every animal bleeds red, even on Earth.

The company has already used AlphaFold, its protein folding AI, to generate structures for nearly all of the human proteome, as well as yeast, fruit flies, mice and more.

Nick Saraev is 25 years old, far too young, it would seem, to be thinking about death. And yet, since he turned 21, he has taken steps to prevent the infirmities of old age. Every day, he takes 2000 mg of fish oil and 4000 IU of vitamin D to help prevent heart disease and other ailments. He steams or pressure-cooks most of his meals because, he says, charring meats creates chemicals that may increase the risk of cancer. And in the winter, he keeps the humidity of his home at 35 percent, because dry air chaps his skin and makes him cough, both of which he considers manifestations of chronic inflammation, which may be bad for longevity.

Based on the life expectancies of young men in North America, Saraev, a freelance software engineer based near Vancouver, believes he has about 55 years before he really has to think about aging. Given the exponential advances in microprocessors and smartphones in his lifetime, he insists the biotech industry will figure out a solution by then. For this reason, Saraev, like any number of young, optimistic, tech-associated men, believes that if he takes the correct preventative steps now, he might well live forever. Saraev’s plan is to keep his body in good enough shape to hit “Longevity Escape Velocity,” a term coined by English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey to denote slowing down your aging enough to reach each new medical advance as it arrives. If you delay your death by 10 years, for example, that’s 10 more years scientists have to come up with a drug, computer program, or robot assist that can make you live even longer. Keep up this game of reverse leapfrog, and eventually death can’t catch you. The term is reminiscent of “planetary escape velocity,” the speed an object needs to move in order to break free of gravity.

The science required to break free of death, unfortunately, is still at ground level. According to Nir Barzilai, M.D., director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, scientists currently understand aging as a function of seven to nine biological hallmarks, factors that change as we grow older and seem to have an anti-aging effect when reversed. You can imagine these as knobs you can turn up or down to increase or decrease the likelihood of illness and frailty. Some of these you may have heard of, including how well cells remove waste, called proteostasis; how well cells create energy, or mitochondrial function; how well cells implement their genetic instructions, or epigenetics; and how well cells maintain their DNA’s integrity, called DNA repair or telomere erosion.

Scientists have discovered a novel way to classify magnetized plasmas that could possibly lead to advances in harvesting on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars. The discovery by theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) found that a magnetized plasma has 10 unique phases and the transitions between them might hold rich implications for practical development.

The spatial boundaries, or transitions, between different phases will support localized wave excitations, the researchers found. “These findings could lead to possible applications of these exotic excitations in space and laboratory plasmas,” said Yichen Fu, a graduate student at PPPL and lead author of a paper in Nature Communications that outlines the research. “The next step is to explore what these excitations could do and how they might be utilized.”