Lifeboat Foundation

It’s the end of the road for the protons this year after a magnificent performance from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). On Friday, the final beams of the 2017 proton run circulated in the LHC. The run ended, as it does every year, with a round up of the luminosity performance, the indicator by which the effectiveness of a collider is measured and on which the operators keep a constant eye.

The LHC has far exceeded its target for 2017. It has provided its two major experiments, ATLAS and CMS, with 50 inverse femtobarns of data, i.e. 5 billion million million collisions. The inverse femtobarn (fb-1) is the unit used to measure integrated luminosity, or the cumulative number of potential collisions over a given period.

This result is all the more remarkable because the machine experts had to overcome a serious setback. A vacuum problem in the beam pipe of a magnet cell limited the number of bunches that could circulate in the machine. Several teams were brought in to find a solution. Notably, the arrangement of the bunches in the beams was changed. After a few weeks, luminosity started to increase again.

China is developing aircraft capable of reaching US shores with nuclear warheads in just 14 minutes, reports suggest.

The craft will be capable of hypersonic flight speeds of up to 27,000 miles per hour (43,200 kmh) — 35 times the speed of sound.

Continue reading “China sets 2020 date for world’s fastest wind tunnel” »

On Wednesday—for only the second time—the Food and Drug Administration approved a cutting-edge therapy that genetically modifies a patient’s blood cells in order to attack cancer. This time the therapy, known as CAR T-cell therapy, is designed to treat aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

In August, the FDA approved the first CAR T-cell therapy, for a drug called Kymriah designed for children and young adults whose leukemia doesn’t respond to standard treatments. The FDA’s approval of Yescarta, manufactured by Kite Pharma, comes just a few months after its first approval—an indication of just how quickly the field of immunotherapy is moving. Several other companies also have CAR-T therapies in the works.

With China taking a strong lead in the militarization of the Final Frontier, the Air Force has announced it’s time for the US to catch up. Air Force Lieutenant General and President of Air University Steve Kwast says we need to change the way we look at space operations.

“Failure is not an option” is probably the most famous slogan to come out of NASA (apart from the closely related “Houston, we have a problem”). Those were the 1970s, though—this is a new age, with new rules. And according to Kwast, one of those rules should be “fail-first, fail-forward.” Even with rockets.

It’s all part of a new proposal Kwast is pushing called “Fast Space: Leveraging Ultra Low-Cost Space Access for 21st Century Challenges.”

There are many benefits to exercise and how it can reduce the impact of the aging process. We have previously talked about how even a moderate amount of gentle exercise, such as walking, dancing, and strength training, can improve health and reduce mortality.

New research suggests that even moderate levels of physical activity can reduce glaucoma, one of the leading causes of blindness in the United States, and which is most prevalent among the elderly.

The data presented by UCLA researchers at the 121st Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology showed that the most physically active people involved in a recent study have a 73 percent reduced risk of developing glaucoma compared to the least active.

Continue reading “Exercise May Help to Protect Your Eyesight” »

Every so often when talking about aging and eradicating age-related diseases someone will say there are other more important things that must be solved before we earn the right to live healthy and longer lives.

When you discuss any major issue, sooner or later someone will say it: there are more urgent issues than whatever it is you’re advocating for. Sometimes it may be true; other times, and probably most of the time, it’s a logical fallacy known as appeal to worse problems (or “not as bad as”, or even “fallacy of relative privation”).

For example, say you’ve got two issues, A and B, that cannot possibly be both dealt with at the same time; if A is life-threatening and B isn’t, well, then I think it’d make sense to reply “there are more urgent issues” to whoever suggests B should be taken care of first. However, all too often, this answer is abused to play down the importance of a problem that doesn’t happen to be one’s personal favourite—and yes, I’ve seen this happen with rejuvenation therapies.

Oldest tree found.

Fossilized trees from a much warmer era of Antarctic history could provide a basis for predictions about the planet’s warming future.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YJB3RpKZ8fs

The U.S. intelligence community is upping its early-stage investments in machine-learning companies — but Beijing is pouring in far more.

A trio of new investments in Silicon Valley machine-learning startups shows that the U.S. intelligence community is deeply interested in artificial intelligence. But China is investing even more in these kinds of U.S. companies, and that has experts and intelligence officials worried.

Continue reading “China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups” »

To mark the letter’s 25th anniversary, researchers have issued a bracing follow-up. In a communique published Monday in the journal BioScience, more than 15,000 scientists from 184 countries assess the world’s latest responses to various environmental threats. Once again, they find us sorely wanting.

In 1992, scientists warned humanity about a host of impending ecological disasters. A quarter-century later, most of them have gotten worse.