Lifeboat Foundation

NASA needs to get out of the rocket business and start doing what it’s uniquely qualified for.

• By Howard Bloom on January 4, 2017

Polarized —

NASA funds mission to study energy from black holes and other extremes.

The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer should launch in 2020 and cost $188 million.

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The International Space Station is getting on in years, and at some point in the next decade we’re going to learn the date of its shutdown. But what comes next? A new company called Axiom Space has a plan to launch a commercial space station in the next few years, which would get its start as a module attached to the ISS.

It’s easy to shrug off a plan from a company you’ve never heard of, but Axiom has some big names on board. For example, it’s led by one Mike Suffredini, who managed NASA’s ISS program for 10 years. The time is fast approaching that we need to come up with a successor to the ISS, and Axiom’s commercial station could be it.

The plan calls for the core module to be launched around 2020. There are two versions of this phase of construction; one in which the 9×5 meter module (known as Module 1) is launched in one piece, and another where it’s sent up in pieces and assembled in orbit. Assembling in space would take longer, but sending it up as a single payload would be expensive and risky. The completed Module 1 will have its own propulsion, so it will fly to the ISS after reaching orbit.

Continue reading “A new space firm plans a commercial station to take over for the ISS” »

Interesting article on future of elections in Newsweek:

Billionaire Facebook founder may follow in Trump’s footsteps in running for office without prior political experience.

Brain cancer treated with patient’s own immune cells.

A man with an aggressive cancer in his brain and spine went into remission after doctors dripped his own white blood cells into his brain.

India is going to endorse a Universal Basic Income (UBI), according to a leading advocate of the system.

The world’s largest democracy will release a report in January stating that UBI is “basically the way forward,” according to Professor Guy Standing, who has worked on universal income pilot projects in India.

If implemented, India would join Finland in providing free money to citizens.

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Despite efforts to raise public awareness about the disease, cases of melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, have been on the rise in the United States for years. Now, scientists have discovered a new drug that can stop metastasis of the disease, that is, the development of melanoma cells elsewhere in the body — by as much as 90 percent.

The findings are courtesy of a new study published in the journal Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. For the study, researchers injected immuno-compromised mice with human melanoma cells and exposed them to a man-made, small-molecule drug that targets a gene’s ability to produce RNA molecules (one of the major building blocks of life) and certain proteins found in melanoma tumors. Those genes typically cause the disease to spread, but when they were exposed to the compound, up to 90 percent of the cells were prevented from metastasizing.

The potential drug, known as CCG-203971, is the same as the one the researchers have been studying as a potential treatment for scleroderma, a rare and often fatal autoimmune disease that causes the hardening of skin tissue, lungs, heart, kidneys, and other organs.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover New Drug That Stops the Spread of 90% of Melanoma Cells” »

The non-nuclear weapons states must resist that pressure, and continue their historic efforts to protect humanity from the grave threat posed by nuclear weapons. And the citizens of nuclear weapons states must hold their governments accountable for their unconscionable refusal to meet their treaty obligations and negotiate the elimination of these weapons, which are the greatest threat to the security of all peoples throughout the world.

The United Nations has the opportunity to take a major step toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. It is an opportunity that must not be lost.

More than four decades ago, the nations with nuclear arsenals and the world’s non-nuclear states entered into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); the nuclear states — the US, Russia, UK, France and China — pledged that if the states that did not have nuclear weapons agreed not to develop them, they would enter into good-faith negotiations toward the elimination of their nuclear arsenals. During the ensuing years, the three nations that did not sign the NPT — namely India, Pakistan, and Israel — developed nuclear weapons. All of the non-nuclear weapons states that signed the treaty except North Korea have kept their pledge.

Continue reading “6 Nobel Laureates: Stop the Nuclear Insanity” »

Is the future really going to be so bad that you wouldn’t want to live longer? Hardly!

#aging

The future looks grim? That’s quite an interesting claim, and I wonder whether there is any evidence to support it. In fact, I think there’s plenty of evidence to believe the opposite, i.e. that the future will be bright indeed. However, I can’t promise the future will certainly be bright. I am no madame clearvoyant, but neither are doomsday prophets. We can all only speculate, no matter how ‘sure’ pessimists may say they are about the horrible dystopian future that allegedly awaits us. I’m soon going to present the evidence of the bright future I believe in, but before I do, I would like to point out a few problems in the reasoning of the professional catastrophists who say that life won’t be worth living and there’s thus no point in extending it anyway.

Continue reading “Why live longer when the future looks so grim?” »