Lifeboat Foundation

Arsenic is a deadly poison for most living things, but new research shows that microorganisms are breathing arsenic in a large area of the Pacific Ocean. A University of Washington team has discovered that an ancient survival strategy is still being used in low-oxygen parts of the marine environment.

“Thinking of arsenic as not just a bad guy, but also as beneficial, has reshaped the way that I view the element,” said first author Jaclyn Saunders, who did the research for her doctoral thesis at the UW and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Continue reading “Arsenic-breathing life discovered in the tropical Pacific Ocean” »

Dubbed by one scientist as, “probably the most important paper to be published in the field of dementia in the last five years,” a team of researchers has described a newly defined neurodegenerative disease that closely mimics the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, but which has an entirely different pathological cause.

In our final episode of Crash Course Engineering we are going to take all the tools and ideas we’ve discussed throughout this series and try to imagine where we’re headed. We’re going to explore some of the biggest problems that today’s engineers are trying to solve and make some guesses about what the future of the field might look like.

Crash Course Engineering is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1mtdjDVOoOqJzeaJAV15Tq0tZ1vKj7ZV

Continue reading “The Biggest Problems We’re Facing Today & The Future of Engineering: Crash Course Engineering #46” »

Reactor designs are inspired by everything from smoke rings to shrimps.

The vehicle carried 38 experiments to suborbital space and back today.

Bridgewater Associates billionaire Ray Dalio once gave some of the world’s most successful visionaries — from Elon Musk to Bill Gates — a personality assessment to learn what makes them so successful. Here’s what he found.

An Instagram filter with AI-generated poetry.

The mission could tell us a lot more about how the solar system formed.

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have made a key observation about one of the most fundamental biological processes: gene transcription.