Lifeboat Foundation

One small amoeba found a solution to the traveling salesman problem faster than our best algorithms. What does it know that we don’t?

It was the year that technology—and the people who create it—seemingly could do no right, and did much that was wrong. As one of my sources put it in a tweet reacting to a dumb tech stunt, “2018 can’t end soon enough.”

A team of Florida State University researchers has unlocked a decades-old mystery about how a critical cellular process is regulated and what that could mean for the future study of genetics.

AI-powered robots may soon be doing some procedures faster, more accurately and with fewer complications than humans.

• By Sandip S. Panesar on December 27, 2018

In the rare books collection of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, a large tome tied with string sits in an ivory box that looks like it came from a bakery. At one point, the book belonged to Edwin Hubble, who revealed that galaxies exist beyond our own and that the universe is expanding, among other things, at nearby Mount Wilson Observatory. Between the well-worn leather cover boards, I find some of the first detailed maps of the lunar surface, illustrated and engraved in the 17^th century. As I delicately place the volume back in the box, the covers leave a light brown residue on my fingertips—a small remnant of one man’s quest to tame the moon.

The book, titled Selenographia, was created by perhaps the most innovative Polish astronomer since Copernicus. But Johannes Hevelius, as we call him in the English-speaking world, has been somewhat more forgotten among history’s great scientists. Selenographia was the first book of lunar maps and diagrams, extensively covering the moon’s various phases. More than 300 years before humans stepped onto the moon’s surface, Hevelius was documenting every crater, slope and valley that he could see with his telescope. He conducted these observations, as well as others for a comprehensive star catalog, using his own equipment in a homemade rooftop observatory.

Published in 1647, Selenographia made Hevelius a celebrity of sorts. The Italian astronomer Niccolo Zucchi even showed a copy of the book to the pope. Of course, like Copernicus before him, Hevelius believed that that the Earth orbited the sun. And according to Johannes Hevelius and His Catalog of Stars, published by Brigham Young University Press, Pope Pius IX said Selenographia “would be a book without parallel, had it not been written by a heretic.”

Continue reading “The 17th-Century Astronomer Who Made the First Atlas of the Moon” »

Death’s Dress Rehearsal: Virtual Reality Explores Dying In A Hospice : Shots — Health News A Maine medical school and nearby hospice center are trying out a VR program aimed at fostering more empathy for dying patients among health workers-in-training. Not everyone is sold on the idea.

Professor Paul Dyson of Swansea University Medical School said:

“This new strain of bacteria is effective against 4 of the top 6 pathogens that are resistant to antibiotics, including MRSA. Our discovery is an important step forward in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Our results show that folklore and traditional medicines are worth investigating in the search for new antibiotics. Scientists, historians and archaeologists can all have something to contribute to this task. It seems that part of the answer to this very modern problem might lie in the wisdom of the past.”

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has been speeding through space since early 2006 and it’s about to make what might be its most interesting flyby to date. After speeding past Jupiter and Pluto in the 12 years since its launch, the probe is about to have a very close encounter with a mysterious object in the outer Solar System called Ultima Thule. As luck would have it, it’s going to meet its target on New Year’s Day, and it’s a pretty big deal for NASA.

As we approach the probe’s arrival at Ultima Thule, NASA is announcing its schedule of events related to the probe’s flyby. The big show will begin on the afternoon of Monday, December 31st, and it’ll kick off three days of news and briefings that will give us our best look yet at an extremely distant Solar System object.