Lifeboat Foundation

Zoom in close on the center of the picture above, and you can spot something you perhaps never thought you’d be able to see: a single atom. Here is a close-up if, you’re having trouble:

This strontium atom is emitting light after being excited by a laser, and it’s the winner of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) photography award. The EPSRC announced the winners of its fifth annual contest yesterday. Winning photographer David Nadlinger, graduate student at the University of Oxford, was just excited to be able to show off his research.

“It’s exciting to find a picture that resonates with other people that shows what I spend my days and nights working on,” Nadlinger told me. The best part, to him, was “the opportunity to excite people about my research, more than winning a competition.”

Continue reading “Picture of Single Trapped Atom Wins UK Science Photography Prize” »

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/reaching-the-finish-line/e/…oplay=true

A recent Falcon 9 launch reportedly contained two prototype global internet satellites, bringing SpaceX closer to establishing the Starlink global network.

Nebula Genomics aims to help people understand their genome and guarantees that individuals will retain permanent ownership of their DNA data, all paid for with a new cryptocurrency.

The program uses state-of-the-art AI techniques, but simple tests show that it’s a long way from real understanding.

What progress is being made in the field of reversing aging — the grand humanitarian project to extend healthy lifespan?

In this London Futurists online video conference, a number of healthspan extension researchers and activists from around the answered questions such as:
• What do you know now, that wasn’t known, or which was less clear, back in January 2017?
• What progress has encouraged you? And what disappointments have there been?
• Overall, what have we learned? And what should the field do differently in the future?

Continue reading “Reversing Aging — 2018 update” »

These campaigns could erode the base of the Legal Open Access movement: scientists’ awareness of their options for sharing research. Elbakyan, on the other hand, would be left unaffected. The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber.

The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

In cramped quarters at Russia’s Higher School of Economics, shared by four students and a cat, sat a server with 13 hard drives. The server hosted Sci-Hub, a website with over 64 million academic papers available for free to anybody in the world. It was the reason that, one day in June 2015, Alexandra Elbakyan, the student and programmer with a futurist streak and a love for neuroscience blogs, opened her email to a message from the world’s largest publisher: “YOU HAVE BEEN SUED.”

Continue reading “Science’s pirate queen” »

The flying taxi could soon be spotted in Dubai and Las Vegas.

There’s a lot going on under the hood of your smartphone camera every time you push the button.