Lifeboat Foundation

Madeleine Lancaster has 300 brains growing in her lab – here’s how she’s done it.

The robot uses trial and error to perfect complex tasks.

A new mathematical model of memory could accelerate the quest to build super-powered, brain-inspired hardware systems.

In Brief:

Researchers have proposed an alternative way to generate super-strong magnetic fields that would solve the hindrances keeping us from harnessing the Faraday effect to its full use. More research and experimentation are needed to test the method.

Continue reading “Physicists Propose A Way to Make Magnetic Fields That Are Stronger Than Any on Earth” »

A space nation, independent of countries on Earth, could be founded after a team of engineers, scientists and legal experts put forward proposals for an extra-terrestrial state.

The project, which is led by Russian scientist Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, Chairman of UNESCOs Science of Space committee, aims to create an area in space which is beyond the control of individual nations.

Under current space law, government’s must authorise and supervise space programmes run from their own countries even if they are commercial.

Continue reading “Scientists propose space nation named ‘Asgardia’ and cosmic shield to protect Earth from asteroids” »

A rare group of children is immune to AIDS, scientists believe.

The 170 boys and girls in South Africa are known as ‘non-progressors’.

Continue reading “Rare group of children are IMMUNE to AIDS, scientists reveal” »

The first of 50 patients to complete a trial for a new HIV treatment in the UK is showing no signs of the virus in his blood.

The initial signs are very promising, but it’s too soon to say it’s a cure just yet: the HIV may return, doctors warn, and the presence of anti-HIV drugs in the man’s body mean it’s difficult to tell whether traces of the virus are actually gone for good.

That said, the team behind the trial – run by five British universities and the UK’s National Health Service – says we could be on the brink of defeating HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) for real.

Continue reading “A new treatment appears to have erased HIV from a patient’s blood” »

There are two kinds of people in Washington, DC, says entrepreneur Dean Kamen. There are the policy experts, whom he calls cynics. And there are the scientists, whom he deems optimists.

Kamen, speaking at the White House Frontiers Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, places himself in the latter camp. Unlike policy wonks and politicians who see diseases like Alzheimer’s or ALS as unstoppable scourges, Kamen points out that previously terrifying diseases were all toppled by medical innovation. The plague, polio, smallpox — all were civilization-threatening epidemics until experimental scientists discovered new ways to combat them.

If that sounds like the kind of disruption that the tech industry has unleashed across the rest of the world, that’s no accident. Kamen, the founder of DEKA, a medical R&D company, says that the same trends that have empowered our computers and phones and communication networks will soon power a revolution in health care. He says that medical innovation follows a predictable cycle. First we feel powerless before a disease. Then we seek ways of treating it. Then we attempt to cure it.

Continue reading “Engineering a Better Body and the End of Disease” »

In their study, published on the pre-print server arxiv.org, Maha Salah, Fayçal Hammad, Mir Faizal and Ahmed Farag Ali have been able to look at the state of the universe before its beginning, creating a model of pre-Big Bang cosmology.

The cosmology of the universe can be modelled using the Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It predicts that the universe is expanding and the galaxies are all moving away from us. Also the further a galaxy is away, the faster it is moving away from us. This is used to predict the universe started with a Big Bang – if you reverse this expansion to go back in time, eventually we come to the point where the universe began.

At the point of Big Bang the laws of Einstein’s general theory of relativity seem to break down and it is not possible to use them to understand how the Big Bang occurred. So, how did the Big Bang happen and can we describe physics before the Big Bang? Can we describe physics before the creation of the universe? According to the team’s model, yes, we can.

Continue reading “Before the Big Bang there was another universe and a new one will emerge after ours collapses” »