Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Princeton University have found a way to make a tokamak nuclear fusion reactor safer using insulating boron powder. The new research appears in the IAEA journal Nuclear Fusion and comes from Princeton’s U.S. Department of Energy-funded Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL).

A tokamak, like the huge one that will reach 200 million Celsius in China next year, is a nuclear fusion plasma reactor where extremely hot, charged plasma spins and generates virtually limitless energy. The Princeton research examines the way boron powder can prevent one of the fundamental flaws in existing plasma reactor technology.

More than half a million pieces of man-made space junk are orbiting the Earth at speeds up to 17,500 miles per hour. Even the tiniest pieces have the potential to destroy any of the 1,700 satellites circling the Earth.

Nuclear physicist Taylor Wilson joined the Air Force Space Command to see how a growing military and commercial space presence threatens the ubiquitous satellites, which are essential to humanity’s digital way of life.

Continue reading “Space Debris Is Now a Big Problem | VICE on HBO” »

#18 in our top science stories of 2019.

Planets beyond our galaxy could be discovered using gravitational waves. Such worlds would be like Magrathea in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.’

Engineering Food: The Impossible Whopper.

“Now, let’s compare the estrogen hormone in an impossible whopper to the whopper made from hormone implanted beef. The impossible whopper has 44 mg of estrogen and the whopper has 2.5 ng of estrogen. Now let me refresh your metric system. There are 1 million nanograms (ng) in one milligram (mg). That means an impossible whopper has 18 million times as much estrogen as a regular whopper. Just six glasses of soy milk per day has enough estrogen to grow boobs on a male. That’s the equivalent of eating four impossible whoppers per day. You would have to eat 880 pounds of beef from an implanted steer to equal the amount of estrogen in one birth control pill.”

The impossible whopper is being advertised by Burger King as a plant based alternative to the whopper. When food manufacturers started talking about making artificial meat, I, too, thought it would be impossible to make a hamburger cheaply enough to make it competitive. You see, I assumed that they would have to buy the individual amino acids (the building blocks for protein) and chemically string them together in the proper order, then remove the reagents (chemicals needed to cause the chain reactions) and then add something to give it the right textures.

Continue reading “Stangle: Impossible burgers are made of what?” »

Writing in Nature Medicine, an international team headed by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe a new way to effectively deliver a gene-silencing vector to adult amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) mice, resulting in long-term suppression of the degenerative motor neuron disorder if treatment vector is delivered prior to disease onset, and blockage of disease progression in adult animals if treatment is initiated when symptoms have already appeared.

The findings are published in the December 23, 2019 online issue of the journal Nature Medicine. Martin Marsala, MD, professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and a member of the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, is senior author of the study.

ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. Motor neurons responsible for communicating movement are specifically harmed, with subsequent, progressive loss of muscle control affecting the ability to speak, eat, move and breathe. More than 5,000 Americans are diagnosed with ALS each year, with an estimated 30,000 persons currently living with the disease. While there are symptomatic treatments for ALS, there is currently no cure. The majority of patients succumb to the disease two to five years after diagnosis.

Raising hope of effective treatment for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), researchers have found that the brain knows how to integrate natural and artificial vision, while maintaining information processing that is important for vision.

AMD is a common cause of severe vision loss in among those aged 50 and over.

Though there is no cure for AMD, significant recent advancements in artificial retina implants may lead to effective treatment.

When it comes to kefir benefits, there are more than you can shake a well populated gut microbiome at. Because the drink – typically made from cow, goat or sheep milk, that gets the funky, fermented treatment – is resplendent in potential wins for your health.

But it can be a bit of a, erm, challenging concept. Why? Well, the texture can wind up somewhat lumpy, and the taste is distinctly sour. It’s fermented by adding kefir grains, which are colonies of yeast and lactic acid bacteria that look like tiny gel-like beads, similar to those used for sourdough, to milk and leaving for 24 hours, allowing the microorganisms to multiply and ferment the lactose to lactic acid. Bang: you’ve got DIY kefir.

Though — shocker — is isn’t vegan, it is possible to make from non-dairy milks or drinks, like coconut water, but the benefits proven in the same way. It is however low in lactose (the natural sugar in the milk), as the process of making kefir turns the lactose into lactic acid, so often lactose intolerant people can drink it.