Lifeboat Foundation

France’s postal service has begun using drones to make parcel deliveries to a remote Alpine village.

La Poste’s subsidiary, DPD, says flying packages by remote control is more reliable, quicker and safer than driving a van up narrow mountain roads in winter when they are often icy or blocked by snow.

The delivery by drone, which flies at around 30km/h, takes eight minutes for a round trip, compared with 30 minutes for a vehicle.

Molecular biologist Fiona Behan reports on how the CRISPR gene-editing technique can find cancer’s weak points, identifying targets for new drugs.

There’s some irony in the fact that the darkest objects in the sky — black holes — can be responsible for some of the Universe’s brightest light. Simulations of the magnetic fields surrounding black holes and neutron stars have now provided new insights into their astonishing brilliance.

Astrophysicists from Columbia University in New York have developed a model that shows how electrons taking a cosmic roller coaster-ride through magnetic turbulence can generate surprisingly energetic waves of radiation.

Applied to the swirling chaos surrounding dense objects such as black holes, it helps to explain why we see them glow with a ferocity that so far defies explanation.

A heart transplant team at Duke University, North Carolina, has become the first in the US to reanimate the heart of a deceased donor and transplant it into a recipient.

Image Credit: Csaba Deli / Shutterstock.com

Some people hope to cheat death by storing their consciousness digitally. Science isn’t quite there yet, but we’ve done enough brain and memory research to have immediate implications – and to start asking uncomfortable questions.

The idea of attaining de facto immortality by translating your brain into code and storing your personality as a digital copy online has been captivating people’s imagination for quite some time. It is particularly popular among transhumanists, people who advocate enhancing human intellect and physiology through the most sophisticated technology available.

As the most technologically advanced nations around the world pour resources into brain studies and yesterday’s science fiction becomes reality, it might seem that humanity is nearing a breakthrough in this field. Could the ability to become a “ghost in the shell” – like in the iconic cyberpunk Japanese manga, or the 2017 film – be just around the corner?

The development could lead to personalized, responsive medical devices.

Editing of hemoglobin gene leads two people with different conditions to no longer need regular blood transfusions.

The idea that our universe is just part of a much vaster cosmos has a long history—and it’s still very much with us.

The current Lambda CDM model may explain a great deal about the evolution and the chronology of the events that occurred in our Universe but it doesn’t paint the complete picture.

We know of the cosmic inflation that happened followed by the Big Bang itself however how these two are coherently connected has so far defied all our attempts to explain.

During the inflationary period, within less than a trillionth of a second, our universe grew from an infinitesimal point to an octillion (that’s 1 followed by 27 zeroes) times in size, which was followed by a more conventional and gradual period of expansion, nevertheless violent by our standards, which we know as the Big Bang.