Lifeboat Foundation

Our #ParkerSolarProbe spacecraft lifted off at 3:31 a.m. EDT aboard a United Launch Alliance #DeltaIV Heavy rocket for its journey to our closest star. Throughout its seven-year mission, our the spacecraft will swoop through the Sun’s atmosphere 24 times, getting closer than any spacecraft has gone before. Details: https://www.nasa.gov/…/nasa-ula-launch-parker-solar-probe-o…

The success shows that advances in artificial intelligence aren’t the sole domain of elite programmers.

Denis Aabo Sørensen lost his left hand nine years ago, while handling fireworks. Since then, he has used prosthetic hands, but never one like this. Last year, a team of European engineers created for him a prosthetic hand that connects directly to the remaining nerves in his upper arm. That means the hand is able to send sensations of touch back through his arm and into his brain. Plus, when Sørensen wanted to grab something, he could move the hand by simply thinking about it.

By combining quantum mechanical quirks of light with a technique called photonic force microscopy, scientists can now probe detailed structures inside living cells like never before. This ability could bring into focus previously invisible processes and help biologists better understand how cells work.

Photonic force microscopy is similar to atomic force microscopy, where a fine-tipped needle is used to scan the surface of something extremely small such as DNA. Rather than a needle, researchers used extremely tiny fat granules about 300 nanometers in diameter to map out the flow of cytoplasm inside yeast cells with high precision.

To see where these miniscule fat particles were, they shined a laser on them. Here, the researchers had to rely on what’s known as squeezed light. Photons of light are inherently noisy and because of this, a laser beam’s light particles won’t all hit a detector at the same time. There is a slight randomness to their arrival that makes for a fuzzy picture. But squeezed light uses quantum mechanical tricks to reduce this noise and clear up the fuzziness.

Finding the physical pathways that create consciousness in the brain has eluded scientists thus far.

Scientists have developed gene therapy that lets deaf mice hear whispers – and humans could be next.

An extreme form of inherited deafness has been cured in the rodents, which could pave the way for life-changing treatments for humans born with gene defects that affect hearing and balance.

In a groundbreaking experiment, scientists used a laboratory-made virus to deliver corrective DNA into the inner ear.

Continue reading “Revolutionary gene therapy could be a miracle cure for deafness” »

Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem. Here’s why it’s so hard to make new antibiotics to tackle the problem head-on.

Take a look at these cool robots!

I wish the academy would incentivise scholars to improve society, not chase citations. I want us to reimagine a PhD that is designed not to win kudos within the academic community, but rather aimed at discovering something new that will be useful for practitioners and have real social impact.

Too much research is aimed at insular academic circles rather than the real world. Let’s fix this broken system.

Julian Kirchherr

Continue reading “A PhD should be about improving society, not chasing academic kudos” »