Lifeboat Foundation

How have stars and planets developed from the clouds of dust and gas that once filled the cosmos? A novel experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has demonstrated the validity of a widespread theory known as “magnetorotational instability,” or MRI, that seeks to explain the formation of heavenly bodies.

The theory holds that MRI allows accretion disks, clouds of dust, gas, and plasma that swirl around growing stars and planets as well as black holes, to collapse into them. According to the theory, this collapse happens because turbulent swirling plasma, technically known as “Keplerian flows,” gradually grows unstable within a disk. The instability causes angular momentum—the process that keeps orbiting planets from being drawn into the sun—to decrease in inner sections of the disk, which then fall into celestial bodies.

Unlike orbiting planets, the matter in dense and crowded accretion disks may experience forces such as friction that cause the disks to lose angular momentum and be drawn into the objects they swirl around. However, such forces cannot fully explain how quickly matter must fall into larger objects for planets and stars to form on a reasonable timescale.

Continue reading “Novel experiment validates widely speculated mechanism behind the formation of stars” »

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New York: Researchers say they have developed an innovative new system for delivering a malaria vaccine that shows promise in its effectiveness. By developing a vaccine that targets specific cells in the immune system, researchers from the University of Chicago in the US saw a much greater immune and antibody response to the vaccine.

Though a vaccine for malaria exists, it is only effective in 30 to 50 per cent of patients, and malaria is still responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths annually, according to the US Centers for Disease Control. “When compared to the current malaria vaccine option, our results are extremely exciting,” said Jeffrey Hubbell, a professor at the University of Chicago.

Quantum dots, which have potential uses in medical imaging and solar cells, could be made with help from the polyphenols found in tea leaves.

As genetic genealogy gains momentum, one state considers barring police departments from using public DNA databases in criminal cases.

‘’We find selection rules driving interactions in chemistry as a result of environmental conditions; or emergent properties such as catalytic activity, self-assembly and self-replication; or even as a result of the specifics of chemical reactions.’’

Just like the mythical creation stories that depict the formation of the world as the story of order from chaos, the early Earth was home to a chaotic clutter of organic molecules from which, somehow, more complex biological structures such as RNA and DNA emerged.

There was no guiding hand to dictate how the molecules within that prebiotic clutter should interact to form life. Yet, had those molecules just interacted randomly then, in all likelihood, that they would never have chanced upon the right interactions to ultimately lead to life.

Continue reading “Cleaning up the clutter: How proto-biology arose from the prebiotic clutter” »

Very excited to have interviewed Dr. Michael Lustgarten in my role as longevity / aging ambassador for the ideaXme Show — Mike has been at the forefront of studying the 100 trillion organisms present in the human microbiome, their effect on human health and wellness, as well as a major proponent of metabolomics and biologic age tracking — A true future thinker in the area of extending human lifespan and healthspan

“Ruth is a shining example of one of the qualities I most admire in a scientist: dogged perseverance in pursuit of one’s thesis, in spite of near-universal rejection of it by the mainstream community, until one finally wins them round.

It’s only an admirable quality if you’re likely to be right, of course, so you’d better be a really good scientist in other ways too — and she sure is. Ruth spoke at a couple of my Cambridge conferences and I was always dismayed that such solid data and logic concerning the involvement of herpes simplex virus in Alzheimer’s disease was so widely ignored or dismissed for what seemed to be totally flimsy reasons. That’s not happening any more!”, says Aubrey de Grey.

https://www.undoing-aging.org/news/dr-ruth-itzhaki-to-speak-…aging-2019

Continue reading “We are happy to announce Dr. Ruth Itzhaki as a speaker for the 2019 Undoing Aging Conference” »

The longevity industry gets a boost with the launch of a $100 million venture fund, Longevity Vision Fund, focused on longevity biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The fund will invest in infrastructure projects enabling the longevity biotechnology industry.