Lifeboat Foundation

By allison linn, senior writer, microsoft

Introducing the anti-earthquake bed!

Dirty water has a use.

New technology doesn’t always look great, but researchers at Binghamton University are aiming to prove that function and style don’t have to be at odds with a new bacteria-powered battery that takes its design cues from origami.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi, an assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering at Binghamton, and two of his students recently published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics a report on their invention of a microbial fuel cell that runs on nothing more than the bacteria found in just a few drops of dirty water.

Continue reading “This tiny foldable battery is powered by dirty water” »

Researchers in the U.K. have made what is described as a “breakthrough reclassification” of pancreatic cancer, which offers new opportunities to treat the often-fatal disease.

A study co-led by professor Andrew Biankin and colleagues at the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Cancer Sciences has found four “key subtypes” of the cancer, with each possessing “their own distinct clinical characteristics and differential survival outcomes,” according to a statement released on Thursday.

The researchers’ paper was published in the journal Nature, and named the subtypes as:

Continue reading “Pancreatic cancer ‘breakthrough’ hailed” »

A POSSIBLE cure for inherited eye diseases which cause blindness is within sight thanks to a breakthrough recorded by a Tasmanian-led research team.

Associate Professor Alex Hewitt, an ophthalmologist and a researcher with the University of Tasmania’s Menzies Institute for Medical Research and the School of Medicine, said his team had successfully edited adult eye tissue genes in the laboratory to replace unwanted genes that caused blindness.

Dr Hewitt said he was optimistic Tasmanian doctors could soon start wielding molecular gene shears inside the eyes of humans.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) will set up seven new Research Units and one new Clinical Research Unit. This was decided by the Senate of the DFG in its summer session during the DFG Annual Meeting in Mainz. In addition to the already established Units, another Research Unit is now in a position to start work. This Unit is funded jointly by the DFG and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The DFG Senate had already supported this Unit in March 2016 and approval has now been obtained from the Austrian partner organisation.

The research collaborations will offer researchers the possibility of pursuing current and pressing issues in their research areas and establishing innovative work directions. Clinical Research Units are also characterised by the close connection between research and clinical work. The maximum funding duration of Research Units and Clinical Research Units is two periods of three years. In the initial funding period, the nine new groups will receive approximately €23 million in total. As a result, the DFG will be funding a total of 190 Research Units and 19 Clinical Research Units.

The new Research Units.

Continue reading “Eight new research units, 1 new clinical research unit” »

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Google’s parent, Alphabet, Inc., held its annual shareholder meeting earlier this month. The gem of the event for investors was when Executive ChairmanEric Schmidtdiscussed the “most interesting” tech innovations that hebelieves are going to take off over the next five to ten years.

Continue reading “Google Billionaire: 7 Game-Changing Tech Innovations to Take Off in 5 to 10 Years” »

One of the latest innovations in the 3D printing world comes from a preteen who created a 3D printer using a 3D –rinting pen and a Lego Mindstorms EV3.

I find this article extremely laughable. Of course, humans do not know everything around science why we do research, incubate, and evolve future technologies as well as continue to do innovation and discovery.

What We Cannot Know. By Marcus du Sautoy. 4th Estate; 440 pages; £20. To be published in America by Viking Penguin in April 2017.

“EVERYONE by nature desires to know,” wrote Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But are there limits to what human beings can know? This is the question that Marcus du Sautoy, the British mathematician who succeeeded Richard Dawkins as the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford University, explores in “What We Cannot Know”, his fascinating book on the limits of scientific knowledge.