Lifeboat Foundation

Take any two cells from your body and there’s a good chance their genetic sequences will be a match. That is, unless you happen to have what’s referred to in the medical literature as a ‘tetragametic chimerism’ – a condition that causes separate fertilised embryos to merge into a single body.

Once thought to be rare among humans, there’s good reason to suspect we might be seeing a lot more of it in the future.

The truth is, nobody is really certain how many humans have cells in their body that once belonged to a sibling.

Continue reading “Some People Are Their Own Identical Twins, And The Science Behind That Is Fascinating” »

Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about our nocturnal adventures, sometimes at tedious length.

But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, they start to make a lot more sense. And dreams are much more important than you might think.

Here are some common questions answered about the nighttime hallucinations we call dreams.

Continue reading “Science Is Getting Closer to Understanding What Goes on Inside The Mind When We Dream” »

In principle, a wormhole-like scenario is possible, but a wormhole tends to close before objects or other matter could pass through it. As far as we know, it’s unlikely we could construct a wormhole that stays open long enough for us to get to a distant part of the universe.

That’s really the issue: Can you keep a wormhole open?

Continue reading “Blue Sky Science: Are there wormholes that lead to other galaxies?” »

For all its progress, Russia’s state-funded science still lags behind that of emerging science powers including China, India and South Korea, especially when it comes to translating discoveries into economic gains. Decades of underfunding, excessive state bureaucracy and entrenched opposition to reform within the country’s sputtering research institutions are hampering competitiveness, says Khokhlov. “What we need are new ideas, new labs, fresh talent and more freedom and competition.”

With Vladimir Putin set to earn another presidential term, researchers wonder whether his government will reverse decades of decline.

In 1969, William Safire was President Nixon’s speech writer. He wrote the short speech shown below, and delivered it to Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman. The speech was to be read by Nixon in the event that the Apollo 11 lunar lander failed to launch or that some other problem caused the lander or mothership to crash back onto the surface of the moon.

In 1969, the space race was at full throttle. Russians were first to launch a satellite, send a dog and a man into space,* and perform an extravehicular space walk. America was under great pressure to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s promise and beat the Russians in landing a man on the moon. Today, former engineers at NASA acknowledge that they believed the chances of such a catastrophe were more than 50%.

Continue reading “What if Apollo 11 had failed? Nixon’s undelivered speech” »

The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft stands atop its launch pad counting down to a 4:30 p.m. EDT liftoff today to the International Space Station. The Expedition 55 crew is preparing for its arrival on Wednesday while continuing a variety of advanced space research aboard the orbital lab today.

NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is hosting the 14^th launch of a SpaceX commercial cargo mission to the space station. Astronauts Norishige Kanai and Scott Tingle are practicing the maneuvers and procedures necessary to capture Dragon with 2 Canadarm2 when it arrives at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning. Their fellow flight engineers Drew Feustel and Ricky Arnold joined them later in the afternoon to review the cargo they’ll transfer back and forth after they open the hatches to Dragon.

Feustel spent the better part of his day testing algorithms on a pair of tiny internal satellites that could be used to detect spacecraft positions and velocities. Arnold strapped himself into an exercise cycle for an exertion in space study then collected his blood samples for stowage and later analysis.

Continue reading “Expedition Crew Waits for Dragon and Studies Life Science” »

Scientists are increasingly betting their time and effort that the way to control the world is through proteins. Proteins are what makes life animated. They take information encoded in DNA and turn it into intricate three-dimensional structures, many of which act as tiny machines. Proteins work to ferry oxygen through the bloodstream, extract energy from food, fire neurons, and attack invaders. One can think of DNA as working in the service of the proteins, carrying the information on how, when and in what quantities to make them.

Living things make thousands of different proteins, but soon there could be many more, as scientists are starting to learn to design new ones from scratch with specific purposes in mind. Some are looking to design new proteins for drugs and vaccines, while others are seeking cleaner catalysts for the chemical industry and new materials.

David Baker, director for the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, compares protein design to the advent of custom tool-making. At some point, proto-humans went beyond merely finding uses for pieces of wood, rock or bone, and started designing tools to suit specific needs — from screwdrivers to sports cars.

Continue reading “Protein Engineering May Be the Future of Science” »

In an era of artificial eggs and Crispr, anyone could become a biological parent to the healthiest baby.

Kogan developed Kosinksi’s ideas, improved them, and cut a deal with Cambridge Analytica. Armed with this bounty – and combined with additional data gleaned from elsewhere – Cambridge Analytica built personality profiles for more than 100m registered US voters. It’s claimed the company then used these profiles for targeted advertising.

Imagine for example that you could identify a segment of voters that is high in conscientiousness and neuroticism, and another segment that is high in extroversion but low in openness. Clearly, people in each segment would respond differently to the same political ad. But on Facebook they do not need to see the same ad at all – each will see an individually tailored ad designed to elicit the desired response, whether that is voting for a candidate, not voting for a candidate, or donating funds.

Cambridge Analytica worked hard to develop dozens of ad variations on different political themes such as immigration, the economy and gun rights, all tailored to different personality profiles. There is no evidence at all that Clinton’s election machine had the same ability.