Lifeboat Foundation

In the first billion years, there was no oxygen on Earth. Life developed in an anoxic environment. Early bacteria probably obtained their energy by breaking down various substances by means of fermentation. However, there also seems to have been a kind of “oxygen-free respiration.” This was suggested by studies on primordial microbes that are still found in anoxic habitats today.

“We already saw ten years ago that there are genes in these microbes that perhaps encode for a primordial respiration enzyme. Since then, we—as well as other groups worldwide—have attempted to prove the existence of this respiratory enzyme and to isolate it. For a long time unsuccessfully because the complex was too fragile and fell apart at each attempt to isolate it from the membrane. We found the fragments, but were unable to piece them together again,” explains Professor Volker Müller from the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Bioenergetics at Goethe University.

Through hard work and perseverance, his doctoral researchers Martin Kuhns and Dragan Trifunovic then achieved a breakthrough in two successive doctoral theses. “In our desperation, we at some point took a heat-loving bacterium, Thermotoga maritima, which grows at temperatures between 60 and 90°C,” explains Trifunovic, who will shortly complete his doctorate. “Thermotoga also contains Rnf genes, and we hoped that the Rnf enzyme in this bacterium would be a bit more stable. Over the years, we then managed to develop a method for isolating the entire Rnf enzyme from the membrane of these bacteria.”

“We need to go to space to help us here on Earth. Satellites have played an enormous role in improving the state of the world, and will do even more”.

I’m often asked: ‘Why are you building satellites for space when there are so many problems to fix here on Earth?’ It’s a perfectly rational question. The short answer is that we need to go to space to help us here on Earth. Satellites have played an enormous role in improving the state of the world, and will do even more as an explosion of technology innovation enables large new fleets of small satellites to be deployed with radical new capabilities.

Continue reading “Space technology is improving our lives and making the world a better place. Here’s how” »

Circa 2018 face_with_colon_three

If you don’t like mushrooms, it might be because you haven’t tried them yet in dress or jacket form. Believe it or not, mushrooms can now be fashioned into flexible leather-like clothing, purses, pants, and even durable furniture and building bricks for a cleaner, more sustainable planet. Phil Ross and his team at the San Francisco-based MycoWorks, a group of engineers, designers, and scientists, are developing products inspired by fungi’s lattice-like “roots,” called mycelium. According to the MycoWorks website, mycelium are carbon-negative and can also be naturally dyed any color, so your mushroom dress or house can be bright purple, fuchsia, or Cerulean blue if tan seems too subtle.

According to the website of Italy’s Mogu agency, which specializes in developing and scaling-up a range of mycelium-based technologies for the production of naturally-grown biomaterials and products, mushroom-based fabric can be tweaked to be as hard as enamel and shell-like or as soft and porous as a sponge, depending on the amount of light, humidity, exchange of gas, temperature, and types of “food” the mushroom is given (hemp, straw, etc.), rendering it as the ideal creative material for whatever you envision forging.

Continue reading “Clothing Made Of Mushrooms Might Just Be The Future — And It’s Actually Pretty Cool” »

Electricity could be beamed to your home using microwave technology instead of copper lines.

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To learn more about the science behind a dog’s ability to find its way home, researchers tracked the 27 hunting dogs representing 10 breeds as they roamed the woods.

Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and wild bees for pollination, so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about food security, notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning crop production would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for native bee species and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K0yNvk8JV-8

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history getting to the space station. Now they’re coming home.

Storage is just as important aboard the International Space Station as it is on Earth. While the space station is about the size of a football field, the living space inside is much smaller than that. Just as you wouldn’t store garden tools in a house when you could store them in a shed outside, astronauts now have a “housing unit” in which they can store tools for use on the exterior of the space station.

On Dec. 5, 2019, a protective storage unit for robotic tools called Robotic Tool Stowage (RiTS) was among the items launched to station as part of SpaceX’s 19^th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. As part of a spacewalk on July 21, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Chris Cassidy installed the “robot hotel” where the tools are stored to the station’s Mobile Base System (MBS), where it will remain a permanent fixture. The MBS is a moveable platform that provides power to the external robots. This special location allows RiTS to traverse around the station alongside a robot that will use the tools it stores.