Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

For the first time scientists have found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not engage in photosynthesis.

The peculiar organism is dubbed ‘corallicolid’ because it is found in 70 per cent of corals around the world and may provide clues as to how to protect in the future.

“This is the second most abundant cohabitant of coral on the planet and it hasn’t been seen until now,” says Patrick Keeling, a University of British Columbia botanist and senior researcher overseeing the study published in Nature. “This organism poses completely new biochemical questions. It looks like a parasite, and it’s definitely not photosynthetic. But it still makes chlorophyll.”

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The 5-foot-tall (1.5 meters) Beresheet fired its engines for a little over a minute early this morning (April 1), altering its trajectory slightly to prepare for a planned capture into lunar orbit on Thursday (April 4).

If all goes according to plan, the robotic lander will touch down on the moon one week later, on April 11. That will be a huge milestone. To date, the only organizations to pull off a soft lunar landing are superpower governments — the Soviet Union, the United States and China.

Related: israel’s 1st moon lander beresheet in pictures.

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LEAF Director Elena Milova shares a report from the recent Berlin Undoing Aging conference with you today. Hosted by the Forever Healthy Foundation and SENS Research Foundation, the event saw the leading figures in aging research come together for this superb conference.

The day after I got back from the Undoing Aging 2019 scientific conference, which was jointly organized by the SENS Research Foundation and Forever Healthy Foundation, Moscow greeted me with the first sunny days of the spring. Still tired and lacking sleep, but happy and inspired, I want to share my impressions of this year’s conference with you.

Actually, I began preparing for this event in the autumn of 2018, when it was first announced. I booked the hotel well in advance, including some spare rooms that could be transferred to our partners later on. B&B Alexanderplatz is located next to the conference venue Umspannwerk Alexanderplatz, literally next door, and it has a nice social space in the lobby, making it very handy for setting appointments with business partners, so we at LEAF decided to make it our headquarters once again. I arrived on March 26th, got some brief rest, and went downstairs to work while also keeping an eye on who was arriving.

Not long after I sat down, I saw some very familiar faces, as Maria Entraigues-Abramson and her husband Gary Abramson arrived. As part of the organizers’ team from the SRF, they came to Berlin early to help coordinate the preparation. Next, I saw our own VP Dr. Oliver Medvedik and his super-energetic friend, Jean Lam. Last but not least, I met Anna Dobryukha, the chief of the medical department at Komsomolskaya Pravda; she is one of the most famous Russian journalists writing about aging and longevity.

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India’s anti-satellite missile test created at least 400 pieces of orbital debris, the head of NASA says — placing the International Space Station (ISS) and its astronauts at risk.

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said Monday that just 60 pieces of debris were large enough to track. Of those, 24 went above the apogee of the ISS, the point of the space station’s orbit farthest from the Earth.

“That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event that sends debris at an apogee that goes above the International Space Station,” Bridenstine said in a live-streamed NASA town hall meeting. “That kind of activity is not compatible with the future of human spaceflight.”

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Discovering planets that nobody has ever seen before is even harder than it sounds. Space telescopes from NASA and other scientific bodies have gathered an incredible amount of data that will take astronomers years and years to sift through, and many times there’s just nothing there to be found.

But humans don’t have to do all of the work, and Anne Dattilo, a senior at the University of Texas in Austin enlisted the help of artificial intelligence to study data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and found not one, but two new exoplanets in the process.

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