Lifeboat Foundation

In recent months, the world’s new billionaires made more of their fortunes from inheritance than from entrepreneurship, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report.

It marked the first time in the nine-year history of the report that newly minted billionaires accumulated more wealth from inheritance than starting a business.

Fifty-three heirs inherited a total of $150.8 billion in the 12 months ending in April, exceeding the total of $140.7 billion accumulated by 84 new self-made billionaires, according to the Swiss bank’s report. The shift is likely to continue: The report said more than 1,000 billionaires are expected to pass $5.2 trillion to their children over the next 20 or 30 years.

Life on Mercury?

Salt glaciers uncovered on Mercury, the second planet from the sun, could have implications for the habitability of this tiny planet and similar worlds beyond the solar system.

Dec 1 (Reuters) — Amazon (AMZN.O) on Friday said it booked three Falcon 9 launches with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to help deploy the ecommerce giant’s Project Kuiper satellite network, tapping a rival in the satellite internet business for its multi-billion dollar launch campaign.

Amazon aims to build Kuiper as a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to beam broadband internet globally and compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network, which already has some 5,000 satellites providing nearly global coverage.

Amazon, which vowed in 2019 to invest $10 billion into the project, will put an unspecified number of Kuiper satellites on three Falcon 9 rockets from SpaceX beginning in mid-2025, the company said Friday.

Sumit Rana, head of research and development, discusses how the EHR giant’s system uses AI to generate progress notes, create draft responses to patient questions and assist with medical coding. And how AI sometimes can be more empathetic than a person.

This protocol for the spatiotemporal control of RNA activity uses LicV, a synthetic, photoswitchable RNA-binding protein (RBP) that can bind to a specific RNA sequence in response to blue light irradiation, and provides an efficient and generalizable strategy for engineering photoswitchable RBPs.

Summary: Dopamine, a neurotransmitter, plays a vital role in encoding both reward and punishment prediction errors in the human brain.

This study suggests that dopamine is essential for learning from both positive and negative experiences, enabling the brain to adapt behavior based on outcomes. Using electrochemical techniques and machine learning, scientists measured dopamine levels in real-time during a computer game involving rewards and penalties.

The findings shed light on the intricate role of dopamine in human behavior and could have implications for understanding psychiatric and neurological disorders.

Pentoses are essential carbohydrates in the metabolism of modern lifeforms, but their availability during early Earth is unclear since these molecules are unstable.

A new study, published in the journal JACS Au and led by the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, reveals a chemical pathway compatible with early Earth conditions and by which C6 aldonates could have acted as a source of pentoses without the need for enzymes. Their findings provide clues about primitive biochemistry and bring us closer to understanding the Origins of Life.

The emergence of life on Earth from simple chemicals is one of the most exciting yet challenging topics in biochemistry and perhaps all of science. Modern lifeforms can transform nutrients into all sorts of compounds through complex chemical networks; what’s more, they can catalyze very specific transformations using enzymes, achieving a very fine control over what molecules are produced.

Researchers are claiming a breakthrough in quantum communications, thanks to a new diamond-stretching technique they say greatly increases the temperatures at which qubits remain entangled, while also making them microwave-controllable.

Quantum networking is an emerging field that uses weird quantum phenomena to send and receive information. These networks will be impossible to hack, and will use quantum entanglement to cover large distances, creating pairs of qubits which mirror each other’s quantum state without any physical connection.

Diamond-based qubits are capable of maintaining their state of entanglement for a decent length of time – but only provided they’re kept incredibly cold – just a hair above absolute zero. That limits their usefulness, because it’d mean you’d need a giant, energy-intensive cooling apparatus at every node of your quantum network.

The authors present a series of correlated insulating states of twisted bilayer graphene that is detected using an atomic force microscope tip. An additional experiment demonstrates the coupling of a mechanical oscillator to a quantum device.