Lifeboat Foundation

The integration of mechanical memory in the form of springs has for hundreds of years proven to be a key enabling technology for mechanical devices (such as clocks), achieving advanced functionality through complex autonomous movements. Currently, the integration of springs in silicon-based microtechnology has opened the world of planar mass-producible mechatronic devices from which we all benefit, via air-bag sensors for example.

For a new generation of minimally and even non-invasive biomedical applications however, mobile devices that can safely interact mechanically with cells must be achieved at much smaller scales (10 microns) and with much softer forces (pico Newton scale, i.e., lifting weights less than one millionth of a mg) and in customized three-dimensional shapes.

Researchers at the Chemnitz University of Technology, the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Leibniz IFW Dresden, in a recent publication in Nature Nanotechnology, have demonstrated that controllable springs can be integrated at arbitrary chosen locations within soft three-dimensional structures using confocal photolithographic manufacturing (with nanoscale precision) of a novel magnetically active material in the form of a photoresist impregnated with customizable densities of magnetic nanoparticles.

In quantum physics, the enigmatic dance between interactions and disorder unfolds in the intricate phenomenon known as many-body localization.

Quantum many-body systems may not thermalize due to the phenomenon of many-body localisation. Its theoretical underpinning is given by observables, the l-bits, which could not as of now be probed by experiments. The authors define experimentally relevant quantities to retrieve spatially resolved entanglement information, allowing to probe the l-bits.

Scientists have grown a tiny brain-like organoid out of human stem cells, hooked it up to a computer, and demonstrated its potential as a kind of organic machine learning chip, showing it can quickly pick up speech recognition and math predictions.

Clusters of brain cells grown in the lab have shown potential as a new type of hybrid bio-computer.

Until now, scientists somehow didn’t know exactly what made pee yellow.

But that just may have finally changed. In a new study published in the journal Nature Microbiology, a multidisciplinary group of scientists out of the University of Maryland reported on their findings about a middleman enzyme called bilirubin reductase, which had long evaded researchers as they tried to figure out which precise compounds resulted in urine’s distinct yellow hue.

To be clear, as Healthline reports, scientists had known for more than 125 years that on a high level, urine gets its color from the disposal of old red blood cells as they degrade in our livers.

A US spacecraft carrying human remains launched on Monday in a bid to become the first private mission to land on the moon.

If it succeeds, Peregrine will also be the first US mission in more than 50 years to complete a lunar touchdown and could pave the way for commercial space services, such as lunar burials.

“This is the moment we’ve been waiting for 16 years,” John Thornton, CEO of Astrobiotic, the company behind the lander, said after the launch. “We are on our way to the moon.”

The slow start from Apple’s latest offering recently expanded to a 30% year-on-year decline, Bloomberg reported, citing Jefferies analysts led by Edison Lee.

Apple isn’t likely to see its iPhone sales recover from this sluggish start, per Jefferies analysts, which forecast a double-digit drop in volumes for 2024. The company saw a similar decline in December, per Bloomberg.

Apple’s relationship with China has been under strain recently.

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A new report by Computer scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology presents new kinds of cyberattacks that can “poison” AI systems.

AI systems are being integrated into more and more aspects of our lives, from driving vehicles to helping doctors diagnose illnesses to interacting with customers as online chatbots. To perform these tasks the models are trained on vast amounts of data, which in turn helps the AI predict how to respond in a given situation.

In this study, we conducted behavioral experiments and measured survival rates in local caves to minimize the impacts of factors other than light. Although energy-costly eyes were highly reduced or lost in cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders, which spend their entire life cycles in the complete absence of light, our results demonstrated that they could detect light, and light cues may be used to avoid the perilously dry environment outside the cave. The annotation of core PPGs based on transcriptomic data suggests that cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders have retained a nearly complete set of PPGs as in the entrance spiders. The molecular evolutionary analysis showed strong purifying selection on PPGs of cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders. Therefore, our study provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that the phototransduction system of cave-dwelling eyeless Leptonetela spiders may have been under purifying selection rather than being a phylogenetic relic. Our results thus refute the neutral hypothesis.

Leptonetela spiders are small cryptozoic spiders that build sheet webs for capturing prey in twilight or lightless environment, such as leaf litter, rotting logs, rock crevices, and caves (31). Light is suggested to be the primary selective force driving the evolution of eyes of cave animals, thus, eyes are often reduced or lost as cave preadaptation in many litter-dwelling arthropods (36–38). Leptonetela spiders have lost anterior median eyes that are generally involved in identifying and stalking prey in spiders, likely due to their twilight or lightless habitats. In addition, cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders living in lightless deep caves exhibit various degrees of eye reduction (highly reduced or eyeless) compared to their entrance spider relatives that have six intact eyes. Thus, Leptonetela spiders provided an ideal system for studying the evolution of eyes and visual systems.

This study provides evidence demonstrating negative phototaxis in cave-dwelling spiders, a highly diverse group that plays a critical role in cave ecosystems as top predators (23). Negative phototaxis has frequently been found in other subterranean animals. For example, the cave-dwelling carrion beetle Ptomaphagus hirtus that has highly reduced eyes nonetheless displays strongly negative phototaxis and maintains a reduced but functional phototransduction system, as shown by transcriptomic data (13). However, Langille et al. (14) reported that five of six subterranean water beetles completely lacked phototactic responses, and the authors proposed negative phototaxis as a preadaptation to living in permanent darkness for ancestral cave-dwelling animals. We speculate that drought resistance may play an important role in the retention of PPGs in Leptonetela spiders.

The work demonstrates control over key properties leading to better performance.

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.