Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

God’s Number is 20

The Rubik’s Cube is one of the most iconic mathematical puzzles ever invented, created by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik in 1974.

A standard 3×3×3 cube has-1 possible configurations — roughly 43 quintillion!

And here’s the remarkable mathematical result: every reachable configuration can be solved in 20 moves or fewer, provided a 180° face turn counts as one move.

Proven in 2010, this result is known as God’s Number.

A simple-looking puzzle. More than 43 quintillion configurations. And a mathematically proven upper limit on the number of moves needed to solve any of them.

Reference: [God’s Number Is 20 —]//www.cube20.org/)

Continue reading “God’s Number is 20” | >

New Electrical Test Can Help Identify Signs of Extraterrestrial Life in Space

If there is extraterrestrial life out there, it’s certainly done a great job of staying hidden so far (at least as far as the official scientific consensus goes).

International researchers led by a team from the University of Osaka in Japan have now developed a new electrical technique for spotting signs of life outside of Earth’s atmosphere – and it promises to be simpler than current approaches to alien detection.

The method focuses on amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and details have been published in Nature Communications.

ACE Emerges as Potential Biomarker for Treatment-Resistant Schizophrenia

“This study provides some evidence that genetic alterations in the gene for ACE affect the level of the protein it makes, which in turn may influence the biology of psychosis, particularly in patients whose symptoms do not respond adequately to standard treatments,” says Kun Yang, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, are currently diagnosed primarily through evaluation and assessment of symptoms and behaviors, including hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking. Sawa says there are currently no objective biological blood or other tests that can determine which people with psychoses are likely to develop treatment resistance. Identifying biological differences associated with treatment resistance could help researchers develop more precise approaches to diagnosis and treatment, including the identification of new drug targets.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from 200 participants, including 78 healthy controls and 122 people with early-stage psychosis. Among the participants with psychosis, 31 had treatment-resistant psychosis and 91 did not. The researchers measured ACE protein levels in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, examined ACE enzymatic activity and analyzed genetic data related to schizophrenia risk. They found that ACE protein levels were significantly lower in both cerebrospinal fluid and blood among people with early-stage psychosis compared with healthy controls.

Volumetric discordance between ¹⁸F-FET-PET/MRI and MRI-based radiotherapy target volumes in high-grade glioma: a prospective pilot study (FETSMaRT)

High-grade gliomas carry a poor prognosis, and MRI-based radiotherapy (RT) planning may inadequately capture metabolically active tumor infiltration. ¹⁸F-fluoroethyl-tyrosine (FET) PET provides superior tumor delineation, yet prospective North American evidence supporting integration with RT planning remains limited.

FETSMaRT enrolled 30 patients with WHO grade 3 or 4 high-grade glioma receiving post-operative RT. FET-PET/MRI was acquired before RT with the radiation oncologist blinded to PET, enabling retrospective quantification of discordance between MRI-based and FET-PET/MRI-derived gross tumor (GTV), clinical target (CTV), and planning target (PTV) volumes. In the glioblastoma subgroup (n = 23), Kaplan–Meier and Cox analyses related GTV and CTV discordance to time to progression.

Median age was 60 years; 77% had glioblastoma and 60% MGMT promoter methylation. GTV discordance occurred in 17/30 patients (56.7%) and CTV discordance in 15/30 (50.0%). FET-PET/MRI-derived volumes significantly exceeded MRI-based volumes for GTV (43.6 vs. 38.6 cc; p 0.0001), CTV (119.2 vs. 110.8 cc; p = 0.0045), and PTV (171.1 vs. 159.6 cc; p = 0.0003). Larger GTV∆ and CTV∆ change values were associated with numerically shorter median time to progression, but neither association was statistically significant. Radiation treatment failures were predominantly central (60.0%).

Vascular Abnormalities in Athletes: State-of-the-Art Multimodality Imaging

Vascular abnormalities in athletes, although less common than musculoskeletal injuries, present a significant diagnostic challenge due to overlapping manifestations. These conditions range from subtle exertional discomfort to potentially limb-threatening ischemia and life-threatening complications such as pulmonary embolism or sudden cardiac death. In this comprehensive review, the authors highlight the spectrum of vascular abnormalities encountered in athletes, emphasizing the pivotal role of multimodality imaging, including US, CT angiography, MR angiography, and conventional angiography in their accurate diagnosis and effective management. They discuss upper extremity conditions such as Paget-Schroetter syndrome, quadrilateral space syndrome, palmar arch injury, and digital ischemia. Lower extremity conditions discussed include arterial thromboembolism, external iliac artery endofibrosis and dissection, adductor canal syndrome, chronic exertional compartment syndrome, popliteal entrapment syndromes, venous insufficiency, and cystic adventitial disease. Other conditions discussed include venous thromboembolism, median arcuate ligament compression, aortopathies, pulmonary hypertension, Bezold-Jarisch reflex, coronary artery disease, coronary anomalies, and high-flow priapism. The authors aim to equip radiologists with essential knowledge to promptly recognize these conditions, thereby facilitating early intervention and improved outcomes.

©RSNA, 2026

Supplemental material is available for this article.

Quantum sensor could measure how Earth drags spacetime

Einstein’s theory of general relativity describes gravity as the bending of spacetime, a mathematical model that combines three-dimensional space and time into a single, four-dimensional continuum. The theory also predicts that a rotating object, such as Earth, slightly drags the surrounding spacetime as it rotates, a phenomenon known as frame-dragging.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) recently introduced the idea of a quantum sensor that could measure this tiny effect in a laboratory setting. Their proposed experiment, described in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, would use helium cooled until it enters a special phase known as the superfluid state inside a gyrometer, an instrument that measures rotation.

“The inspiration for this project came when Birgitta Whaley and I were visiting Markus Aspelmeyer at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Vienna, Austria, during a sabbatical of Birgitta,” Kai-Isaak Ellers, first author of the paper, told Phys.org.

Why tightly confined water’s response to electric fields depends on direction

Using an advanced new mathematical model, a pair of physicists in Belgium has revealed the origins of an unusual, direction-dependent effect found in water confined to a narrow gap between two plates. Through research published in Physical Review Letters, Mehdi Neek-Amal and Francois Peeters at the University of Antwerp showed how two drastically different dielectric responses in this water emerge from the natural bonding behavior of its molecules.

Dielectric materials are made up of molecules with built-in electric dipoles: a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other. When exposed to an electric field, these dipoles rotate so that their positive ends point in the direction of the applied field and their negative ends in the opposite direction. This polarization creates an internal electric field within the material that partially cancels out the applied field.

In pure water, the dielectric effect emerges due to the tendency of oxygen atoms to pull electrons away from the hydrogen atoms they bond to covalently, creating a dipole across the chevron-shaped molecule. Under ordinary conditions, this creates hydrogen-bonding networks, where the positive hydrogen atoms of one molecule are attracted electrostatically to the negative oxygen atom at the tip of a neighboring chevron.

Single 2D crystal transforms into transistor with built-in insulation and electrical contacts

A transistor normally requires several fundamentally different materials—a semiconductor to carry current, an insulating dielectric to control it and metallic contacts through which current enters and leaves. Integrating all of these components becomes increasingly difficult as semiconductor devices approach the atomic scale.

A research team led by Director Jo Moon-Ho of the Center for Van der Waals Quantum Solids within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has now demonstrated a fundamentally different approach. Instead of fabricating the semiconductor, dielectric and contact materials separately and then assembling them into a device, the researchers started from a single layered crystal and chemically converted selected atomic layers and regions into the different materials needed for a working transistor. The work is published in the journal Science.

Mini brain organoids ‘read’ braille in key step toward biohybrid computing

Could computers include tiny brain organoids one day? The human brain is an incredibly energy-efficient computer, and silicon processors that try to imitate it achieve huge energy savings over traditional processors. Now scientists are experimenting with using organoids modeled on the human forebrain to develop energy-efficient biohybrid computing.

A crucial first step toward this is learning whether the organoids can receive and relay signals reliably, which a Bristol-based team of researchers investigated using braille letters. They found that teams of three brain organoids produced signals that accurately corresponded to different letters 83% of the time.

“We can take information from a real tactile sensor, turn it into a form that a living neural network can receive, and then recover meaningful information from the organoid response,” said Tianyi Liu, a Ph.D. candidate at Bristol University and first author of the article in Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence.