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

Gut microbiota can predict risk of type 2 diabetes years before it develops

The presence of certain bacteria in the gut microbiota, and fluctuations in a person’s metabolism, can be seen in people who go on to develop type 2 diabetes years later. This has been shown in a large Swedish study led by researchers at Chalmers University of Technology. The study is published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

The discovery paves the way for identifying people at risk of developing type 2 diabetes at an early stage, enabling preventive measures to be introduced.

“Our study was able to show changes in the gut microbiota several years before the disease developed. This could indicate that the composition of the microbiome plays a role in the development of diabetes, and not the other way around,” says Gaël Toubon, a postdoctoral researcher in food science at Chalmers’ Department of Life Sciences.

JWST finds the most distant barred galaxy candidate in the early universe

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified what may be the most distant barred spiral galaxy ever discovered, dating to a time less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. The paper outlining its properties was posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 23.

Stellar bars are elongated formations of stars that stretch across a galaxy’s central region, spinning together as a single, unified structure. Through this rotation, they function much like a funnel, channeling gas toward the galactic center. This can ignite bursts of star formation, supply material to the central black hole and contribute to the buildup of a compact core. Such structures are common among galaxies in the local universe, and our own Milky Way is one example of a barred galaxy.

But bars don’t just form anywhere. They take shape in galaxies where stars move in smooth and orderly fashion, with something called a dynamically “cold” disk. Early-universe galaxies were the opposite: turbulent and gas-rich, constantly disrupted by mergers and bursts of star formation, conditions that should keep disks “hot” and unsettled for billions of years.

Programmable metasurface generates dozens of holograms at once

Over the past few decades, engineers have developed various devices that can create holograms, three-dimensional (3D) or two-dimensional (2D) images produced by precisely controlling the shape and direction of traveling light waves. Holograms are now widely used to produce visual representations of objects and to measure their physical properties, authenticate documents or bank cards, and serve as visualization tools in some educational settings.

While the quality of the holograms that can be produced has improved significantly in recent years, most existing technologies can generate only one hologram at a time. To simultaneously generate several independent holograms, one would need to increase a device’s so-called holographic channels (i.e., separate streams of independently controlled holograms), which tends to reduce the quality of the produced images or the speed at which they can be refreshed.

Researchers at Southeast University in China recently developed a new programmable metasurface, an engineered ultrathin material that can manipulate waves in unique ways, which reliably generates dozens of holograms at once. This metasurface, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, consists of 6,000 elements that can be individually controlled, both in terms of their spatial arrangement and how they change over time.

Dysregulated calcium signaling underlies hyposalivation and microbial dysbiosis in Down syndrome

People with Down syndrome (DS) show reduced saliva flow and high periodontal disease burden. In Dp16 mice, a model of DS, Son et al. show that deficient calcium signaling in salivary glands underlies hyposalivation and is associated with oral and gut microbial dysbiosis and altered succinate levels.

Beyond Immunosuppression: The Rise of T-Cell Engagers for Autoimmune Disease | Dr. Jeffrey Jones

Dr. jeff jones, MD — chief medical officer cullinan therapeutics.

For decades we’ve treated autoimmune diseases by suppressing the immune system — but what if we’ve been approaching the problem all wrong? What if, instead of lifelong immunosuppression, we could selectively eliminate the immune cells causing disease and allow the immune system to rebuild itself? Today we’re exploring one of the hottest areas in biotechnology: T-cell engagers and the possibility of an \.

Growing Plants in Space: The Science Behind Future Moon and Mars Colonies | Mark Ciotola

Mark Ciotola, CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space.

Everyone talks about getting humans to Mars. But almost nobody talks about the harder question — how do you keep them alive once they get there? My guest today says the answer isn’t bigger rockets — it’s plants.

Mark Ciotola is CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space (https://www.sustainspace.com/), a company focused on developing regenerative life-support technologies for future space missions while translating those innovations to improve agriculture and sustainability on Earth. Through Sustain Space’s Orbital Genomics initiative, he is helping advance research into growing plants in space environments — an essential capability for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Mark’s career spans entrepreneurship, academia, industry, and government, including work with NASA, Genentech, Applied Biosystems, Intuit, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, San Francisco State University, and Singularity University, where he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and faculty member in Space and Physical Sciences.

A physicist, entrepreneur, educator, and sustainability advocate, Mark is particularly interested in regenerative ecosystems, closed-loop life-support systems, space agriculture, and the broader question of how humanity can build a sustainable future both on Earth and beyond it.

Continue reading “Growing Plants in Space: The Science Behind Future Moon and Mars Colonies | Mark Ciotola” | >

Evidence Mounts for Hierarchical Black Hole Mergers

Different analyses of gravitational-wave observations are converging on evidence for a distinct population of massive black hole binaries produced through repeated mergers.

Throughout the Universe, pairs of orbiting black holes emit ripples in spacetime that propagate across the cosmos. These gravitational waves carry away orbital energy, causing the black holes to slowly spiral closer together. This process is extremely slow, but, in a minority of cases, it leads to a cataclysmic merger within the age of the Universe. Since the historic detection of gravitational waves in 2015 (see Viewpoint: The First Sounds of Merging Black Holes), the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA gravitational-wave detectors have advanced to the point of recording a signal from merging black holes every few days of operation, yielding a cumulative catalog of hundreds [1]. Understanding how, when, and where the Universe produces these extreme astrophysical collisions remains an open question, with implications spanning physical scales from the subatomic to the cosmological.

Now, two teams led, respectively, by Cailin Plunkett at MIT [2] and Sharan Banagiri at Monash University in Australia [3] present evidence that a subset of binary black hole observations can be connected to a particular origin story: that of hierarchical mergers, in which at least one member of the pair is not the remnant of a dead star but instead the product of an earlier black hole merger (Fig. 1). The fact that these and other analyses [4– 10], based on markedly different assumptions, converge on a similar conclusion strengthens the case that hierarchical mergers constitute an important contribution to the binary black hole population.

Optical writing of antiferromagnets points toward new storage devices and energy efficient information systems

A German-Japanese research team involving the University of Augsburg has made a significant breakthrough in the use of antiferromagnets. For the first time, the team has succeeded in writing magnetic information using only ultrashort laser pulses—without the need for electric currents or magnetic fields.

Antiferromagnetic materials are considered promising for the next generation of data storage devices because they react particularly quickly and are insensitive to external disturbances. Until now, however, their application has been limited because their magnetic states are difficult to control precisely.

The research team led by experimental physicist Prof. Dr. István Kézsmárki has now developed a new method in which it is not the polarization of the light, but its direction of propagation (“pulse”), that is used for control. Through targeted irradiation, it is possible to switch between different magnetic states and write information. Furthermore, this information can also be read out using purely optical means. The paper is published in the journal Nature Materials.

New biobased polymers exhibit excellent tensile properties beyond polyolefins

The research group of Professor Kotohiro Nomura, Tokyo Metropolitan University, in cooperation with the research groups of Senior Researcher Hiroshi Hirano and Director Seiji Higashi of the Osaka Research Institute of Industrial Science and Technology, and Associate Professor Hiroki Takeshita of The University of Shiga Prefecture, has developed biobased poly(ester amide)s from inedible biorenewables that can be easily chemically recycled and exhibit better mechanical (tensile) properties in film than commodity plastics.

The work has been published in JACS Au.

The development of biobased polymers that are readily chemically recyclable and derived from nonedible renewable resources has been recognized as a promising sustainable material in the circular economy. However, there have been few examples of materials with mechanical properties (e.g. tensile strength and elongation at break) that exceed those of conventional polymers such as polyethylene and polypropylene.

/* */