Lifeboat Foundation

“Kepler-51e has an orbit slightly larger than Venus and is just inside the star’s habitable zone, so a lot more could be going on beyond that distance if we take the time to look,” said Dr. Jessica Libby-Roberts.

How many exoplanets are in the cosmos and what can they tell us about planetary formation and evolution? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of more than 50 researchers announced the discovery of Kepler-51e, which is the fourth planet residing in the Kepler-51 system. This discovery holds the potential to expand our knowledge of exoplanets, specifically regarding their formation and evolution, as Kepler-51e challenges previous notions about low-density exoplanets, also called “puff planets” or “Super-Puffs”

“Super puff planets are very unusual in that they have very low mass and low density,” said Dr. Jessica Libby-Roberts, who is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State University and second author of the study. “The three previously known planets that orbit the star, Kepler-51, are about the size of Saturn but only a few times the mass of Earth, resulting in a density like cotton candy.”

Continue reading “Astronomers Find New Planet in Kepler-51 System, Challenging Models of ‘Super-Puffs’” »

“These sites act like Velcro with different colors – designed so that only strands with matching ‘colors’ (in fact, complementary DNA sequences) can connect,” said Dr. Luu.

This method allows researchers to construct customizable, highly specific architectures that can perform intricate tasks at the molecular level.

One of the most promising applications of this technology is its ability to create nanorobots capable of delivering drugs directly to targeted areas within the body.

“Discovering liquid water oceans inside the moons of Uranus would transform our thinking about the range of possibilities for where life could exist,” said Dr. Douglas Hemingway.

Do the moons of Uranus have interior liquid oceans like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? This is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters hopes to address as a pair of researchers investigated the likelihood of five Uranus moons, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon possessing interior oceans. This study holds the potential to not only help researchers better understand the compositions of these moons, but also establish a framework for sending a spacecraft to Uranus for the first time since NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1986.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to simulate changes in each moon’s wobble with the goal of estimating the potential amount of liquid water that each moon could be harboring. This technique could be used to detect liquid oceans within these moons, thus increasing the feasibility of a future spacecraft mission to Uranus.

Continue reading “NASA’s Next Mission to Uranus: Searching for Liquid Water Oceans on Icy Moons” »

Amazon just dropped Nova multimodal AI models that beat gpt-4o and sonnet 3.5 🤯

New state-of-the-art foundation models from Amazon deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.

When it is solicited, the research emphases of E.9 Space Biology: Research Studies will fall under two broad categories: Precision Health and Space Crops.

For Precision Health-focused studies, investigators may propose to use any non-primate animal model system, and any appropriate cell/tissue culture/ microphysiological system/ organoid or microbial models, that are supported by the chosen platform. For Space Crop-focused studies, applicants may propose to use any plant model system, and when appropriate, any microbial or plant and microbial model systems that are supported by the chosen platform.

This opportunity will include five different Project Types: Research Investigations, Early Career Research Investigations, New NASA Investigators, GeneLab Analytical Investigations, and Tissue Sharing Investigations.

This is precisely the nature of our new understanding of biology, which has occurred over the past twenty years and is now sufficiently advanced to offer a new paradigm.

The previous paradigm was given in what is called the central dogma.

Engineers harness focused ultrasound to revolutionize CRISPR’s capabilities to treat countless diseases.

As described in that paper and henceforth, a transformer is a deep learning neural network architecture that processes sequential data, such as text or time-series information.

Now, MIT-birthed startup Liquid AI has introduced STAR (Synthesis of Tailored Architectures), an innovative framework designed to automate the generation and optimization of AI model architectures.

The STAR framework leverages evolutionary algorithms and a numerical encoding system to address the complex challenge of balancing quality and efficiency in deep learning models.

We take a look at the current best predictions for what the solar system will look like throughout the rest of the Sun’s life.