Lifeboat Foundation

“What this new result does is provide a clearer picture of how our local universe has come together — it is telling us that at least in one of the large galaxies, there has been this sporadic feeding of small galaxies,” Lewis said in a press release.

Globular clusters are at the center of this research. They’re older associations of stars that have lower metallicity. There are at least 150 in the Milky Way, likely more. They play a role in the galactic evolution, but the role isn’t clearly understood. Globulars, as they’re known, are more prevalent in a galaxy’s halo, while their counterparts, open clusters, are found in the galactic disks.

The researchers behind this work identified a population of globulars in Andromeda’s inner halo that all have the same metallicity. Metallicity refers to the elemental makeup of stars, with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium referred to as metals in astronomy. The globulars have lower metallicity than most stars in the same region, meaning they came from elsewhere, not from Andromeda itself. It also means they’re older since there were fewer heavy elements in the early Universe than there are now. Lewis named the collection of globulars the Dulai Structure, which means black stream in Welsh.

In a breakthrough study, Japanese researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have engineered the smallest motile life form ever. They introduced seven bacterial proteins into a synthetic bacterium, allowing it to move independently.

The rise of synthetic biology.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest life form can now move, thanks to genetic engineering” »

A specimen retrieved from a cupboard in the Natural History Museum in London has shown that modern lizards originated in the Late Triassic and not the Middle Jurassic as previously thought.

This fossilized relative of living lizards such as monitor lizards, gila monsters and slow worms was identified in a stored museum collection from the 1950s, including specimens from a quarry near Tortworth in Gloucestershire, South West England. The technology didn’t exist then to expose its contemporary features.

As a modern-type lizard, the new fossil impacts all estimates of the origin of lizards and snakes, together called the Squamata, and affects assumptions about their rates of evolution, and even the key trigger for the origin of the group.

Axions that decay into photons could account for visible light that exceeds what’s expected to come from all known galaxies.

If you could switch off the Milky Way’s stars and gaze at the sky with a powerful telescope, you’d see the cosmic optical background (COB)—visible-wavelength light emitted by everything outside our Galaxy. Recent studies by the New Horizons spacecraft—which, after its Pluto flyby, has been looking further afield—have returned the most precise measurements of the COB yet, showing it to be brighter than expected by a factor of 2. José Bernal and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland propose that this excess could be caused by decaying dark matter particles called axions [1]. They say that their model could be falsified or supported by future observations.

Comparing COB measurements to predictions provides a tool for testing hypotheses about the structure of the Universe. But measuring the COB is very difficult due to contamination by diffuse light from much nearer sources, especially sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Observing from the edge of our Solar System, New Horizons should be unaffected by most of this contamination, making the measured excess brightness a tool for improving our understanding of galaxy evolution.

You will not believe what we’re about to tell you — scientists have just created the very first Dino
chicken!
Using chicken DNA, they’ve proven how evolution works, and we might just see dinosaurs roam.
the Earth again. It’s our one chance to live out a real-life version of Jurassic Park!
So, join us as we learn how scientists took chicken DNA and created the chickenosaurus’
’

Disclaimer Fair Use:
1. The videos have no negative impact on the original works.
2. The videos we make are used for educational purposes.
3. The videos are transformative in nature.
4. We use only the audio component and tiny pieces of video footage, only if it’s necessary.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Just Successfully Recreated A Dinosaur From Chicken DNA!” »

Future pets!

A new study finds surprising evidence of the self-evolution of urban foxes.

NASA’s Discover supercomputer simulated the extreme conditions of the distant cosmos.

A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the U.S. space agency’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer to run 100 simulations of jets emerging from supermassive black holes.

Continue reading “NASA uses a climate simulation supercomputer to better understand black hole jets” »

Recently, a team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan achieved long-lived storage of high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) quantum states of photons based on cold atomic ensembles, using a guiding magnetic field combined with clock state preparation. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Previous work has shown that integrating multimode memory into quantum networks can greatly improve channel capacity, which is crucial for long distance quantum communication. The collective enhancement effect of the cold atomic ensemble makes it an efficient medium for storing photonic information. Although important progress has been made, many problems remain to be solved in long-lived spatial multimode memory based on cold atomic ensembles, one of which is how to achieve high fidelity for multimode memory after a long storage time since multiple spatial modes are more easily affected by the surrounding environment.

Based on the degrees of freedom of OAM, the team carried out research on the long-lived storage of high-dimensional multimode quantum states using the cold 85Rb system. In this work, to overcome the effect of inhomogeneous evolution due to the spatial complexity of stored OAM, the team used a guiding magnetic field to dominate atomic evolution and then employed a pair of magnetically insensitive states to suppress the decoherence in the transverse direction. After the clock states were employed, the destructive interference between different Zeeman sublevels was eliminated, which consequently extended the lifetime of faithful storage.

Summary: The fossil of a 525-million-year-old tiny sea creature with a preserved nervous system may solve a century-long debate about how the brains of arthropods evolved.

Source: University of Arizona.

Fossils of a tiny sea creature that died more than half a billion years ago may compel a science textbook rewrite of how brains evolved.