Lifeboat Foundation

On the largest cosmic scales, galaxies line up along filaments, with great clusters forming at their intersection. Here’s how it took shape.

Psychologists from Edith Cowan University (ECU) have used virtual reality (VR) technology in a new study that aims to better understand criminals and how they respond when questioned. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“You will often hear police say, to catch a criminal, you have to think like a criminal—well that is effectively what we are trying to do here,” said Dr. Shane Rogers, who led the project alongside ECU Ph.D. candidate Isabella Branson.

The forensic psychology research project involved 101 participants, who role-played committing a burglary in two similar virtual mock–crime scenarios.

Stepping inside Erin Adams’ lab at the University of Chicago is a bit overstimulating.

Adams’ work centers on molecular immunology. As the Joseph Regenstein Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and vice provost for research, she researches the molecular signals that the immune system uses to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue.

And her lab is expansive. It includes a tissue culture lab space—where she and her team of postdoctoral fellows work with cells to try to recapitulate things. Then there’s the crystal room where one can find hundreds of labeled wells filled with proteins that are being watched to see if three-dimensional crystals materialize.

The mysterious Lycurgus Cup is convincing evidence that ancient Romans used nanotechnology, or at least knew how to get the desired effects, long before the availability of modern technology.

The cup is made of a special type of glass known as dichroic, meaning “two-colored” in Greek, which changes hue when held up to the light. It is opaque green but turns to glowing translucent red when light shines through it.

Continue reading “Ancient Roman Nanotechnology and the Lycurgus Cup” »

Chemical analysis of rocks found in South Africa shows that ancient microorganisms sustained themselves in a variety of ways, adding to evidence for an early origin of life on Earth.

By Michael Marshall

Quantum computing is one of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of our lives, and it’s likely to supercharge the AI Boom.

Using various ground-based telescopes, astronomers have performed photometric and spectroscopic observations of a nearby Type Ia supernova known as SN 2020nlb. Results of the observations campaign, presented January 16 on the pre-print server arXiv, deliver important insights regarding the evolution of this stellar explosion.

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) are found in binary systems in which one of the stars is a white dwarf. Stellar explosions of this type are important for the scientific community, as they offer essential clues into the evolution of stars and galaxies.

SN 2020nlb was detected on June 25, 2020 with the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), shortly after its explosion in the lenticular galaxy Messier 85 (or M85 for short), located some 60 million light years away. Spectroscopic observations of SN 2020nlb, commenced shortly after its detection, confirmed that it is a Type Ia supernova.

The humble membranes that enclose our cells have a surprising superpower: They can push away nano-sized molecules that happen to approach them. A team including scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has figured out why, by using artificial membranes that mimic the behavior of natural ones. Their discovery could make a difference in how we design the many drug treatments that target our cells.

The team’s findings, which appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, confirm that the powerful electrical fields that cell membranes generate are largely responsible for repelling nanoscale particles from the surface of the cell.

This repulsion notably affects neutral, uncharged nanoparticles, in part because the smaller, charged molecules the electric field attracts crowd the membrane and push away the larger particles. Since many drug treatments are built around proteins and other nanoscale particles that target the membrane, the repulsion could play a role in the treatments’ effectiveness.

Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty.

But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control.

A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has changed our basic understanding of addiction drastically over the past decade. The general consensus among scientists and health care professionals is that there is a strong neurobiological and genetic basis for addiction.