Lifeboat Foundation

Our brain’s memory center bears a sleek design.

A peek into living tissue from human hippocampi, a brain region crucial for memory and learning, revealed relatively few cell-to-cell connections for the vast number of nerve cells. But signals sent via those sparse connections proved extremely reliable and precise, researchers report December 11 in Cell.

One seahorse-shaped hippocampus sits deep within each hemisphere of the mammalian brain. In each hippocampus’s CA3 area, humans have about 1.7 million nerve cells called pyramidal cells. This subregion is thought to be the most internally connected part of the brain in mammals.

LLNL is working on a laser that is 10x more efficient than CO₂ EUV lasers.

Engineers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the US are developing a device that can harvest humidity in the air to create clean electricity.

Scientists have developed an advanced swarm navigation algorithm for cyborg insects that prevents them from becoming stuck while navigating challenging terrain.

Published in Nature Communications, the new algorithm represents a significant advance in swarm robotics. It could pave the way for applications in disaster relief, search-and-rescue missions, and infrastructure inspection.

Cyborg insects are real insects equipped with tiny electronic devices on their backs—consisting of various sensors like optical and infrared cameras, a battery, and an antenna for communication—that allow their movements to be remotely controlled for specific tasks.

Why it matters

The new study explains a longstanding puzzle in medicine: why do some people who’ve inherited a disease-causing mutation experience fewer symptoms than others with the same mutation? “In many diseases, we’ll see that 90% of people who carry a mutation are sick, but 10% who carry the mutation don’t get sick at all,” says Bogunovic, a scientist who studies children with rare immunological disorders at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Enlisting an international team of collaborators, the researchers looked at several families with different genetic disorders affecting their immune systems. In each case, the disease-causing copy was more likely to be active in sick patients and suppressed in healthy relatives who had inherited the same genes.

What if the secret to slowing down aging was hiding in our brains? A groundbreaking study by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, published in Nature in January 2025, may have uncovered some exciting clues. Using cutting-edge technology, the team analyzed over 1.2 million brain cells from young and aged mice to understand how they change with time. They found that certain cells become inflamed, while others lose critical functions, and all eyes are now on the hypothalamus as a key player in the aging process. These findings deepen our understanding of aging and could pave the way for treatments that keep our brains younger for longer.

Early Formation of Life’s Building Blocks

A groundbreaking study published in Nature Astronomy has revealed that amino acids, essential for life, can form in dark interstellar clouds long before stars and planets emerge. Glycine, the simplest amino acid, was shown to form on the surface of icy dust grains in cold, energy-deprived environments through a process called “dark chemistry.” These findings challenge the long-standing belief that UV radiation was required to create glycine, significantly expanding our understanding of how life’s precursors emerge in space.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have used a distortion in space to reveal over 40 individual stars in a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years from the Milky Way—halfway back to the beginning of the universe. It’s the largest number of individual stars ever detected in the distant universe.

The unique image, which takes advantage of JWST’s high-resolution optics, was only possible because the light from 44 stars in a distant galaxy was magnified by a massive cluster of galaxies in front of it called Abell 370.

This technique, called gravitational lensing—also known as an “Einstein ring” because it was predicted by the famous scientist Albert Einstein—works when the gravitational field of a foreground object distorts the space around it. Light is bent from an object behind it into circular rings or arcs, both revealing the existence of something in the background and, crucially, magnifying it by factors of hundreds or even thousands. In this case, an arc was visible, dubbed the “Dragon Arc.”

Researchers at the University of Virginia are using advanced simulations to study electron behavior in electric propulsion thrusters.