Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

First-ever detection of ‘heavy water’ in a planet-forming disk

The discovery of ancient water in a planet-forming disk reveals that some of the water found in comets—and maybe even Earth—is older than the disk’s star itself, offering breakthrough insights into the history of water in our solar system.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have made a first-ever detection of doubly deuterated water (D₂O, or “heavy water”) in a planet-forming disk around V883 Ori, a young star. This means that the water in this disk, and by extension the water in comets that form here, predates the birth of the star itself, having journeyed through space from ancient molecular clouds long before this solar system formed.

The research is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

An edible fungus could make paper and fabric liquid-proof

As an alternative to single-use plastic wrap and paper cup coatings, researchers in Langmuir report a way to waterproof materials using edible fungus. Along with fibers made from wood, the fungus produced a layer that blocks water, oil and grease absorption. In a proof-of-concept study, the impervious film grew on common materials such as paper, denim, polyester felt and thin wood, revealing its potential to replace plastic coatings with sustainable, natural materials.

“Our hope is that by providing more ways to potentially reduce our reliance on , we can help lessen the waste that ends up in landfills and the ocean; nature offers elegant, to help us get there,” says Caitlin Howell, the corresponding author of the study from the University of Maine.

Fungi are more than their mushroom caps; underground they form an extensive, interwoven network of feathery filaments called mycelium. Recently, researchers have been inventing water-resistant materials made from these fibrous networks, including leather-like, electrically conductive gauze and spun yarn, because the surface of mycelium naturally repels water.

How to advance technology without cognitive overload

A new paper explores how managing cognitive load distribution is vital for navigating complex technologies and enabling their effective use.

In October 1935, the U.S. Army held a flying competition. On paper, Boeing’s entry, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, appeared to be the clear favorite. It was bigger, faster, and could fly farther than other bombers. Captained by an experienced test pilot, the Flying Fortress took off, rose 300 meters, stalled, and then came crashing down to Earth, killing the pilot and another crew member.

The problem was not mechanical. Nor was it poor training. Instead, as one newspaper put it, the bomber was “too much airplane for one man to fly.” With four engines and an array of complicated controls, the Flying Fortress required many intricate operations to be performed at once—more than even the most competent pilot could remember.

How a nutrient spark turned Earth into an oxygen world

A new study has revealed how phosphorus, a nutrient essential for photosynthesis, surged into ancient oceans and started Earth’s first major rise in atmospheric oxygen more than 2 billion years ago.

Dr. Matthew Dodd, from UWA’s School of Earth and Oceans, is lead author of the study published in Nature Communications. “By fueling blooms of photosynthetic microbes, these phosphorus pulses boosted burial and allowed oxygen to accumulate in the air, a turning point that ultimately made possible,” Dr. Dodd said.

The research combined a global archive of ancient carbonate rocks with modeling to simulate Earth’s climate system and show that ocean phosphorus and rose and fell together during the Great Oxidation Event.

Lab-boosted olfactory receptor reveals new insights about how our sense of smell works

Humans have about 400 odorant receptors (ORs), but scientists have had trouble finding ligands that match up with most of these ORs in lab settings—leaving them with a murky understanding of how certain smells are recognized in our brains. Only 71 human receptor-ligand interactions have been identified in studies thus far, often with low sensitivity in assays. Scientists have struggled with poor in vitro expression of ORs in lab conditions, limiting identification of receptor–odorant pairs.

In 2004, the field of olfactory science appeared to gain some progress in the form of a Nobel-winning hypothesis called the “combinatorial model,” which suggested that multiple ORs contribute to the perception of a single odorant. However, a new study, published recently in Current Biology, paints a somewhat different picture.

For their study, a group of Swiss researchers tweaked the C-terminal domains of ORs, which resulted in dramatically boosted OR cell-surface expression and sensitivity in lab conditions. This allowed the group to test out which ORs respond to various scents, like ambergris, rose, vanilla, and corked wine. Using this method, they were able to “de-orphanize” several ORs, or find matching ligands for them, resulting in novel OR identification for odorants.

Uncertainty-aware Fourier ptychography enhances imaging stability in real-world conditions

Professor Edmund Lam, Dr. Ni Chen and their research team from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering under the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have developed a novel uncertainty-aware Fourier ptychography (UA-FP) technology that significantly enhances imaging system stability in complex real-world environments. The research has been published in Light: Science & Applications.

Fourier ptychography, widely regarded as a cornerstone of computational imaging, enables wide field-of-view and high-resolution imaging with broad applications ranging from microscopy to X-ray and remote sensing. However, its practical implementation has long been hindered by misalignments, , and poor data quality—challenges common across computational imaging fields.

The team’s UA-FP framework innovatively incorporates uncertainty parameters into a fully differentiable computational model, enabling simultaneous system uncertainty quantification and correction and significant enhancement of imaging performance—even under suboptimal or interference-prone conditions. This advancement represents not only an advance in ptychography but also a transformative development for computational imaging as a whole.

General relativity could make life possible on planets orbiting white dwarfs

In the hunt for extraterrestrial life, we usually look for planets orbiting sun-like stars and icy moons. But there is another possible candidate—planets circling white dwarfs, the hot, dense remnants of dead stars.

A white dwarf is what is left when a star like our sun runs out of fuel and sheds its outer layers. Smaller and dimmer than they were before, these stellar remains have a habitable zone (a region where liquid water can exist on a planet’s surface) within a few million kilometers of the star, which is extremely close in astronomical terms.

While large planets have been found orbiting , scientists previously thought that life could not exist on them due to . These forces are increased when a companion planet nearby stretches the habitable planet’s orbit into an oval shape. This stretches and compresses the planet’s interior, generating frictional heat that can trigger a deadly greenhouse effect, making the planet uninhabitable. It would boil away any surface lakes and oceans and prevent life from forming.

AI streamlines search for catalysts to clear hydrogen production hurdles

To increase energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of hydrogen fuel production, Fanglin Che, associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is leveraging the power and potential of machine learning and computational modeling. The multi-university team she leads has completed a study that was just published in Nature Chemical Engineering. The study utilized artificial intelligence to identify catalysts with the potential to facilitate cleaner and more efficient hydrogen production.

/* */