Lifeboat Foundation

For more than 5,000 years, humans have adorned themselves with tattoos.

In a new study, researchers used lasers to uncover highly intricate designs of ancient tattoos on mummies from Peru.

The preserved skin of the mummies and the black tattoo ink used show a stark contrast—revealing fine details in tattoos dating to around 1,250 A.D. that aren’t visible to the naked eye, said study co-author Michael Pittman, an archaeologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In a significant step toward creating a sustainable and circular economy, Rice University researchers have published a study in the journal Carbon demonstrating that carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers can be fully recycled without any loss in their structure or properties. This discovery positions CNT fibers as a sustainable alternative to traditional materials like metals, polymers and the much larger carbon fibers, which are notoriously difficult to recycle.

“Recycling has long been a challenge in the materials industry—metals recycling is often inefficient and energy-intensive, polymers tend to lose their properties after reprocessing and carbon fibers cannot be recycled at all, only downcycled by chopping them up into short pieces,” said corresponding author Matteo Pasquali, director of Rice’s Carbon Hub and the A.J. Hartsook Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Materials Science and NanoEngineering and Chemistry.

Continue reading “Fully recyclable carbon nanotube fibers have far-reaching implications for manufacturing across sectors” »

A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School has found that increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities. It points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline.

AI’s influence is growing fast. A quick search of AI-related science stories reveals how fundamental a tool it has become. Thousands of AI-assisted, AI-supported and AI-driven analyses and decision-making tools help scientists improve their research.

AI has also become more integrated into daily activities, from virtual assistants to complex information and decision support. Increased usage is beginning to influence how people think, especially impactful among younger people, who are avid users of the technology in their personal lives.

Collapsed dead stars, known as neutron stars, are a trillion times denser than lead, and their surface features are largely unknown. Nuclear theorists have explored mountain building mechanisms active on the moons and planets in our solar system. Some of these mechanisms suggest that neutron stars are likely to have mountains.

Neutron star “mountains” would be much more massive than any on Earth—so massive that gravity just from these mountains could produce small oscillations, or ripples, in the fabric of space and time.

Mountains, or non-axisymmetric deformations of rotating neutron stars, efficiently radiate gravitational waves. In a study published in the journal Physical Review D, nuclear theorists at Indiana University consider analogies between neutron star mountains and surface features of solar system bodies.

The mechanisms resulting in particle acceleration to relativistic energies in space plasmas are an open question. Here, the authors show a reinforced shock acceleration model which enables electrons to efficiently achieve relativistic energies and reveal a low electron injection threshold.

AI applications like ChatGPT are based on artificial neural networks that, in many respects, imitate the nerve cells in our brains. They are trained with vast quantities of data on high-performance computers, gobbling up massive amounts of energy in the process.

Spiking neurons, which are much less energy-intensive, could be one solution to this problem. In the past, however, the normal techniques used to train them only worked with significant limitations.

Continue reading “New training technique opens the door to neural networks that require much less energy” »

This cross-sectional study in two independent middle-aged and aged cohorts investigates whether psychological characteristics associated with varying dementia risk aggregate into psychological profiles and relate to aging brain health.

An unplugged electric instrument may function, but it sounds much better when it is connected to an amplifier. Similarly, toxins and other small molecules at low concentrations in the environment or human body may emit quiet signals that are undetectable without specialized lab technology.

Now, thanks to a “cool trick” in biochemistry used to adapt a sensing platform already being deployed by Northwestern scientists to measure toxins in drinking water, researchers can detect and even measure chemicals at low enough concentrations to have use outside the lab. By attaching circuitry akin to a volume knob to “turn up” weak signals, the team has opened the door for the system to be applied to disease detection and monitoring in the human body for nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, as well as bacteria such as E. coli.

The results, which describe a system that is 10 times more sensitive than previous cell-free sensors built by the team, are published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.

A research team developed electrokinetic mining (EKM), an eco-friendly method for extracting rare earth elements. EKM reduces environmental harm, lowers resource use, and achieved over 95% recovery in industrial tests, marking a breakthrough in sustainable mining.

On-adsorption rare earth deposits (IADs) are the primary source of heavy rare earth elements (HREE), meeting over 90% of global demand. However, the widely used ammonium-salt-based in-situ mining method has caused significant environmental damage.

To promote sustainable rare earth element (REE) extraction, Professors Jianxi Zhu and Hongping He from the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have developed an environmentally friendly and efficient electrokinetic mining (EKM) technology.