Lifeboat Foundation

Fungal infections have been slipping past their usual geographic boundaries and increasing in hospitals and other settings — and, as Scientific American’s Maryn McKenna has pointed out, we currently don’t have much recourse against them.

Fungal infections are incredibly hard to beat, even with modern medicine.

But MIT researchers studying the common yeast Candida albicans may have found a new effective antifungal candidate, and you’ve got some in you right now: mucus.

Tardigrades are often considered the most endearing invertebrates, akin to the capybara of their realm, yet their significance surpasses mere charm.

This year, researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, discovered that when the tardigrades are under stress, their bodies produce unstable free radicals of oxygen and an unpaired electron.

Continue reading “Beyond cute: What tardigrades can teach us about life and death” »

Loongson’s next-generation data center CPU is ready.

Saving the world’s automakers from fines made Tesla nearly $9 billion since 2009.

The next-generation AI model from Google excels at processing large amounts of information per one query, such as 30,000 lines of code or over 700,000 words of text.

Here’s visible proof for the first time ever.

Ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism have long been known to scientists as two classes of magnetic order of materials. Back in 2019, researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) postulated a third class of magnetism, called altermagnetism. This altermagnetism has been the subject of heated debate among experts ever since, with some expressing doubts about its existence.

Recently, a team of experimental researchers led by Professor Hans-Joachim Elmers at JGU was able to measure for the first time at DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) an effect that is considered to be a signature of altermagnetism, thus providing evidence for the existence of this third type of magnetism. The research results were published in Science Advances.

Independent of the smart-corridor project, two major companies behind self-driving big rig technology told KXAN they plan to remove safety drivers and go completely driverless by the end of the year.

A spokesperson for the California-based company Kodiak Robotics told KXAN it started operating self-driving big rigs on routes around Texas in 2019, always with backup safety drivers.

In that time, “the bulk of Kodiak’s deliveries have been between our Dallas operations hub and Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta,” Kodiak spokesman Daniel Goff said.

Plural and Hummingbird are leading the funding round for the startup that aims to address a major contributor to housing shortfalls in Europe.