Lifeboat Foundation

Since their discovery in the 1990s, the head-direction cells in the brain have been referred to as its “internal compass.” These cells are activated when the head of an animal or human points in a certain direction, and are thought to be important for spatial orientation and navigation.

Now a team of neuroscientists at the University of Tübingen has discovered that head-direction cells in mice do more than this. They may be involved in relaying sensory and emotional information that is used to form memories of experiences, called “episodic memory.”

The research team, led by Professor Andrea Burgalossi from the Institute of Neurobiology and the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN), have published their study in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

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Reaching new worlds is a difficult task, but transplanting ecosystems and civilizations to them may be even harder.\
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Pancosmorio Paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/.…\
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Credits:\
The Fermi Paradox: Pancosmorio Theory\
Episode 428; January 4, 2024\
Produced, Written \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur\
Editor: Briana Brownell\
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Graphics:\
Jeremy Jozwik\
Ken York\
Mafic Studios\
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Music Courtesy of:\
Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator

The authors evolved antibiotic-resistant Helicobacter pylori in the absence of antibiotics and presence of DNA from antibiotic-sensitive strains. Horizontal gene transfer mediated the molecular reverse evolution of the antibiotic-resistance gene to the antibiotic-sensitive allele, and the authors used theoretical modelling to determine the evolutionary conditions that promote reverse evolution.

In a thin film of phase-change materials, photonic circuits can be directly written, erased, and modified by a laser writer.

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf and Dresden University of Technology have unraveled the water adsorption mechanism in certain microporous materials—so-called hierarchical metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—while probing them on the atomic scale.

Discovered only about 25 years ago, their special properties quickly led to a reputation as “miracle materials”—which, as it turned out, can even harvest water from air. The researchers describe how the material achieves this in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“These very special materials are highly porous solids made of metals or metal-oxygen clusters which are connected in a modular way by pillars of organic chemicals. This 3D arrangement leads to networks of cavities reminiscent of the pores of a kitchen sponge. It is precisely these cavities that we are interested in,” says Dr. Ahmed Attallah of HZDR´s Institute of Radiation Physics.

New research challenges the long-held idea that evolution is always random, and could have massive implications for addressing real-world issues.

Researchers are discovering the shortest knots and fattest Möbius strips, among other “optimal shapes.”

Unraveling the Enigma of Sleep: A Critical Exploration of Cortical network Dynamics.

Sleep has long been recognized as a fundamental physiological process, crucial for the well-being of both humans and animals.

Xu et al. show that waking progressively disrupts neural dynamics criticality in the visual cortex and that sleep restores it. Deviations from criticality predict future sleep/wake behavior better than prior behavior and slow-wave activity.

Tiled titanium: sapphire laser amplification.