Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 13

In collisions of argon and scandium atomic nuclei, scientists from the international NA61/SHINE experiment have observed a clear anomaly indicative of a violation of one of the most important symmetries of the quark world: the approximate flavor symmetry between up and down quarks.

The existence of the anomaly may be due to hitherto unknown inadequacies in current nuclear models, but the potential connection to the long-sought-after “new physics” cannot be ruled out.

If we were to assemble a structure using the same number of wooden and plastic blocks, we would expect the proportions between the blocks of the two types not to alter after it has been dismantled. Physicists have so far lived in the belief that a similar of the initial and final states, called flavor symmetry, occurs in collisions between particles containing up and down quarks.

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Eyes may be the window to the soul, but a person’s biological age could be reflected in their facial characteristics. Investigators from Mass General Brigham developed a deep learning algorithm called “FaceAge” that uses a photo of a person’s face to predict biological age and survival outcomes for patients with cancer.

They found that patients with , on average, had a higher FaceAge than those without and appeared about five years older than their .

Older FaceAge predictions were associated with worse overall across multiple cancer types. They also found that FaceAge outperformed clinicians in predicting short-term life expectancies of patients receiving palliative radiotherapy.

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Microplastic pollution is a severe ecological and environmental issue and is also one of the important risk factors affecting human health. Polylactic acid (PLA), a medical biodegradable material approved by the FDA, is an important material to replace petroleum-based plastics.

Although PLA has achieved large-scale application in , its brittle characteristics make it more likely to generate microplastic particles. These particles can efficiently invade the gut through the food chain and trigger unknown biotransformation processes at the microbiota–host interface. Therefore, elucidating precisely the transformation map of PLA microplastics within the living body is crucial for assessing their safety.

In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team led by Prof. Chen Chunying from the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology (NCNST) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed the complete biological fate of PLA microplastics (PLA-MPs) in the gut of mice, particularly focusing on their microbial fermentation into endogenous metabolites and their involvement in the .

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Punishing conditions in the clouds of Venus could be home to a DNA-like molecule capable of forming genes in life very different to that on Earth, according to a new study.

Long thought to be hostile to complex organic chemistry because of the absence of water, the clouds of Earth’s sister planet are made of droplets of , chlorine, iron, and other substances.

But research led by Wrocław University of Science and Technology shows how peptide nucleic acid (PNA)—a structural cousin of DNA—can survive under lab conditions made to mimic conditions that can occur in Venus’ perpetual clouds.

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Molding the flow of light—whether confined to localized regions or propagating in free space—remains crucial for modern integrated photonics. The advancement of the multi-channel, programmable optical waveguide and coupler arrays has enabled us to develop photonic integrated circuits (PICs) as a viable alternative to electronic ones, overcoming limitations in processing speed, bandwidth, and efficiency across the optical-to-microwave spectrum.

However, as on-chip complexity grows, we face significant challenges regarding long-term stability and fabrication-induced defects, making operational reliability critical for practical applications.

The increasing demand for high-capacity information processing drives our need for more complex PICs with additional channels. In this context, topological photonics offers promising solutions due to its inherent robustness against defects.

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Technology is being pushed to its very limits. The upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN slated for the next few years will increase data transfer rates beyond what the current neutrino detector for the FASER experiment can cope with, requiring it to be replaced by a new kind of more powerful detector.

This is a task that physicist Professor Matthias Schott from the University of Bonn will be tackling.

Extremely lightweight, electrically neutral and found almost everywhere in the universe, neutrinos are among its most ubiquitous particles and thus one of its basic building blocks. To researchers, however, these virtually massless elementary particles are still “ghost particles.”

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