Lifeboat Foundation

The lunar sample returned by China’s 2020 lunar mission contained minerals that provide clues to their origin. China’s Chang’e-5, the first lunar sample return mission since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976, delivered 1.73 kilograms of regolith from the Oceanus Procellarum, a plane named for its vast size. The sample landed with CE-5 in late 2020 and included a new mineral, Changesite-(Y), as well as a perplexing combination of silica minerals. Researchers now compare CE-5’s material composition to other lunar and Martian regolith samples and examine potential causes and origins for the lunar sample’s unique makeup.

Earth’s moon achieved its Swiss cheese appearance from celestial objects crashing into its surface, forming impact craters. But craters weren’t all that was left behind; the intense pressure and temperature of such a collision also impacts the rocks and dust covering the lunar surface, known as regolith, altering its mineral composition and structure. Analyzing the resulting minerals provides modern researchers clues to the moon’s past.

China’s Chang’e-5, the first lunar sample return mission since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 in 1976, delivered 1.73 kilograms of regolith from the Oceanus Procellarum, a plane named for its vast size.

Neurodegenerative diseases are among the most complex human ailments, and their exact causes and mechanisms are the subject of ongoing research and debate. When it comes to Huntington’s disease, steadily accumulating evidence over the past 30 years has led to a model of molecular events that explains several key features of the disease, including why it has an earlier onset in some people and why it causes symptoms such as involuntary movements and mood swings.

But two new complementary papers from The Rockefeller University suggest that this may not be the whole story.

Huntington’s is caused by somatic CAG expansions in which a triplet repeat of DNA bases in a mutated Huntingtin (mHTT) gene increase in number throughout life, leading to cell death. As described in Nature Genetics and in Neuron, the Rockefeller scientists used a custom technique to reveal that these genetic repeats are unstable, and likely producing more toxic proteins, only in select brain cell types. Moreover, some cells they studied proved surprisingly resilient to CAG repeat expansion.

Feb 20 (Reuters) — The first human patient implanted with a brain-chip from Neuralink appears to have fully recovered and is able to control a computer mouse using their thoughts, the startup’s founder Elon Musk said late on Monday.

“Progress is good, and the patient seems to have made a full recovery, with no ill effects that we are aware of. Patient is able to move a mouse around the screen by just thinking,” Musk said in a Spaces event on social media platform X.

Musk said Neuralink was now trying to get as many mouse button clicks as possible from the patient.

India will invite private firms to invest about $26 billion in its nuclear energy sector to increase the amount of electricity from sources that don’t produce carbon dioxide emissions, two government sources told Reuters.

In a new video, 1X’s EVE robots work together in silence in a test environment, performing actions such as sorting mail, handling objects and tidying up a child’s toys.

Quantum computing engineers at UNSW Sydney have shown they can encode quantum information—the special data in a quantum computer—in four unique ways within a single atom, inside a silicon chip.

The feat could alleviate some of the challenges in operating tens of millions of quantum computing units in just a few square millimeters of a silicon quantum computer chip.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the engineers describe how they used the 16 quantum ‘states’ of an antimony atom to encode quantum information.

CERN has announced that they are to release a cut-down version of their popular Hadron Collider for use in the home.

The Large Hadron Collider was built over twenty years ago, is housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel on the Switzerland – France border, and is used to smash particles together to see what happens.

The facility has proven tremendously successful, having smashed over thirty particles together since it was built.

A critical security flaw in the Bricks theme for WordPress is being actively exploited by threat actors to run arbitrary PHP code on susceptible installations.

The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024–25600 (CVSS score: 9.8), enables unauthenticated attackers to achieve remote code execution. It impacts all versions of the Bricks up to and including 1.9.6.

It has been addressed by the theme developers in version 1.9.6.1 released on February 13, 2024, merely days after WordPress security provider Snicco reported the flaw on February 10.

The Anatsa banking trojan has been targeting users in Europe by infecting Android devices through malware droppers hosted on Google Play.

Over the past four months, security researchers noticed five campaigns tailored to deliver the malware to users in the UK, Germany, Spain, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

Researchers at fraud detection company ThreatFabric noticed an increase of Anatsa activity since November, with at least 150,000 infections.