Lifeboat Foundation

Ordinary ballpoint pens loaded with conductive inks ‘write’ LEDs onto textiles, packaging and more.

Short-lived proteins control gene expression in cells to carry out a number of vital tasks, from helping the brain form connections to helping the body mount an immune defense. These proteins are made in the nucleus and are quickly destroyed once they’ve done their job.

Despite their importance, the process by which these proteins get broken down and removed from cells once they are no longer needed has eluded scientists for decades—until now.

In a cross-departmental collaboration, researchers from Harvard Medical School identified a protein called midnolin that plays a key role in degrading many short-lived nuclear proteins. The study shows that midnolin does so by directly grabbing the proteins and pulling them into the cellular waste-disposal system, called the proteasome, where they are destroyed.

Even though we may actually sound more like our recorded voice to others, I think the reason so many of us squirm upon hearing it is not that the recorded voice is necessarily worse than our perceived voice. Instead, we’re simply more used to hearing ourselves sound a certain way.

A study published in 2005 had patients with voice problems rate their own voices when presented with recordings of them. They also had clinicians rate the voices. The researchers found that patients, across the board, tended to more negatively rate the quality of their recorded voice compared with the objective assessments of clinicians.

So if the voice in your head castigates the voice coming out of a recording device, it’s probably your inner critic overreacting – and you’re judging yourself a bit too harshly.

Listening to some songs can cause a powerful physiological response known as ‘frisson.’ What is it, and why does it happen?

A speech-to-text brain–computer interface that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays enabled an individual who cannot speak intelligibly to achieve 9.1 and 23.8% word error rates on a 50-and 125,000-word vocabulary, respectively.

Feeling lonely, a writer decided to create an AI boyfriend only to find him shallow, increasingly annoying and clingy.

Most people think the world consists of various elements ranging from fire and water to protons and electrons. Heinrich Päs challenges this idea, arguing that quantum physics revives the ancient idea of universal oneness that Christianity unjustly excluded from our culture.

Human eyes are the only natural window we have into a person’s central nervous system.

By looking through them, scientists have found very early signs of Parkinson’s disease, up to seven years before symptoms emerge.

The findings are based on three-dimensional eye scans, which are commonly used by optometrists to examine the health of someone’s retina – the layer of nerve cells at the back of the eye.

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