Lifeboat Foundation

NASA has revealed that it has already processed 70.3 grams of rocks and dust collected by the OSIRIS-REx mission from asteroid Bennu. That means the mission has way exceeded its goal of bringing 60 grams of asteroid samples back to Earth — especially since NASA scientists have yet to open the primary sample container that made its way back to our planet in September. Apparently, they’re struggling to open the mission’s Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) and could not remove two of its 35 fasteners using the tools currently available to them.

The scientists are processing the samples inside a specialized glovebox (pictured above) with a flow of nitrogen in order to keep them from being exposed to our atmosphere and any contaminants. They can’t just use any implement to break the container’s fasteners open either: The tool must fit inside the glovebox, and it also must not compromise the samples’ integrity. NASA has sealed the primary container sample for now, while it’s developing the procedure to be able to open it over the next few weeks.

If you’re wondering where the 70.3 grams of rocks and dust came from, well, NASA collected part of it from the external sample receptacle but outside TAGSAM itself. It also includes a small portion of the samples inside TAGSAM, taken by holding down its mylar flap and reaching inside with tweezers or a scoop. NASA’s initial analysis of the material published earlier this month said it showed evidence of high carbon content and water, and further studies could help us understand how life on Earth began. The agency plans to continue analyzing and “characterizing” the rocks and dust it has already taken from the sample container, so we may hear more details about the samples even while TAGSAM remains sealed.

Found in a Spanish landfill, the fossils of the extinct species Pierolapithecus catalaunicus may reveal important clues about our origins.

After birth, the human heart loses its regenerative capacity almost completely. Damage to the heart muscle—for example, due to a heart attack—therefore usually leads to a permanent loss of function in adults. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research have now shown for the first time in mice that a change in the energy metabolism of heart muscle cells enables heart regeneration.

In the animals, heart function could thus be restored to a large extent after a heart attack. The study, published in the journal Nature, is groundbreaking and could enable completely new therapeutic approaches.

The loss of regenerative capacity in adults hearts is due, among other things, to the loss of the ability of heart muscle cells to divide after birth. This is accompanied by a fundamental change in the energy metabolism of the heart cells: Instead of obtaining energy from sugars, which is known as glycolysis, the heart muscle cells now obtain their energy largely from fats. This form of energy production is known as fatty acid oxidation.

ChatGPT’s deceptive messages work almost as well as ones written by people, IBM found. And it’s much faster.

Isotopes tell the epic tale of one ancient mammal’s odyssey across Alaska.

Its energy efficiency is just mind-blowing,” said Damien Querlioz, a nanoelectronics researcher at the University of Paris-Saclay in Palaiseau. “I feel the paper will shake the common thinking in computer architecture.

NorthPole, a new edge-based processor announced this month by IBM Research, is up to 22 times faster and much more energy efficient than chips currently on the market.

A team from IBM research has presented NorthPole – a brain-inspired chip architecture, which blends computation with memory to process data more efficiently at low energy costs.

Continue reading “New AI chip is 22 times faster” »

In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves—ripples in space and time—produced by a pair of colliding black holes.

Since then, LIGO and its sister detector in Europe, Virgo, have detected gravitational waves from dozens of mergers between black holes as well as from collisions between a related class of stellar remnants called neutron stars. At the heart of LIGO’s success is its ability to measure the stretching and squeezing of the fabric of space-time on scales 10 thousand trillion times smaller than a human hair.

As incomprehensibly small as these measurements are, LIGO’s precision has continued to be limited by the laws of quantum physics. At very tiny, subatomic scales, empty space is filled with a faint crackling of quantum noise, which interferes with LIGO’s measurements and restricts how sensitive the observatory can be.

Rethinking what and who we are.

New technique could be used in medical diagnostics and advanced manufacturing.

Ever since Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered the world of bacteria through a microscope in the late seventeenth century, humans have tried to look deeper into the world of the infinitesimally small.

There are, however, physical limits to how closely we can examine an object using traditional optical methods. This is known as the ‘diffraction limit’ and is determined by the fact that light manifests as a wave. It means a focused image can never be smaller than half the wavelength of light used to observe an object.