Lifeboat Foundation

Look, we write rather a lot about the Fermi Paradox, so trust us when we say that the Berserker Hypothesis may be the darkest explanation out there. Not only would it mean that the universe is a dead, lifeless husk, but it would also imply that our own destruction is imminent.

The Fermi Paradox at its most basic is, given the high probability that alien life exists out there (bearing in mind the vastness of space and that we keep finding planets within habitable zones), why has nobody got in touch yet?

Female kidneys are known to be more resilient to disease and injury, but males need not despair. A new USC Stem Cell-led study published in Developmental Cell describes not only how sex hormones drive differences in male and female mouse kidneys, but also how lowering testosterone can “feminize” this organ and improve its resilience.

“By exploring how differences emerge in male and female kidneys during development, we can better understand how to address sex-related health disparities for patients with kidney diseases,” said Professor Andy McMahon, the study’s corresponding author, and the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

First authors Lingyun “Ivy” Xiong and Jing Liu from the McMahon Lab and their collaborators identified more than 1,000 genes with different levels of activity in male and female mouse kidneys, in a study supported by the National Institutes of Health. The differences were most evident in the section of the kidney’s filtering unit known as the proximal tubule, responsible for reabsorbing most of the nutrients such as glucose and amino acids back into the blood stream.

An essential protein that acts as a gatekeeper for calcium entering cells promotes the growth of oral cancer and generates pain, according to a new study published in Science Signaling led by researchers at New York University College of Dentistry.

Targeting this protein—the ORAI1 calcium channel —could provide a new approach to treating oral cancer, which causes persistent pain that worsens as it progresses.

“Our results show that the ORAI1 channel fuels the growth of oral cancer tumors and produces an abundance of molecules that, once secreted, interact with neurons resulting in an increased sensitivity to pain,” said Ga-Yeon Son, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Pathobiology at NYU College of Dentistry and the study’s first author.

The current crop of AI robots has made giant leaps when it comes to tiny activities.

There are robots performing colonoscopies, conducting microsurgeries on blood vessels and nerve cells, designing circuit boards, constructing delicate timepieces and conducting fine touch-up operations on fading, aging classical paintings by the masters.

Continue reading “Targeted stiffening yields more efficient soft robot arms” »

Sending an email with a forged address is easier than previously thought, due to flaws in the process that allows email forwarding, according to a research team led by computer scientists at the University of California San Diego.

The issues researchers uncovered have a broad impact, affecting the integrity of email sent from tens of thousands of domains, including those representing organizations in the U.S. government—such as the majority of U.S. cabinet email domains, including state.gov, as well as security agencies. Key financial service companies, such as Mastercard, and major news organizations, such as The Washington Post and the Associated Press, are also vulnerable.

It’s called forwarding-based spoofing and researchers found that they can send email messages impersonating these organizations, bypassing the safeguards deployed by email providers such as Gmail and Outlook. Once recipients get the spoofed email, they are more likely to open attachments that deploy malware, or to click on links that install spyware on their machine.

Limestone spheroids, enigmatic lithic artifacts from the ancient past, have perplexed archaeologists for years. While they span from the Oldowan to the Middle Paleolithic, the purpose behind their creation remains a subject of intense debate.

Now, a study conducted by a team from the Computational Archaeology Laboratory of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in collaboration with researchers from Tel Hai College and Rovira i Virgili University seeks to shed light on these mysterious objects, offering insights into the intentions and skills of early hominins.

Spheroids are among the most enduring yet least understood archaeological artifacts, often considered as by-products of percussive tasks. However, the team’s research challenges this conventional wisdom. The central question at the heart of this study is whether these spheroids were unintentional by-products or intentionally crafted tools designed for specific purposes.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new type of material that could offer a sustainable and eco-friendly solution to clean pollutants from water.

Dubbed an “engineered living material,” it is a 3D-printed structure made of a seaweed-based polymer combined with bacteria that have been genetically engineered to produce an enzyme that transforms various organic pollutants into benign molecules. The bacteria were also engineered to self-destruct in the presence of a molecule called theophylline, which is often found in tea and chocolate. This offers a way to eliminate them after they have done their job.

Continue reading “3D-printed ‘living material’ could clean up contaminated water” »

By analyzing the data from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), astronomers from the Christ University in Bangalore, India, have serendipitously discovered a new ring galaxy, which received designation DES J024008.08–551047.5 and may belong to the rare class of polar ring galaxies. The finding was reported in a paper published August 29 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The so-called polar ring galaxies (PRGs) are systems composed of an S0-like galaxy and a polar ring, which remain separate for billions of years. In general, these outer polar rings, composed of gas and stars, are aligned roughly in a perpendicular orientation with respect to the major axis of the central host galaxy.

However, although more than 400 PRG candidates have been discovered to date, only dozens of them have been confirmed as real polar ring galaxies by follow-up spectroscopic observations.

Traveling to faraway places is a great way to seek out new experiences, but jet lag can be an unpleasant side effect. Adjusting to a new time zone is often accompanied by fatigue, difficulty sleeping, and a host of other problems that can turn an otherwise exciting adventure into a miserable trip.

Jet lag is caused by a difference between the circadian system —the body’s internal clock—and the surrounding environment. Around the turn of the century, scientists began to recognize that the body has multiple internal clocks, calibrated in different ways, and that jet lag-like symptoms can result when these clocks drift out of sync with each other. This can happen in several ways and grows more prevalent with age.

A team of scientists from Northwestern University and the Santa Fe Institute developed a theoretical model to study the interactions between multiple internal clocks under the effects of aging and disruptions like jet lag. The article, “A minimal model of peripheral clocks reveals differential circadian re-entrainment in aging,” appeared in the journal Chaos on Sept. 5, 2023.