Lifeboat Foundation

To enjoy the scent of morning coffee and freshly baked cookies or to perceive the warning smell of something burning, the brain needs two types of cells, neurons and astrocytes, to work closely with each other. Research has shown a great deal of the changes that occur in neurons during olfactory, or smell, perception, but what are the astrocyte responses and how they contribute to the sensory experience remains unclear.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and collaborating institutions report in the journal Science the responses of astrocytes to olfactory stimulation, revealing a new mechanism that is required to maintain astrocyte-neuron communication and process olfactory sensation.

“Previous studies have shown that under natural conditions in a living animal, olfactory stimulation of the brain activates neurons first, which changes the genes these neurons express to be able to mediate the olfactory sensation,” said first author Dr. Debosmita Sardar, a postdoctoral associate in Dr. Benjamin Deneen’s lab at Baylor. “In this study, we investigated what occurred to astrocytes following neural activity during olfactory stimulation and uncovered changes that had not been described before.”

The immune system is an incredibly complex network that has some amazing capabilities. It can eliminate dangerous cells that may lead to cancer, and defend the body against a wide variety of pathogenic invaders. It also has the ability to remember those encounters with pathogens so if they happen again, the immune system is primed to respond more quickly and forcefully against the offender. Scientists have now learned more about how the immune system memory is created at the molecular level. The findings have been reported in Science Immunology.

When immune cells are exposed to an invader, they can recognize structures called antigens on the surface of the pathogen. In this study, the researchers compared immune cells that had never been exposed to an antigen, so-called naive cells, to immune cells that had been in contact with an antigen, known as memory cells. The investigators wanted to identify the epigenetic differences between these cell types, which are changes in DNA that can impact gene expression, such as structural shifts or chemical tags, but do not alter the sequence of the genome. Epigenetic changes might explain why memory cells can react so quickly while naive cells are comparatively slow.

But in black holes, where a lot of mass is crammed into a very small region of space, these worlds collide and there is no theoretical framework that unifies the two.

“We have a great understanding of both individually, but it turns out extremely hard to combine these two theories,” says Weinfurtner. “The idea is that we want to understand how quantum physics behaves, on what we call a curved space time geometry.”

In the new setup, the black hole is represented by a tiny vortex inside a bell jar of superfluid helium, cooled to-271C. At this temperature, helium begins to demonstrate quantum effects. Unlike water, which can spin at a continuous range of speeds, the helium vortex can only swirl at certain fixed values. Ripples sent across the surface of the helium, tracked with nanometre precision by lasers and a high-resolution camera, represent radiation approaching a black hole.

Consider it a technological solution to the problem of death.

Over the last couple years, I’ve been writing about creating ghosts — perhaps an inevitability in the midst of a pandemic.

Artur Sychov, founder and CEO of metaverse company Somnium Space, has joined the quest against loss. Using motion capture and voice data, he wants to create duplicate avatars that can move as you moved and speak as you spoke, using your voice.

An international group of experts argue that tackling the long-standing challenge of decoding the communication systems of whales, crows, bats, and other animals is coming within reach, following breath-taking advances in artificial intelligence (AI) research.

In an article published in Science, led by Professor Christian Rutz from the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, the authors explain how cutting-edge machine-learning tools could provide transformative insights into the hidden lives of animals, with important implications for their conservation.

The prospect of understanding what animals say to each other, or of even initiating a conversation with another species, has fired humans’ imagination for millennia. But since there is no Rosetta Stone for translating animals’ communication signals, their meaning must be deciphered through careful observation and experimentation. Despite good research progress over the past few decades, collecting and analyzing data is a challenging task. For example, annotating recordings of bird calls, whale songs or primate gestures is time-consuming, and even experienced biologists often struggle to differentiate seemingly similar signal types.

Marion Patten sadly passed away two years after her ovarian cancer diagnosis. Today, her husband Wayne finds happiness in supporting research that helps other women like Marion.

BENGALURU, July 14 (Reuters) — India’s space agency launched a rocket on Friday that sent a spacecraft into orbit and toward a planned landing next month on the lunar south pole, an unprecedented feat that would advance India’s position as a major space power.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 launch rocket blasted off from the country’s main spaceport in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Friday afternoon, leaving behind a plume of smoke and fire.

About 16 minutes later, ISRO’s mission control announced that the rocket had succeeded in putting the Chandrayaan-3 lander into an Earth orbit that will send it looping toward a moon landing next month.

There’s a reason the saying “that’s why we test” exists. I’ve seen it a lot in my mentions the past few days. Unfortunately, and crucially, it ignores that tests happen for different reasons.

Let’s get into that, especially in light of the recently unveiled explosion of a BE-4 rocket engine during Blue Origin’s testing in Texas. The engine was bound for the second launch of its customer United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

Viasat shares plunged sharply Thursday in the wake of the announcement.

The first ViaSat-3, launched last April, was expected to provide space-based internet access to customers in the western hemisphere starting this summer. Two more satellites covering Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific are expected to launch over the next two years.

Capable of handling up to 1 terabyte of data per second, the satellites are equipped with the largest dish antennas ever launched on a commercial spacecraft. Each satellite’s reflector is designed to deploy atop a long boom.