Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 18

Sunburns and aging skin are obvious effects of exposure to harmful UV rays, tobacco smoke and other carcinogens. But the effects aren’t just skin deep. Inside the body, DNA is literally being torn apart.

Understanding how the body heals and protects itself from DNA damage is vital for treating genetic disorders and life-threatening diseases such as cancer. But despite numerous studies and medical advances, much about the molecular mechanisms of DNA repair remains a mystery.

For the past several years, researchers at Georgia State University have tapped into the Summit supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to study an elaborate molecular pathway called (NER). NER relies on an array of highly dynamic protein complexes to cut out (excise) damaged DNA with surgical precision.

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Over the past two years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued Travel Health Advisories focused on measles outbreaks.

These advisories highlight where there is an active health risk when people visit the highlighted countries.

On February 21, 2025, the CDC reissued a Level 1, Practice Usual Precautions, alert for 57 countries. This CDC list does not integrate the Region of the Americas, with numerous countries reporting 537 measles outbreaks this year.

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In anticipation for my next public lecture, the organizer requested the title of my lecture. I suggested: “Hunting for Aliens.” The organizer expressed concern that some members of the audience might confuse me for a U.S. government employee in search of illegal aliens near the southern border wall. I explained that no two-dimensional wall erected on Earth would protect us from extraterrestrials because they will arrive from above. It is just a matter of time until we notice interstellar travelers arriving without a proper visa. A policy of deporting them back to their home exoplanet will be expensive — over a billion dollars per flight. The trip will also take a long time — over a billion years with conventional chemical propulsion. We will have to learn how to live with these aliens, and promote diversity and inclusion in a Galactic context.

The Sun formed in the last third of cosmic history, so we are relatively late to the party of interstellar travelers. Experienced travelers might have been engaged in their interstellar journeys for billions of years. To properly interpret their recorded diaries and photo albums in terms of the specific stars they visited, we would need to accurately interpret their time measurements.

Imagine an interstellar tourist wearing a mechanical analog watch. Such a timepiece is at best accurate to within 3 seconds per day, or equivalently 30,000 years per billion years. This timing error is comparable to the amount of time it takes to hop from one star to another with chemical propulsion. Interstellar travelers must wear better clocks in order to have a reliable record of time.

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A new analysis reveals complex linkages among the United Nations’ (UN’s) 17 Sustainable Development Goals—which include such objectives as gender equality and quality education—and finds that no country is on track to meet all 17 goals by the target year of 2030.

Alberto García-Rodríguez of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS One.

In 2015, UN member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals with the aim of achieving “peace and prosperity for people and the planet.” However, setbacks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, , and have slowed progress, and more research is needed to clarify the underlying obstacles so they can be effectively addressed.

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Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), have developed an innovative solar-powered method to transform sewage sludge—a by-product of wastewater treatment—into green hydrogen for clean energy and single-cell protein for animal feed.

Published in Nature Water, the sludge-to-food-and-fuel method tackles two pressing global challenges: managing waste and generating sustainable resources. This aligns with NTU’s goal of addressing humanity’s greatest challenges, such as climate change and sustainability.

The United Nations estimates that about 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities by 2050. Along with the growth of cities and industries comes an increase in , which is notoriously difficult to process and dispose of due to its complex structure, composition, and contaminants such as and pathogens.

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Modern communication networks rely on optical signals to transfer vast amounts of data. But just like a weak radio signal, these optical signals need to be amplified to travel long distances without losing information.

The most common amplifiers, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs), have served this purpose for decades, enabling longer transmission distances without the need for frequent signal regeneration. However, they operate within a limited spectral bandwidth, restricting the expansion of optical networks.

To meet the growing demand for high-speed , researchers have been seeking ways to develop more powerful, flexible, and compact amplifiers. Even though AI accelerators, , and high-performance computing systems handle ever-increasing amounts of data, the limitations of existing are becoming more evident.

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Abstract

Agriculture is a sector that plays a crucial role in ensuring food security and sustainable development. However, traditional agriculture practices face challenges such as inefficient irrigation methods and lack of real-time monitoring, leading to water waste and reduced crop yield. Several systems that attempt to address these challenges exist, such as those based on Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and 3G/4G cellular technology; but also encounter difficulties such as low transmission range, high power consumption, etc. To address all these issues, this paper proposes a smart agriculture monitoring and automatic irrigation system based on LoRa. The system utilizes LoRa technology for long-range wireless communication, Blynk platform for real-time data visualization and control, and ThingSpeak platform for data storage, visualization, and further analysis. The system incorporates multiple components, including a sensor node for data collection, a gateway for data transmission, and an actuator node for irrigation control. Experimental results show that the proposed system effectively monitors collected data such as soil moisture levels, visualizes data in real time, and automatically controls irrigation based on sensor data and user commands. The system proposed in this study provides a cost-effective and efficient solution for sustainable agriculture practices.

Smart Agriculture, Internet of Things, LoRa, Power Consumption, Real-Time Monitoring.

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How does the human brain learn to see? Research from Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and Goethe University Frankfurt explores how early visual experiences restructure circuits in the visual cortex. This research sheds light on the fundamental mechanisms of brain development and visual perception.

Explore the research.

How early visual experience builds reliable brain circuits Because it does it so well, we often take for granted how our brain creates reliable visual representations of our surroundings that are critical for guiding our behavior. While scientists understand a lot about how mature neural circuits support reliable vision, the sequence of developmental events before and after birth that build these circuits is not clear. Collaborating scientists at Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, and Goethe University Frankfurt have discovered how early visual experience dramatically changes the brain networks that process vision – changes that are essential for establishing reliable visual perception.

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