Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A single-celled microbe that revels in Earth’s most hostile salt lakes has the remarkable ability to transform its mote of a body into multicellular tissue when the pressure’s on.

“The advent of clonal multicellularity is a critical evolutionary milestone,” the international team who made this discovery, led by Brandeis University pathobiologist Theopi Rados, write in their new paper.

Haloferax volcanii is a member of the often-overlooked archaea domain, which looks quite similar to bacteria and yet have more in common with our own domain, eukaryota. Multicellularity is common in eukaryotes and rare among bacteria, and as far as we know, H. volcanii is only the second archaeon found to take this multicellular leap.

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NASA continues to mark progress on plans to work with commercial and international partners as part of the Gateway program. The primary structure of HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) arrived at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Gilbert, Arizona, where it will undergo final outfitting and verification testing.

HALO will provide Artemis astronauts with space to live, work, and conduct scientific research. The habitation module will be equipped with essential systems including command and control, data handling, energy storage, power distribution, and thermal regulation.

Following HALO’s arrival on April 1 from Thales Alenia Space in Turin, Italy, where it was assembled, NASA and Northrop Grumman hosted an April 24 event to acknowledge the milestone, and the module’s significance to lunar exploration. The event opened with remarks by representatives from Northrop Grumman and NASA, including NASA’s Acting Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Lori Glaze, Gateway Program Manager Jon Olansen, and NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik. Event attendees, including Senior Advisor to the NASA Administrator Todd Ericson, elected officials, and local industry and academic leaders, viewed HALO and virtual reality demonstrations during a tour of the facilities.

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Particle Physics Breakthroughs: The Outstanding Contributions of US Universities to Large Hadron Collider Research and Talent Development — fully visualized data of colleges rankings, basic information, admission, graduation, tuition, majors, students, campus safety and more information.

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Scientists at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, in collaboration with the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, have developed a new nanoparticle therapy that tackles obesity through two complementary mechanisms: converting energy-storing white fat into calorie-burning beige fat while simultaneously reducing obesity-related inflammation.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Controlled Release, are detailed in an article titled “Apigenin-loaded nanoparticles for obesity intervention through immunomodulation and adipocyte browning.” This innovative approach addresses key limitations of current obesity treatments by precisely targeting adipose tissue with apigenin-loaded nanoparticles—enhancing therapeutic effects while minimizing potential side effects.

The research team, led by Dr. Alireza Hassani Najafabadi and Dr. Ryan M. Pearson, engineered specialized PLGA nanoparticles to deliver the natural compound apigenin directly to fat tissue. This targeted delivery system ensures optimal therapeutic effects while minimizing potential side effects throughout the body.

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Network alignment is a fundamental problem in several domains that aims at mapping nodes across networks. Here, the authors develop a probabilistic approach that assumes that observed networks are errorful copies from a blueprint. The method samples the distribution of alignments, improving accuracy and enabling potential applications.

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Chinese doctors have successfully implanted the world’s smallest and lightest artificial heart that uses magnetic levitation technology into a 7-year-old boy, giving him more time to wait for a heart transplant.

Weighing 45 grams and measuring just 2.9 centimeters in diameter, this tiny device is the size of a regular plastic water bottle cap and is about half the weight of the smallest maglev-powered heart pump designed for adults.

The Union Hospital affiliated to Tongji Medical College at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Hubei province, said on Tuesday that the boy is now in stable condition and awaiting further treatment, following the operation which was carried out on March 30.

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