Lifeboat Foundation

A research team led by Prof. Yossi Paltiel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with groups from HUJI, Weizmann, and IST Austria recently conducted a study unveiling the significant influence of nuclear spin on biological activities. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions and opens up exciting possibilities for advancements in biotechnology and quantum biology.

Scientists have long believed that nuclear spin had no impact on biological processes. However, recent research has shown that certain isotopes behave differently due to their nuclear spin. The team focused on stable oxygen isotopes (16O, 17O, 18O) and found that nuclear spin significantly affects oxygen dynamics in chiral environments, particularly in its transport.

“It’s never really the goal of anybody to write papers — it’s to do science,” says Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also editor-in-chief of the journal eLife. He predicts that generative AI tools could even fundamentally transform the nature of the scientific paper.

But the spectre of inaccuracies and falsehoods threatens this vision. LLMs are merely engines for generating stylistically plausible output that fits the patterns of their inputs, rather than for producing accurate information. Publishers worry that a rise in their use might lead to greater numbers of poor-quality or error-strewn manuscripts — and possibly a flood of AI-assisted fakes.

“Anything disruptive like this can be quite worrying,” says Laura Feetham, who oversees peer review for IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, which publishes physical-sciences journals.

To most people, complex technologies separate modern humans from their ancestors who lived in the Stone Age, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. In today’s fast changing world, older technologies, even those from a few years ago, are often described dismissively as “Stone Age.”

Such terms serve to disconnect us from our ancient relatives, who were much more sophisticated than we sometimes think they were.

A team led by archaeologist Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool recently published robust and well dated evidence for the earliest known use of wood technology. The wooden structure, along with artifacts, date to 476,000 years ago and have been excavated from waterlogged deposits at Kalambo Falls, Zambia.

Some of nature’s mysteries have kept scientists busy for decades—for example, the processes that drive evolution. The question of whether certain differences between and within species are caused by natural selection or by chance processes divides evolutionary biologists even today. Now, an international team of researchers has teased apart a scientific debate concerning the evolutionary theories of Darwin and the Japanese geneticist Kimura. Their conclusion: the debate is unnecessarily convoluted by the co-existence of different interpretations.

Due to his contributions to geological and biological sciences, British naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is considered one of the most important natural scientists. His influential work “On the Origin of Species” (1859), with its strictly scientific explanation of the diversity of life, forms the basis of modern evolutionary biology. Darwin concluded that species evolve through natural selection: well-adapted organisms survive, others don’t.

However, by the end of the 1960s, the Japanese geneticist Motoo Kimura (1924–1994) proposed that at the genetic level, most changes in the course of evolution do not offer direct advantages or disadvantages to the individual but are simply neutral. According to his “Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution,” first published in 1968, most of the genetic variation within and between species arises from random fluctuations of neutral mutations.

Dr. Michael Demkowicz predicted self-healing in metal; this summer it was finally observed, shocking scientists around the world.

A microscopic crack grew in a very small piece of platinum when placed under repetitive stretching. The experiment, designed to study fatigue crack growth, continued as predicted for a while. But then, something unexpected happened. The crack stopped growing and instead began to get shorter, effectively “healing” itself.

This incredible observation was made by a group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories while conducting fracture experiments on nanocrystalline metals. The findings were recently published in the journal Nature.

Researcher show that n-bit integers can be factorized by independently running a quantum circuit with orders of magnitude fewer qubits many times. It then use polynomial-time classical post-processing. The correctness of the algorithm relies on a number-theoretic heuristic assumption reminiscent of those used in subexponential classical factorization algorithms. It is currently not clear if the algorithm can lead to improved physical implementations in practice.

Shor’s celebrated algorithm allows to factorize n-bit integers using a quantum circuit of size O(n^2). For factoring to be feasible in practice, however, it is desirable to reduce this number further. Indeed, all else being equal, the fewer quantum gates there are in a circuit, the likelier it is that it can be implemented without noise and decoherence destroying the quantum effects.

The new algorithm can be thought of as a multidimensional analogue of Shor’s algorithm. At the core of the algorithm is a quantum procedure.

Falling through the Solar System at an astonishing 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just smashed the record for fastest object ever to be created by human hands.

The event on September 27 marks the turning point of the mission’s 17^th loop around the Sun as it collects data on the heated winds of charged particles and violent magnetism that surround our closest star, and comes just under three years after its previous record of 586,863.4 kilometers (364,660 miles) per hour.

At these speeds, it’d be possible for an aircraft to circumnavigate our planet roughly 15 times in a single hour, or zoom from New York to Los Angeles in just over 20 seconds.

A recent letter called a leading theory of consciousness “pseudoscience.”

An exploration of ten of the spookier technosignatures SETI might detect in the future.

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