Lifeboat Foundation

Turtles migrate thousands of miles out in the open ocean, charting epic courses in search of food, mates, and nesting grounds. Exactly how they find where they’re going has long puzzled scientists who suspected magnetic fields were involved, but were unsure of the exact mechanism through which turtles were sensing it.

We’ve since learned that turtles appear to recognize magnetic signatures of locations, such as the beach on which they hatched where females will later return to lay their own eggs. We know the magnetosphere is in constant flux, and turtle nesting sites have been found to shift in tandem, so how is it that they’re able to make sense of this invisible force?

Some answers to this question were revealed in a study that looked at the way snapping turtles can tell north from south, in a phenomenon known as spontaneous magnetic alignment. It was once thought to be a rare trait in the animal kingdom, but as Professor John Phillips from the Department of Biological Sciences at Virginia Tech told IFLScience, this is no longer the case.

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Bacterial cells can easily share genes with one another, and have a few ways to do so. Viruses called bacteriophages infect bacterial cells, and they can also transfer genes between bacterial cells in a process known as transduction. Often, the genes that are being shared confer resistance to a drug, and once a bacterial cell gains the ability, antibiotic resistance can easily spread through populations of microbial cells. Now scientists have discovered another mechanism that bacteria use to share genes, and it can help microbes evolve even faster than we knew. The findings have been reported in Cell.

There are three types of transduction that we now know about: generalized, specialized, and lateral. The newly revealed mechanism is called lateral cotransduction. It is about as rapid as lateral transduction, which itself is far faster than generalized transduction. However, the study indicated that lateral cotransduction is more complex and versatile than the other modes of transduction. Lateral transduction happens when phages that have integrated into bacterial genomes are reactivated, and trigger reproduction in the lytic cycle; but lateral cotransduction can while new bacterial cells are being infected, and during the reactivation process.

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter that can provide an intense feeling of reward. It has been a long-standing assumption that most, if not all, dopamine neurons solely respond to rewards or reward-predicting cues. However, a study in mice led by researchers at Northwestern University reveals dopamine may also control movements. The researchers uncovered that one genetic subtype fires when the body moves and that these neurons do not respond to rewards at all.

The findings are published in Nature Neuroscience in an article titled, “Unique functional responses differentially map onto genetic subtypes of dopamine neurons,” and shed new light on the brain which may lead to new research on Parkinson’s disease, which is characterized by the loss of dopamine neurons yet affects the motor system.

“Dopamine neurons are characterized by their response to unexpected rewards, but they also fire during movement and aversive stimuli,” the researchers wrote. “Dopamine neuron diversity has been observed based on molecular expression profiles; however, whether different functions map onto such genetic subtypes remains unclear. In this study, we established that three genetic dopamine subtypes within the substantia nigra pars compacta, characterized by the expression of Slc17a6 (Vglut2), Calb1, and Anxa1, each have a unique set of responses to rewards, aversive stimuli, and accelerations and decelerations, and these signaling patterns are highly correlated between somas and axons within subtypes.”

The device was equipped with infrared technology.

A police drone equipped with infrared capabilities has risen as a hero in the search for a missing person with dementia that disappeared from a Delta hospital on July 29. Delta is a city located in British Columbia, Canada.

This is according to a report by Global News published on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Police use drone to find missing person with dementia” »

It reduces water wastage and carbon emissions.

“When it comes to photovoltaics, dust is the enemy. This is not a trivial concept, even if it may seem so at first glance; actually, the problem of soiling – the accumulation of dust, dirt or sand on PV panels – can decrease, sometimes significantly, the performance of solar power systems,” stated an Enel Green Power press release published on Friday.

Desert areas

Continue reading “This new robot cleans solar panels without using any water” »

Great Wall Motor will use Baidu’s Ernie 3.5 foundational language model which rivals OpenAI’s ChatGPT4.

Marking the entry of AI systems into mass-market cars, Chinese automaker Great Wall Motor (GWM) is set to integrate Baidu’s ChatGPT-like AI system, which enables conversation between driver and car.

According to South China Morning Post (SCMP). GMW has partnered with technology firm Baidu to produce automobiles integrated with the latter’s chatbot tool, Ernie Bot, bolstering a push to make cars more intelligent and user-friendly.

Mark Zuckerberg is set to enter the AI space and join the AI hype by launching chatbots on Facebook’s social media platforms.

With tech giant companies joining the artificial intelligence race to keep up with the new technology demand, Meta’s owner is all set to launch a variety of AI-backed chatbots.

Financial Times (FT) reported earlier today (2 Aug 2023) that the chatbots will launch as soon as next month. With the ambition to boost engagement, the tech giant has been designing new persona-based chatbot prototypes that can have humanlike discussions with its nearly four billion users.

“The ad money will otherwise be kept by X if you are not an X Premium (Blue) subscriber,” Musk said in a post.

To be eligible for the program, creators also need to be at least 18 years old, have a minimum of 500 followers, and have 15 million or more “organic impressions” on posts within the last three months.

The price of an X premium subscription starts at $8 per month, or $84 a year, and it gives users access to extra features such as “Edit.”