Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2564

The positron, the antiparticle of the electron, has the same mass and charge as that of an electron but with the sign flipped for the charge. It is an attractive particle for scientists because the use of positrons has led to important insights and developments in the fields of elementary particle physics, atomic physics, materials science, astrophysics, and medicine.

For instance, positrons are known to be components of antimatter. They are also powerful in detecting lattice defects in solids and semiconductors and in structural analysis of the topmost surface of crystals.

Positronic compounds, namely bound states of positrons with regular atoms, molecules, or ions, represent an intriguing aspect of –matter interactions and have been studied experimentally via observation of positron annihilation in gases. It may be possible to generate new molecules and ions via the formation of positron compounds, but no research has ever been done from such a perspective.

Read more | >

Did you know (RA) is a long-lasting autoimmune disease that affects joints? The immune system is meant to protect us, but with RA, it attacks healthy tissue. This can cause pain, swelling, stiffness, and loss of joint function.

Caring for yourself when living with RA includes knowing when to rest and when to exercise, occasionally wearing a splint, and managing stress levels.

Find more tips for coping with RA from NIAMS:

What is rheumatoid arthritis? It is a disease that affects multiple joints, resulting in pain, swelling, and stiffness. Tiredness and fever may also be present.

Continue reading “Rheumatoid Arthritis: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Steps to Take” | >

Imagine that the human body is a… More.

How a Small Strand of RNA is Key to Fighting #Cancer.

Called let-7, the microRNA governs formation of the cellular memory pool and is a gift from the dawn of animal life. A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown that a single, small strand of microRNA, or miRNA, known as let-7, governs the ability of T-cells to recognize and remember tumor cells. This cellular memory is the basis for how vaccines work. Boosting cellular memory to recognize tumors could help improve cancer therapies. The research, published recently in Nature Communications, suggests a new strategy for the next generation of cancer-fighting immunotherapies.

Imagine that the human body is a fortress, says Leonid Pobezinsky, associate professor of veterinary and animal sciences at UMass Amherst and the paper’s senior author, along with Elena Pobezinskaya, a research assistant professor also in veterinary and animal sciences at UMass. Our bodies have T-cells, which are white blood cells that specialize in fighting both pathogens, think of the common cold, and altered cells of the organism itself, like tumor cells. Most of the time, the T-cells are naïve — mustered out of duty and resting. But when they recognize foreign antigens after bumping into them, they suddenly wake up, turn into killer T-cells and attack whatever the pathogen may be, from the sniffles to COVID, or even cancer. After the killer T-cells have won their battle, most of them die.

Continue reading “How a Small Strand of RNA is Key to Fighting Cancer” | >

Tech companies are investing billions in developing and deploying generative AI. That money needs to be recouped. Recent reports and analysis show that it’s not easy.

According to an anonymous source from the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft lost more than $20 per user per month on generative AI code Github Copilot in the first few months of the year. Some users reportedly cost as much as $80 per month. Microsoft charges $10 per user per month.

It loses money because the AI model that generates the code is expensive to run. Github Copilot is popular with developers and currently has about 1.5 million users who constantly trigger the model to write more code.

Read more | >

Interstellar magnetic fields perturb the trajectories of cosmic rays, making it difficult to identify their sources. A new survey of gamma radiation produced when cosmic rays interact with the interstellar medium should help in this identification.

Scientists know that the diffuse gamma-ray glow that suffuses the Milky Way is mainly produced by the interaction of high-energy cosmic rays with interstellar gas. But questions remain about the properties of these cosmic rays. What, for example, is their energy limit? And how do cosmic rays propagate from their sources? These long-standing mysteries could potentially be solved by observations of the highest-energy diffuse gamma rays. To this end, researchers working on the square kilometer array (KM2A) at the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) experiment in China have reported precise measurements of the energy spectra of diffuse gamma rays over a wide energy range and across a large swath of the Galaxy [1]. Their results will give new insight into the propagation, interaction processes, and origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays in our Galaxy.

Since their discovery in 1912, cosmic rays—mainly comprising high-energy protons—have been observed across an energy range of more than 10 orders of magnitude. But in 1958, scientists found that the cosmic-ray flux decreases rapidly beyond an energy of a few PeV [2]. Researchers have explained this spectral cutoff by hypothesizing that cosmic rays accelerated to up to a few PeV are confined by the Galactic magnetic field for 104–107 years and accumulate in a “cosmic-ray pool” (Fig. 1): these are the cosmic rays whose interactions with interstellar gas are responsible for most of the diffuse gamma rays. Cosmic rays above a few PeV, meanwhile, are thought to escape from our Galaxy, therefore contributing relatively little to the gamma-ray haze.

Read more | >