Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past 100 million years, mammals have adapted to nearly every environment on Earth. Scientists with the Zoonomia Project have been cataloging the diversity in mammalian genomes by comparing DNA sequences from 240 species that exist today, from the aardvark and the African savanna elephant to the yellow-spotted rock hyrax and the zebu.

This week, in several papers in a special issue of Science, the Zoonomia team has demonstrated how comparative genomics can not only shed light on how certain species achieve extraordinary feats, but also help scientists better understand the parts of our genome that are functional and how they might influence health and disease.

In the new studies, the researchers identified regions of the genomes, sometimes just single letters of DNA, that are most conserved, or unchanged, across mammalian species and millions of years of evolution—regions that are likely biologically important. They also found part of the genetic basis for uncommon mammalian traits such as the ability to hibernate or sniff out faint scents from miles away. And they pinpointed species that may be particularly susceptible to extinction, as well as genetic variants that are more likely to play causal roles in rare and common human diseases.

An international research team led by investigators at Virginia Commonwealth University has identified for the first time markers that may indicate early in life if a person has susceptibility to schizophrenia.

The ability to predict the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life may allow early detection and intervention, which the researchers hope can reduce the impact of the disease on individuals, families and communities. Their results have been published in Molecular Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric disorder that is most often detected in young adulthood. It affects as much as 1% of the world population and can cause debilitating effects such as a sense of losing touch with reality. People with the disorder are up to three times more likely to die early and often face discrimination, social isolation and debilitating physical illness, according to the World Health Organization.

Emerging AI applications, like chatbots that generate natural human language, demand denser, more powerful computer chips. But semiconductor chips are traditionally made with bulk materials, which are boxy 3D structures, so stacking multiple layers of transistors to create denser integrations is very difficult.

However, semiconductor transistors made from ultrathin 2D materials, each only about three atoms in thickness, could be stacked up to create more powerful chips. To this end, MIT researchers have now demonstrated a novel technology that can effectively and efficiently “grow” layers of 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials directly on top of a fully fabricated silicon chip to enable denser integrations.

Growing 2D materials directly onto a silicon CMOS wafer has posed a major challenge because the process usually requires temperatures of about 600 degrees Celsius, while silicon transistors and circuits could break down when heated above 400 degrees. Now, the interdisciplinary team of MIT researchers has developed a low-temperature growth process that does not damage the chip. The technology allows 2D semiconductor transistors to be directly integrated on top of standard silicon circuits.

SAN FRANCISCO –New Hampshire startup Light Steering Technologies won a $1.25 million U.S. Air Force contract for angular pointing technology with small satellite applications.

Through the contract with AFWERX, the Air Force organization focused on innovation, LST aims to advance the Technology Readiness Level, or technological maturity, of its Multi-Axis Scanner. LST’s Multi-Axis Scanner is a patented magnetic joint for gimbal-like capability.

“What’s compelling about the technology is we are minimizing the moving mass,” Aaron Castillo, LST senior vice president of business development and program management, told SpaceNews. “This is achieved by actuating a mirror instead of the entire satellite bus or using a traditional gimbal mechanism.”

For one, classical physics can predict, with simple mathematics, how an object will move and where it will be at any given point in time and space. How objects interact with each other and their environments follow laws we first encounter in high school science textbooks.

What happens in minuscule realms isn’t so easily explained. At the level of atoms and their parts, measuring position and momentum simultaneously yields only probability. Knowing a particle’s exact state is a zero-sum game in which classical notions of determinism don’t apply: the more certain we are about its momentum, the less certain we are about where it will be.

We’re not exactly sure what it will be, either. That particle could be both an electron and a wave of energy, existing in multiple states at once. When we observe it, we force a quantum choice, and the particle collapses from its state of superposition into one of its possible forms.

Joe Russo, a director who’s helmed some of Marvel’s biggest movies, thinks it’s only a matter of time before AIs can make legit films.

A fighting faction in Sudan has occupied the country’s main public health lab, putting pathogen collections at risk, the WHO said.

A newly discovered phenomenon dubbed “collectively induced transparency” (CIT) causes groups of atoms to abruptly stop reflecting light at specific frequencies.

CIT was discovered by confining ytterbium atoms inside an optical cavity —essentially, a tiny box for light—and blasting them with a laser. Although the laser’s light will bounce off the atoms up to a point, as the frequency of the light is adjusted, a transparency window appears in which the light simply passes through the cavity unimpeded.

“We never knew this transparency window existed,” says Caltech’s Andrei Faraon (BS ‘04), William L. Valentine Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, and co-corresponding author of a paper on the discovery that was published on April 26 in the journal Nature. “Our research has primarily become a journey to find out why.”

Note that this is very far away from a return to an anthropocentric worldview, to pre-Copernican times when the Earth was the center of Creation. (I call it biocentric to make the distinction clear.) Biocentrism is necessarily post-Copernican. I am saying that we are unique and important — but not for having been created by a god, or for being the result of a purposeful cosmic directive.

We are unique and important for being self-aware living entities capable of asking questions about their origin and future. We may not be the measure of all things as Protagoras of Abdera proclaimed long ago, but we are the things that can measure. We experience the world, we measure it, and we tell stories about what we see and what we feel. And what we are finding out is that we may very well be the only ones asking such questions — or, at the very least, the only ones we know of, which effectively amounts to the same thing. Even if “they” exist and tell stories, their stories will not be ours. There is only one human voice in the cosmos. And if we ruin our project of civilization, the Universe will once again become silent.

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