Lifeboat Foundation

face_with_colon_three Year 2020

Cyanobacteria — colloquially also called blue-green algae — can produce oil from water and carbon dioxide with the help of light. This is shown by a recent study by the University of Bonn. The result is unexpected: Until now, it was believed that this ability was reserved for plants. It is possible that blue-green algae will now also become interesting as suppliers of feed or fuel, especially since they do not require arable land. The results have now been published in the journal PNAS.

What do rapeseed, avocado and olive tree have in common? They are all used by humans as producers of oil or fat. However, the ability to produce oil from water and carbon dioxide with the help of light is something that is essentially common to all plants, from unicellular algae to the giant sequoia trees. “We have now shown for the first time that cyanobacteria can do the same,” explains biologist Prof. Dr. Peter Dörmann from the Institute of Molecular Physiology and Biotechnology of Plants (IMBIO) at the University of Bonn. “This was a complete surprise, not only to us.”

Until now, experts had assumed that cyanobacteria lack this property. After all, they are actually bacteria, even if their trivial name “blue-green algae” suggests otherwise. They therefore differ considerably from plants in many respects: Cyanobacteria are closer related to the intestinal bacterium E. coli than to an olive tree. “There are indeed ancient reports in the literature that cyanobacteria can contain oil,” says Dörmann. “But these have never been verified.”

Summary: Treating a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS) with the pregnancy hormone estriol could reverse myelin breakdown in the brain’s cortex, a primary area affected in MS.

MS results in inflammation that damage the myelin coating around nerve fibers in the brain’s cortex, leading to disability worsening. Current MS treatments only target inflammation and can’t repair myelin damage.

However, the new study found that estriol not only prevented brain atrophy but also induced remyelination, suggesting it could repair MS-induced damage.

Will take place will take place June 19–21, 2023, Washington DC, Gaylord National Harbor.

Tesla has released a rare and interesting look at its latest Supercharger monitoring system, which will become an important tool for managing an increasingly valuable asset.

Older Tesla owners will remember the days when the automaker was operating Supercharger monitoring systems on screens at a select few stations.

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American chemical society: chemistry for life.

It’s complicated. So we reached out to legal experts for some definitive answers.

For years, machine learning has been used to analyse human languages or decode ancient communication. Now scientists are harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to decode animal languages, making two-way communication with another species more likely than ever before. Video by: Pedro Films and Tree House Productions Executive Producer: Camelia Sadeghzadeh.

There are already countless songs on Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. And as tunes become easier to create, anyone can add to the copyright din.

A key challenge in neuroscience is to understand how the brain can adapt to a changing world, even with a relatively static anatomy. The way the brain’s areas are structurally and functionally related to each other—its connectivity—is a key component. In order to explain its dynamics and functions, we also need to add another piece to the puzzle: receptors.

Now, a new mapping by Human Brain Project (HBP) researchers from the Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany) and Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (Germany), in collaboration with scientists from the University of Bristol (UK), New York University (U.S.), Child Mind Institute (U.S.), and University of Paris Cité (France) had made advances on our understanding of the distribution of receptors across the brain.

The findings were published in Nature Neuroscience, and the data is now freely available to the neuroscientific community via the HBP’s EBRAINS infrastructure.