Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at MIT are developing innovative agricultural technologies such as stress-signaling plants, microbial fertilizers, and protective seed coatings to adapt farming to climate change and enhance food security.

With global temperatures on the rise, agricultural practices must adapt to new challenges. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of droughts, and some land may no longer be arable. Additionally, it is becoming increasingly difficult to feed an ever-growing population without expanding the production of fertilizer and other agrochemicals, which have a large carbon footprint that is contributing to global warming.

Continue reading “Glowing Plants and Silk-Coated Seeds: How MIT Is Developing the Future of Farming” »

Freethink spoke to Onion staffers about parodying news from the print era into the digital age.

A research team led by Professor Kim Kyuhyung at the Department of Brain Sciences, DGIST, has discovered a new principle that regulates how food moves through the digestive tract and is swallowed. They found that the Piezo channel proteins sense the pressure generated when food accumulates at the front of the digestive tract, triggering swallowing behavior.

This discovery is expected to provide important clues in developing treatments for digestive and eating disorders. The work is published in the journal Nature Communications.

When we eat, the digestive tract generates various signals that can be linked to important physiological processes. However, our understanding of how the movement and accumulation of food in the digestive tract are sensed and processed to regulate important food intake behaviors like swallowing remains limited.

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – Despite awe-inspiring diversity, nearly every lifeform – from bacteria to blue whales – shares the same genetic code. How and when this code came about has been the subject of much scientific controversy.

Image credit: Adobe Stock – Diatomic

Taking a fresh approach at an old problem, Sawsan Wehbi, a doctoral student in the Genetics Graduate Interdisciplinary Program at the University of Arizona, discovered strong evidence that the textbook version of how the universal genetic code evolved needs revision. Wehbi is the first author of a study published in the journal PNAS suggesting the order with which amino acids – the code’s building blocks – were recruited is at odds with what is widely considered the “consensus” of genetic code evolution.

We now have a new idea of what photons look like from a model that predicts how these particles of light interact with their environment.

PlantRNA-FM, an AI model trained on RNA data from over 1,100 plants, decodes genetic patterns to advance plant science, improve crops, and tackle global agricultural challenges.

A groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence (AI) model designed to decode the sequences and structural patterns that form the genetic “language” of plants has been launched by a research collaboration.

Named Plant RNA-FM, this innovative model is the first of its kind and was developed by a partnership between plant researchers at the John Innes Centre and computer scientists at the University of Exeter.

Just as a conductor coordinates different instruments in an orchestra to produce a symphony, breathing coordinates hippocampal brain waves to strengthen memory while we sleep, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study.

This is the first time breathing rhythms during sleep have been linked to these hippocampal brain waves—called slow waves, spindles and ripples—in humans. Scientists knew these waves were linked to memory but their underlying driver was unknown. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“To strengthen memories, three special neural oscillations emerge and synchronize in the hippocampus during sleep, but they were thought to come and go at random times,” said senior study author Christina Zelano, professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “We discovered that they are coordinated by breathing rhythms.”

Nearly a quarter of Portuguese adults have allergies that cause a runny nose. This respiratory disease, formally called allergic rhinitis and frequently associated with asthma, is a common problem around the world, and the upper airway is a key target for research into the underlying disease processes.

Now a global team of researchers has discovered that patients with allergy-induced sniffles and asthma have different fungal colonies or mycobiomes in their noses, suggesting potential lines of inquiry for future treatments.

“We showed that allergic rhinitis samples displayed a significantly higher fungal diversity and a different fungal community structure compared to those of healthy controls,” said Dr. Luís Delgado of the University of Porto, Portugal, one of the authors of the article in Frontiers in Microbiology. “This may suggest that allergic rhinitis increases the diversity and changes the composition of the upper airway’s microbiome.”

Gases are essential for many chemical reactions, and bubbles are one way for these gases to be held in solution. When compared to larger bubbles, nanobubbles have increased stability—meaning that they can remain in a solution longer without popping. Due to their increased stability, they allow for higher availability of gases in solution, allowing more time for chemical reactions to occur.

Led by Dr. Hamidreza Samouei, researchers at Texas A&M University are advancing their understanding of what makes nanobubbles—bubbles with diameters smaller than a single strand of hair—so stable and what factors play a role in their stability. Their findings appear in a recent issue of The Journal of Physical Chemistry.

“When we inject gas at the industrial scale, we don’t want to waste that gas. We want to maximize its use for chemical reactions,” said Samouei, a research assistant professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. “That’s the main purpose, to keep the gas in solution for a very, very long time, ideally infinite time; to keep the gas in solution without bursting.”