Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2924

Timothy Gray of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory led a study that may have revealed an unexpected change in the shape of an atomic nucleus. The surprise finding could affect our understanding of what holds nuclei together, how protons and neutrons interact and how elements form.

“We used radioactive beams of excited sodium-32 nuclei to test our understanding of nuclear shapes far from stability and found an unexpected result that raises questions about how nuclear shapes evolve,” said Gray, a nuclear physicist. The results are published in Physical Review Letters.

The shapes and energies of atomic nuclei can shift over time between different configurations. Typically, nuclei live as quantum entities that have either spherical or deformed shapes. The former look like basketballs, and the latter resemble American footballs.

Read more | >

A recent study study sheds light on how a protein called amyloid precursor protein (APP) affects the growth of nerve cells in the cortex — the human brain’s outer layer. The findings suggest that APP plays a crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance between neural stem cell proliferation and differentiation during the early stages of brain development.

The research, published in Science Advances, could have important implications for our understanding of neurodevelopmental processes and neurodegenerative diseases.

APP is a class I transmembrane protein that is widely expressed during nervous system development. It has been extensively studied due to its connection to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), where its fragmentation produces amyloid peptides that contribute to neuronal death. However, the physiological function of APP, especially in the context of human brain development, has remained unclear.

Read more | >

A team of scientists recently aimed to better understand consciousness and its pathologies by studying the neural activity of patients with disorders of consciousness and healthy volunteers using brain imaging technology. They identified two crucial brain circuits implicated in consciousness. The results of the study have been published in Human Brain Mapping.

Consciousness is a complex and subjective experience, and there is still much debate among scientists and philosophers about its nature and origin. However, in clinical settings, doctors treating patients with severe brain injuries and disorders of consciousness need to find ways to help their patients, regardless of the exact definition of consciousness. The authors of the new study sought to better understand the mechanisms behind the pathological loss of consciousness and its recovery, as well as to have reliable ways to assess the state of the patients.

“In recent years, many studies have tried to objectively assess levels of consciousness using various neuroimaging techniques. While these studies have improved how we diagnose patients with disorders of consciousness, they haven’t fully explained how consciousness comes about,” explained study author Jitka Annen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Coma Science Group at the University of Liege.

Read more | >

Neuroscientists have worked for decades to decode what people are seeing, hearing or thinking from brain activity alone. In 2012 a team that included the new study’s senior author—cognitive neuroscientist Robert Knight of the University of California, Berkeley—became the first to successfully reconstruct audio recordings of words participants heard while wearing implanted electrodes. Others have since used similar techniques to reproduce recently viewed or imagined pictures from participants’ brain scans, including human faces and landscape photographs. But the recent PLOS Biology paper by Knight and his colleagues is the first to suggest that scientists can eavesdrop on the brain to synthesize music.

“These exciting findings build on previous work to reconstruct plain speech from brain activity,” says Shailee Jain, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new study. “Now we’re able to really dig into the brain to unearth the sustenance of sound.”

To turn brain activity data into musical sound in the study, the researchers trained an artificial intelligence model to decipher data captured from thousands of electrodes that were attached to the participants as they listened to the Pink Floyd song while undergoing surgery.

Read more | >

A breakthrough at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), funded by the Department of Energy (DOE), is utilizing the power of DNA to align quantum rods that may help usher in a new era of enhanced televisions and ultra-realistic virtual reality (VR) devices.

Some modern high-end TVs already make use of the dynamic luminescent qualities of two-dimensional (2D) quantum dots, but finding a way to tap into the superior qualities of their two-dimensional cousins, quantum rods, has remained elusive. However, the researchers behind this latest effort claim that the situation has now changed.

The Secrets of Realistic VR and Star Trek Holodecks May Lie in the Quantum Realm.

Read more | >

A recent study published in the Cell Chemical Biology Journal described a small molecule inhibitor of proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) that selectively kills cancer cells.

Study: Small molecule targeting of transcription-replication conflict for selective chemotherapy. Image Credit: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com.

Read more | >

Further boosting this ethos of accessibility is the fact that Hestia will be compatible with both iOS and Android phones. Dupuy pointed out that even a smartphone that is around five years old will work with Hestia for taking images of the sun and the moon, but to see more deep field objects like nebulas, a more recent and more sensitive smartphone such as an iPhone 12 or 13 may be required.

Vaonis, launched in 2016, is no stranger to introducing astronomy equipment via a Kickstarter campaign. In 2020 they successfully launched the Vespera smart telescope after a fund-raising program. The difference between Hestia and previous projects is this smartphone telescope project is much more affordable.

“It was possible to better in terms of price,” Dupuy said. “We wanted to use all the image processing experience we have gained to develop an app and to create a very affordable new product.”

Read more | >