Lifeboat Foundation

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.”

More than a hundred years ago, astronomer Percival Lowell made the case for the existence of canals on Mars designed to redistribute water from the Martian ice caps to its lower, drier latitudes. This necessarily meant the existence of Martians to build the canals.

While Lowell was proven wrong by better telescopes, the question of whether there’s liquid water on Mars continues to tantalize researchers. Liquid water is a critical precondition for a habitable planet. Yet the combination of low temperature, atmospheric pressure and water vapor pressure on Mars means any liquid water found there would likely freeze, boil or evaporate immediately, making its presence unlikely.

Still, researchers continue to make the case for the presence of liquid water on Mars.

When analyzing artworks, understanding the visual clarity of compositions is crucial. Inspired by digital artists, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) researchers from the Mechanics and Materials Unit have created a metric to quantify clarity in digital images. As a result, scientists can accurately capture changes in structure during artistic processes and physical transformations.

This new metric can improve analysis and decision-making across the scientific and creative domains, potentially transforming how we understand and evaluate the structure of images. It has been tested on digital artworks and physical systems. The research is published in the journal PNAS.

In the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. But fast forward 13.8 billion years to the present day, and the universe is made almost entirely of matter, so something must have happened to create this imbalance.

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts an asymmetry between matter and antimatter known as charge–parity (CP) violation. But the size of this asymmetry in the Standard Model is not large enough to account for the imbalance and the asymmetry has so far been observed only in certain decays of particles called mesons, which are made of a quark and an antiquark. It remains to be seen in other meson decays and in decays of other types of particles, such as three-quark particles called baryons.

In two new articles posted to the arXiv preprint server, the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reports seeing evidence of CP violation in decays of baryons and in decays of beauty hadrons into charmonium particles, shedding light on these two pieces of the matter–antimatter puzzle.

Researchers have developed a technique called “atomic spray painting” using molecular beam epitaxy to strain-tune potassium niobate, enhancing its ferroelectric properties.

This method allows precise manipulation of material properties, with potential applications in green technologies, quantum computing, and space exploration.

Material Strain Tuning

Human-made objects on Mars, including spacecraft, landers, and rovers, may hold significant archaeological value rather than being dismissed as space debris.

Scholars propose cataloging and preserving these artifacts to document humanity’s early interplanetary exploration and ensure future missions respect these historical markers.

Mars as a new frontier: understanding the value of space debris.

Glyphosate use in the United States (US) has increased each year since the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant crops in 1996, yet little is known about its effects on the brain. We recently found that C57BL/6J mice dosed with glyphosate for 14 days showed glyphosate and its major metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid present in brain tissue, with corresponding increases in pro-inflammatory cytokine tumor necrosis factor-⍺ (TNF-⍺) in the brain and peripheral blood plasma. Since TNF-⍺ is elevated in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), in this study, we asked whether glyphosate exposure serves as an accelerant of AD pathogenesis. Additionally, whether glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid remain in the brain after a recovery period has yet to be examined.

We hypothesized that glyphosate exposure would induce neuroinflammation in control mice, while exacerbating neuroinflammation in AD mice, causing elevated Amyloid-β and tau pathology and worsening spatial cognition after recovery. We dosed 4.5-month-old 3xTg-AD and non-transgenic (NonTg) control mice with either 0, 50 or 500 mg/kg of glyphosate daily for 13 weeks followed by a 6-month recovery period.

We found that aminomethylphosphonic acid was detectable in the brains of 3xTg-AD and NonTg glyphosate-dosed mice despite the 6-month recovery. Glyphosate-dosed 3xTg-AD mice showed reduced survival, increased thigmotaxia in the Morris water maze, significant increases in the beta secretase enzyme (BACE-1) of amyloidogenic processing, amyloid-β (Aβ) 42 insoluble fractions, Aβ 42 plaque load and plaque size, and phosphorylated tau (pTau) at epitopes Threonine 181, Serine 396, and AT8 (Serine 202, Threonine 205). Notably, we found increased pro-and anti-inflammatory cytokines and chemokines persisting in both 3xTg-AD and NonTg brain tissue and in 3xTg-AD peripheral blood plasma.

As humans, we have the ability to recall detailed information, even from years in the past, indicating a powerful memory system. Newly encoded explicit memories initially depend on the hippocampus^1,2,3,4. Memory reactivation, mediated by a hippocampo-cortical dialog, leads to a gradual maturation of neocortical engrams over time^5,6,7,8,9. After this systems consolidation process, the neocortex can store information for decades.

It is well established that consolidation relies on non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep^{10,11,12,13,14,15}. This brain state gives rise to characteristic patterns in the electroencephalogram, including slow waves (∼ 0.5–4 Hz), sleep spindles (∼ 10–16 Hz) and hippocampal ripple oscillations (∼ 80–120 Hz in humans)^16,17,18. During slow wave activity (SWA), neocortical neurons exhibit synchronous membrane potential changes, referred to as UP and DOWN states^19,20,21,22. UP states are periods of increased neural activity, giving rise to depolarization of neurons^23,24. Conversely, DOWN states are silent periods, associated with hyperpolarization^25,26. In the human neocortex, prominent SWA occurs in supragranular layers 2 & 3^21,27. Several studies have demonstrated that precise temporal coupling of spindles and ripples to SWA promotes engram reactivation^{28,29,30,31,32,33,34} and determines success of memory consolidation^{18,35,36,37,38}. Consequently, brain stimulation methods that boost SWA or enhance coupling have a positive effect on memory performance in rodents and humans^{39,40,41,42,43,44}. These observations suggest that SWA and the underlying membrane potential UP and DOWN states initiate mechanisms that augment memory functions. However, in the human brain such mechanisms remain elusive.

One possibility is that UP and DOWN states modulate excitatory synapses in the neocortex to increase synaptic strength during SWA-coupled neural activity. While action potentials (AP) are necessary to initiate transmission in the mammalian neocortex, it has been demonstrated in laboratory animals that presynaptic signals below the AP-threshold (i.e., subthreshold signals) have a modulatory effect on synaptic strength^{45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54}. For instance, at synapses between neocortical pyramidal neurons in ferrets⁴⁶ and rats⁴⁷ a 1-second-long subthreshold depolarization preceding an AP leads to an increase in synaptic amplitude. Through such mechanisms, UP and DOWN states could tune local synaptic networks to promote long-term synaptic plasticity, which is believed to be fundamental for memory consolidation^2,55.

Built to full scale, it mimics our anatomy in an incredibly precise way. But it is not yet fully functional.

A muscuskeletal designed for the home.