Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Instant digital rewards may make hard thinking feel less worthwhile

Imagine opening a difficult book in a quiet room. The first page is dense. You read one paragraph, then reread it. Nothing “clicks” yet. Your brain is doing what learning often requires: spending effort before the reward arrives. Then your phone lights up. One thumb movement, and the situation changes completely. A joke, a message, a clip, a tiny social reward: all available instantly, all requiring almost no effort. The book has not become harder and, definitely, your intelligence has not disappeared. But the book now feels more expensive, because another activity nearby offers a much better bargain: reward now, effort almost zero.

That is the central idea of the paper “An Effort Recalibration Framework for Digital Media Use and Cognition” that just appeared in Nature Human Behavior. It argues that the most important effect of social media might be that repeated exposure to effortless digital rewards changes how we value effort itself. Over time, the authors suggest, digital media may recalibrate our internal sense of what effort is worth. Difficult work then begins to feel less attractive, not because we can no longer do it, but because our everyday decision system has learned to expect faster returns.

Quantum semiconductor design could expand search for dark matter

Dark matter accounts for 85% of the matter in the universe, but scientists still do not know what it is made of. A study, published in Physical Review Letters, by Rice University researchers proposes a detector design that could help search for axions, hypothetical particles that many physicists think could make up dark matter.

The proposed detector would rely on a class of semiconductor materials whose response changes when their orientation shifts within a magnetic field. This material response makes it easier to tune the detector, allowing researchers to probe a range of axion masses that have remained difficult to explore with existing technologies.

“We are proposing a well-studied material from condensed matter physics for a new application—axion detection,” said Jaanita Mehrani, a doctoral student in Rice’s Applied Physics Graduate Program who is the first author on the study. “What’s different about this material is that it doesn’t have to use complex mechanical tuning mechanisms, it simply tunes with the magnetic field.”

Quantum gravity tests may mistake ordinary spacetime for superposition

Everything around us, from atoms and molecules to planets and galaxies, is governed by two extraordinarily successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of the microscopic world, while Einstein’s theory of gravity describes the motion of stars, black holes and the expansion of the universe. Yet despite their successes, physicists are still searching for a theory of “quantum gravity” that would unite them into a single description of nature.

One of the most widely expected features of such a theory is that gravity should obey the laws of quantum mechanics. And this is where it gets difficult: Quantum mechanics predicts that any object can be delocalized over multiple places at once, which is routinely tested in experiments with atoms and even small clumps of metal. Gravity, according to Einstein’s theory, is space and time itself—it can be curved, flat or even have waves propagating through it, as confirmed by gravitational wave detectors. So many physicists believe that spacetime around a quantum object would also exist in multiple “states” simultaneously.

But what would such a situation actually look like?

Light flips bacterial signaling enzyme between two shapes, unlocking how signals travel

Researchers at the University of Bayreuth and Forschungszentrum Jülich have demonstrated that specific light-sensitive enzymes—so-called sensor histidine kinases (SHKs)—transmit their signal through a light-controlled change in asymmetry. With their new study, the researchers contribute to a better understanding of a central mechanism of bacterial signal processing. This may help develop new tools for biomedicine or biotechnology. The findings are reported in the journal Science Advances.

SHKs are key bacterial signaling proteins that play an important role in many processes, from controlling which genes are active at a given time to enabling the ability to cause disease. Artificially engineered light-sensitive SHKs are also used in optogenetics to precisely control gene activity with light. However, only limited structural information has been available so far for the full protein.

The new study provides important insights into how natural and engineered SHKs transmit signals across multiple protein domains. In the long term, the study may help develop new optogenetic tools that allow biological processes to be precisely controlled using light. This is particularly relevant for applications in biotechnology and biomedicine.

MOF thin films reveal hidden dense packing, challenging decades of porous assumptions

Due to their high porosity, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are regarded as promising materials for innovative applications, which is why the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded in 2025 for their discovery. They are used, for example, to store gases, to capture CO2 and for the targeted delivery of medicines.

While the structure of MOFs in the form of large crystals can be determined with relative ease, thin films have largely remained a mystery. Yet it is precisely the structure that is decisive for the properties and for potential applications.

A team led by Roland Resel and Egbert Zojer from the Institute of Solid State Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), together with colleagues from the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry (led by Paolo Falcaro) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (led by Christof Wöll), has now solved this puzzle.

/* */