Lifeboat Foundation

According to 130,000 years’ worth of data on what mammals have been eating, we’re in the midst of a mass biodiversity crisis. Not great!

This revelation was borne of a new study, conducted by an international team of researchers and published in the journal Science, that used machine learning to paint a detailed past — and harrowing future — of what happens to food webs when land mammals go extinct. Spoiler alert: it’s pretty grim stuff.

“While about 6 percent of land mammals have gone extinct in that time, we estimate that more than 50 percent of mammal food web links have disappeared,” Evan Fricke, ecologist and lead author of the study, said in a press release. “And the mammals most likely to decline, both in the past and now, are key for mammal food web complexity.”

The biotech platform that is leveraging one of the cornerstones of evolution – mitochondria.

Mitochondria play a crucial role in the aging process, activating factors and metabolic pathways involved in longevity. Their dysfunction impacts on both lifespan and healthspan, and whilst they have been identified as disease targets for some time, mitochondria have proven difficult to treat.

Continue reading “Unlocking the power of cell-derived medicines with Dr Alex Schueller, Cellvie’s CEO” »

Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and North Carolina State University have discovered, for the first time, a unique property in complex nanostructures that has thus far only been found in simple nanostructures. Additionally, they have unraveled the internal mechanics of the materials that makes this property possible.

In a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers found these properties in oxide-based “nanolattices,” which are tiny, hollow materials, similar in structure to things like sea sponges.

“This has been seen before in simple nanostructures, like a nanowire, which is about 1,000 times thinner than a hair,” said Yong Zhu, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NC State, and one of the lead authors on the paper. “But this is the first time we’ve seen it in a 3D nanostructure.”

With the aid of physics and a minuscule magnet, researchers have discovered a new structure of telomeric DNA. Telomeres are sometimes seen as the key to living longer. They protect genes from damage but get a bit shorter each time a cell divides. If they become too short, the cell dies. The new discovery will help us understand aging and disease.

Physics is not the first scientific discipline that springs to mind at the mention of DNA. But John van Noort from the Leiden Institute of Physics (LION) is one of the scientists who found the new DNA structure. A biophysicist, he uses methods from physics for biological experiments. This also caught the attention of biologists from Nanyan Technological University in Singapore. They asked him to help study the DNA structure of telomeres. They have published the results in Nature.

A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a novel approach for comparing neural networks that looks within the “black box” of artificial intelligence to help researchers understand neural network behavior. Neural networks recognize patterns in datasets; they are used everywhere in society, in applications such as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems and self-driving cars.

“The artificial intelligence research community doesn’t necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don’t know how or why,” said Haydn Jones, a researcher in the Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group at Los Alamos. “Our new method does a better job of comparing neural networks, which is a crucial step toward better understanding the mathematics behind AI.”

Jones is the lead author of the paper “If You’ve Trained One You’ve Trained Them All: Inter-Architecture Similarity Increases With Robustness,” which was presented recently at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. In addition to studying network similarity, the paper is a crucial step toward characterizing the behavior of robust neural networks.

Black holes aren’t just the densest masses in the Universe, but they also spin the fastest of all massive objects. Here’s why it must be so.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Max Planck Institute have developed a way to produce a web of quantum entangled photons using a far more simple setup than usual. The key is a precisely patterned surface 100 times thinner than paper, which could replace a roomful of optical equipment.

Quantum entanglement is the bizarre-sounding phenomenon where two particles can become so entwined together that manipulating one will instantly affect its partner, no matter how far apart they may be. This forms the basis for emerging technologies like quantum computing and quantum encryption.

The problem is, generating entangled groups of photons can be tricky, and is usually done with large arrays of lasers, specialized crystals, and other optical equipment. But the Sandia and Max Planck team has a much simpler setup – a metasurface.

SpaceX has had many successful launches, compared with Boeing, which hasn’t flown its Starliner rocket yet, NASA’s administrator told Newsweek.

Physicists have discovered a material in which atoms are arranged in a way that so frustrates the movement of electrons that they engage in a collective dance where their electronic and magnetic natures appear to both compete and cooperate in unexpected ways.

Led by Rice University physicists, the research was published online today in Nature. In experiments at Rice, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the University of Washington (UW), Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, researchers studied pure iron-germanium crystals and discovered standing waves of fluid electrons appeared spontaneously within the crystals when they were cooled to a critically low temperature. Intriguingly, the charge density waves arose while the material was in a magnetic state, to which it had transitioned at a higher temperature.

“A charge density wave typically occurs in materials that have no magnetism,” said study co-corresponding author Pengcheng Dai of Rice. “Materials that have both a charge density wave and magnetism are actually rare. Even more rare are those where the charge density wave and magnetism ‘talk’ to each other, as they appear to be doing in this case.”