Lifeboat Foundation

Two groundbreaking studies recently published in the journals Nature and Genome Medicine found genetic signatures that explain ethnic disparities in the severity of prostate cancer, notably in Sub-Saharan Africa.

By genetically analyzing prostate cancer tumors from Australian, Brazilian, and South African donors, the team developed a new prostate cancer taxonomy (classification scheme) and cancer drivers that not only distinguish patients based on their genetic ancestry but also predict which cancers are likely to become life-threatening, a task that is currently difficult.

“Our understanding of prostate cancer has been severely limited by a research focus on Western populations,” said senior author Professor Vanessa Hayes, genomicist and Petre Chair of Prostate Cancer Research at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre and Faculty of Medicine and Health in Australia. “Being of African descent, or from Africa, more than doubles a man’s risk for lethal prostate cancer. While genomics holds a critical key to unraveling contributing genetic and non-genetic factors, data for Africa has till now, been lacking.”

Because the mineral changesite-(Y) contains the isotope helium-3, it could one day fuel nuclear fusion reactors.

Astronomers used radio telescopes to estimate the temperature of molten rock on Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system.

The Energean company announced to the Tel Aviv and London stock exchanges Thursday that its Hermes exploration well in Israeli maritime waters has yielded a new commercial gas discovery of 7–15 billion cubic meters, according to estimates.

Hermes is located southeast of the Karish field, to which the UK-Greek company holds the production rights.

The Stena IceMax drilling rig has now moved to the so-called Olympus area, located between Energean’s Karish and Tanin fields. The company hopes that exploration will enable it to further refine estimates of natural gas there, which currently stand at a theoretical 58 billion cubic meters, according to Energean’s notice.

Tesla (TSLA) has been officially upgraded to investment grade long-term credit rating by S&P Global Ratings.

Despite delivering profits for more than two years straight and building a cash position of over $18 billion while sitting on very little debt, Tesla was still rated as a “junk bond” by rating companies like S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service.

Earlier this year, we reported that the rating agencies are finally changing their opinion on the electric automaker and considering upgrading their ratings.

But they also offer an explanation of the solar system’s earliest days | Science & technology.

Elegant experiments with entangled light have laid bare a profound mystery at the heart of reality.

The devastating loss of a pair of newborns has provided critical insights into a rare set of blood types spotted for the first time in humans 40 years ago.

By unravelling the molecular identity of the relatively new blood type known as the Er system, a new study could hopefully prevent such tragedies in the future.

“This work demonstrates that even after all the research conducted to date, the simple red blood cell can still surprise us,” says University of Bristol cell biologist Ash Toye.

In July, particle physicists in the US completed the Snowmass process—a decadal community planning exercise that forges a vision of scientific priorities and future facilities. Organized by the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society, this year’s Snowmass meetings considered a range of plans including neutrino experiments and muon colliders. One new idea that generated buzz was the Cool Copper Collider (or C³ for short). This proposal calls for accelerating particles with conventional, or “normal-conducting,” radio frequency (RF) cavities—as opposed to the superconducting RF cavities used in modern colliders. This “retro” design could potentially achieve 500 GeV collision energies with an 8-km-long linear collider, making it significantly smaller and presumably less expensive than a comparable superconducting design.

The goal of the C³ project would be to operate as a Higgs factory, which—in particle-physics parlance—is a collider that smashes together electrons and their antimatter partners, called positrons, at energies above 250 GeV. Such a facility would make loads of Higgs bosons with less of the mess that comes from smashing protons and antiprotons together—as is done at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland. A Higgs factory would give more precise measurements than the LHC of the couplings between Higgs bosons and other particles, potentially uncovering small discrepancies that could lead to new theories of particle physics. “I think the Higgs is the most interesting particle that’s out there,” says Emilio Nanni from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. “And we should absolutely build a machine that’s dedicated to studying it with as much precision as possible.”

But an outsider might wonder why another Higgs-factory proposal is being added to the particle-physics menu. A similar factory design—the International Linear Collider (ILC)—has been in the works for years, but that project is presently stalled, as the Japanese government has not yet confirmed its support for building the facility in Japan. Waiting in the wings are several other large particle-physics proposals, including CERN’s Future Circular Collider and China’s Circular Electron Positron Collider.