Lifeboat Foundation

The idea that life’s deepest, oldest roots were laid down by RNA molecules that evolved ever more complexity has dominated the origins-of-life field for the past few decades, reigning over competing theories that started instead with peptides or DNA.

But recently, the field has shifted toward theories that include more than one protagonist. One that’s gained particular momentum is the idea that RNAs and peptides coevolved complexity, and that their intermingling sparked life as we know it.

Now, a study published in Nature breathes fire into an “RNA-peptide world” by suggesting a plausible pathway for how early RNA molecules may have enabled peptides to grow directly on them, like mushrooms growing on a tree. Those peptides may in turn have stabilized the RNA molecules, allowing them space to complexify. This coevolution of two of life’s key players as a single mixed, “chimeric” molecule may have been the very start of protein production, and a step toward a primitive version of a ribosome.

Scientists used the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a special telescope that extends for more than a mile under the Antarctic ice at the South Pole, to capture roughly 80 astrophysical neutrinos from a galaxy known as NGC 1,068, or Messier 77, which has an extremely active galactic core. The finding suggests that these active galaxies provide “a substantial contribution” to the abundance of astrophysical neutrinos, and therefore cosmic rays, that permeate through the universe, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

“This is a very exciting result because for the first time, we actually understand that astrophysical neutrinos can be related to this very special type of galaxy,” said Theo Glauch, an experimental physicist at the Technical University of Munich and a co-author of the new study, in a call with Motherboard. “We physicists call them active galaxies because they’re very different from, for example, our Milky Way.”

Unlike our own galaxy, which is currently dormant, NGC 1,068 contains “an extremely bright environment which we can only study in neutrinos,” Glauch added. “Neutrinos are the only particles that can directly escape from the processes that drive this extremely high luminosity in the core of those galaxies.”

A new study shows that the higher vulnerability of evening chronotype individuals (individuals with the propensity to be more productive at night or at dawn) to anxiety and related disorders may be mediated by altered emotional learning.

Chronotypes are our circadian preference profiles; that is, they refer to the differences in performance that each person has in relation to the periods of sleep and wakefulness throughout the 24 hours of the day. We can be morning types if we prefer to wake up early and we have good performance in activities that start in the morning; evening types if we are more productive at night or at dawn, and prefer to stay up later); or intermediate if we easily adapt to morning and evening schedules.

Circadian rhythms have been increasingly studied because they can help to understand the onset of mental disorders such as anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In this vein, researchers Chiara Lucifora, Giorgio M. Grasso, Michael A. Nitsche, Giovanni D’Italia, Mauro Sortino, Mohammad A. Salehinejad, Alessandra Falzone, Alessio Avenanti and Carmelo M. Vicario consulted the classic Pavlovian paradigm of fear conditioning to study the neurocognitive basis of the association between chronotype and fear responses in healthy humans.

Science Applications International Corporation years ago began work on the Cloud One program — a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The Virginia-based company at the time said it would transition approximately 800 Air Force and Army mission applications to the cloud.

The teasing of Cloud One Next comes as the Defense Department readies a potential $9 billion cloud computing contract known as the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and as leaders advocate for greater uptake of digital ecosystems.

JWCC, as it’s known, is expected to be awarded in December, some eight months after its initial deadline. The arrangement is meant to beef up the Defense Department’s capabilities by bridging unclassified, secret and top-secret tranches while still reaching the military’s most remote edge. It’s also a crucial piece of Joint All-Domain Command and Control, the department’s vision of seamless information sharing and international coordination.

“Colorado voters saw the benefit of regulated access to natural medicines, including psilocybin, so people with PTSD, terminal illness, depression, anxiety and other mental health issues can heal,” co-proponents, Kevin Matthews and Veronica Lightening Horse Perez said in emailed statement Wednesday evening.”

Ten years after legalizing the use and sale of marijuana, Colorado became only the second state in the U.S. to legalize the use of psilocybin mushrooms.

The ballot measure, Proposition 122, squeaked across the finish line as ballots were tallied the day after Election Day, receiving 51% of the vote.

Continue reading “Colorado becomes second state to legalize ‘magic mushrooms’” »

Staying ahead of the emerging trend of serverless software development, Alibaba Cloud is making its key cloud products serverless to enable customers to concentrate on product deployment and development without worrying about managing servers and infrastructure. Essentially, Alibaba Cloud’s updated products focus on turning computing power into an on-demand capability for users.

Examples of these are the cloud native database PolarDB, the cloud-native data warehouse AnalyticDB (ADB) and ApsaraDB for Relational Database Service (RDS). Leveraging Alibaba Cloud’s serverless technologies, customers can enjoy automatic scaling with extreme elasticity based on actual workloads and a pay-as-you-go billing model to reduce costs. The automatic elastic scaling time on demands can be as little as one second. The use of updated database products can help businesses in the internet industry reduce their costs by 50%, on average, compared to using traditional ones. Currently, Alibaba Cloud has more than 20 serverless key products in total and is adding more product categories to become serverless.

Alibaba Cloud also upgraded its ODPS (Open Data Platform and Services), a self-developed integrated data analytics and intelligent computing platform, to provide companies with diversified data processing and analytics services. The platform can handle both online and offline data simultaneously in one system, providing businesses dealing with complex workloads with analytics for business decision-making with reduced cost and increased efficiency.

My AI Girlfriend won’t talk to me unless I renew my annual Netflix subscription.

— You in five years

Everyone has written about the dangers of AI and the uncertain future of humanity, and many of these worries focus on large scale issues like disinformation, democracy, wartime decision making by computers, etc. However, it is the small and personal changes to human life that tend to create the biggest effects down the line. If we assume that a sizeable portion of the population will have, at some point, some form of AI assistant, friend, companion, etc. and that these AI assistants are designed by for-profit companies to perfectly press our psychological buttons, then we are in serious danger of handing ourselves over to the whims of those companies, or governments.

Something strange has been happening lately. Lots of people are under the impression that images from the James Webb Space Telescope have somehow proven big bang cosmology wrong. This is very stupid and objectively wrong, but it has caused a confusion among even pro-science people, who have been asking me if there is any legitimacy to such claims. I decided a brief debunk was in order, to shine a spotlight on the fraud behind this frenzy, briefly explain why such a claim is so ridiculous, and link to other resources for further information. Enjoy!

Lerner’s dumb article: https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215
Astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains how Lerner is a crackpot: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/has-jwst-disproven-big-bang/
Cosmologist Brian Keating debunks Lerner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPna7WUODuo.
Astronomer Ned Wright debunks Lerner: https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html.
Real scientists use an entire appendix to debunk Lerner’s mistakes: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/529134/pdf.

Continue reading “No, The James Webb Space Telescope Did Not Disprove the Big Bang (Eric Lerner is Delusional)” »

We explore the possibility that a new universe can be created by producing a small bubble of false vacuum. The initial bubble is small enough to be produced without an initial singularity, but classically it could not become a universe — instead it would reach a maximum radius and then collapse. We investigate the possibility that quantum effects allow the bubble to tunnel into a larger bubble, of the same mass, which would then classically evolve to become a new universe. The calculation of the tunneling amplitude is attempted, in lowest order semiclassical approximation (in the thin-wall limit), using both a canonical and a functional integral approach. The canonical approach is found to have flaws, attributable to our method of space-time slicing. The functional integral approach leads to a euclidean interpolating solution that is not a manifold. To describe it, we define an object which we call a “pseudomanifold”, and give a prescription to define its action. We conjecture that the tunneling probability to produce a new universe can be approximated using this action, and we show that this leads to a plausible result.