Lifeboat Foundation

The hundreds of gold-rich stars discovered in our Milky Way galaxy may have come from smaller galaxies that merged 10 billion years ago, according to new simulations by a supercomputer.

Using the ATERUI II supercomputer in the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, scientists at Tohoku University and the University of Notre Dame developed new simulations of galaxy formation with the highest resolution yet.

The paper was published this week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A new paper published in Nature Communications presents research on unique peptides with anti-cancer potential.

The research was led by Professor Ashraf Brik and post-doctoral fellows Dr. Ganga B. Vamisetti and Dr. Abbishek Saha from the Schulich Faculty of Chemistry at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, along with Professor Nabieh Ayoub from the Technion’s Faculty of Biology and Professor Hiroaki Suga from the University of Tokyo.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids linked by peptide bonds, the name given to chemical bonds formed between two molecules when the carboxyl group of one molecule reacts with the amino group of the other molecule.

face_with_colon_three circa 2020.

Scientists in Australia have developed a new type of electronic material that is touch-responsive and just a fraction of the thickness of current smartphone screens. This could see it one day find use in next-generation mobile devices, and because of its incredible thinness and flexibility, could be manufactured at large scale using roll-to-roll (R2R) processing like a printed newspaper.

The breakthrough comes from researchers at RMIT University, who began with a material commonly used in today’s mobile touchscreens called indium-tin oxide. This transparent material is highly conductive but does have its shortcomings, chiefly that it is very brittle, so the team sought to give it better pliability by greatly reducing its thickness.

Continue reading “Ultra-thin smartphone touchscreens could be printed like a newspaper” »

Teams of astrophysicists worldwide are trying to observe different possible types of dark matter (DM), hypothetical matter in the universe that does not emit, absorb or reflect light and would thus be very difficult to detect. Fermionic DM, however, which would be made of fermions, has so far been primarily explored theoretically.

The PandaX Collaboration, a large consortium of researchers in China involved in the PandaX-4T experiment, has recently carried out a study aimed at extending the sensitive mass window for experiments aimed at directly detecting fermionic DM from above GeV to MeV or even keV ranges.

The team recently published two papers in Physical Review Letters outlining the results of the two searches for the absorption of fermionic DM using data gathered as part of the Panda X-4T experiment, a large-scale research effort aimed at detecting DM using a dual-phase time projection chamber (TPC) in China.

Orbit, an interactive robot, helps teach children on the autism spectrum to develop social appropriateness and emotion via storytelling, physical interaction, and visual communication.

The hand-sized robot smiles and encourages users to press a button on its back, reacting with a beaming smile if pressed gently, and with a sad face if the interaction is too hard.

Continue reading “Meet Orbit, the Interactive Robot That Looks to Help Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Develop Social Skills” »

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After decades of research using sophisticated brain imaging, there’s a growing consensus among neuroscientists that understanding the connections between brain regions may be even more important than the functions of the regions themselves. When it comes to understanding human cognition, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?

After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.

For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed, perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other civilization transcribed its world.

He stepped down from the position of CEO after his company FTX filed for bankruptcy.

Earlier in the spring, effective altruism believer Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was worth $26 billion. As crypto prices dropped, so did SBF’s fortune. However, the turn of events in the past week has meant that the billionaire’s riches have evaporated entirely, leaving him with nothing, just like those who invested in his company, FTX, CNN.

Getty Images.

Continue reading “Crypto’s golden boy SBF’s $16 billion fortune evaporated in a single week” »

The spacecraft successfully enters lunar orbit.

A toaster oven-sized NASA spacecraft will pave the way for a lunar orbital station that will help the U.S. space agency establish a permanent presence on the moon.

Continue reading “NASA’s CAPSTONE became the first cubesat mission to ever visit the moon” »