Lifeboat Foundation

Protons are particles that exist in the nucleus of all atoms, with their number defining the elements themselves. Protons, however, are not fundamental particles. Rather, they are composite particles made up of smaller subatomic particles, namely two “up quarks” and one “down quark” bound together by force-carrying particles (bosons) called “gluons.”

This structure isn’t certain, however, and quantum physics suggests that along with these three quarks, other particles should be “popping” into and out of existence at all times, affecting the mass of the proton. This includes other quarks and even quark-antiquark pairs.

Indeed, the deeper scientists have probed the structure of the proton with high-energy particle collisions, the more complicated the situation has become. As a result, for around four decades, physicists have speculated that protons may host a heavier form of quark than up and down quarks called “intrinsic charm quarks,” but confirmation of this has been elusive.

Summary: Sleep age, a projected age that correlates to a person’s sleep health, may be a predictor of overall health and mortality risk.

Source: Stanford.

Numbers tell a story. From your credit score to your age, metrics predict a variety of outcomes, whether it’s your likelihood to get a loan or your risk for heart disease. Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have described another telling metric—one that can predict mortality. It’s called sleep age.

Novo Nordisk’s recent growth renaissance has arrived thanks in no small part to semaglutide—the GLP-1 molecule behind the company’s leading marketed trio of Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy.

These days, much of the semaglutide hype surrounds Ozempic’s domination in diabetes, plus Wegovy’s potential to stir the slumbering giant that is the global obesity market. But even as the molecule’s metabolic empire prospers, Novo Nordisk isn’t letting its GLP-1 stay in its comfort zone. Novo is also pitting the drug against a pair of elusive targets: nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and Alzheimer’s disease.

And while CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen is quick to admit the company’s ambitions in these new diseases are among Novo’s “most risky” R&D endeavors, the payoff for patients could be “tremendous,” he said during a recent interview at Novo Nordisk’s headquarters in Plainsboro, New Jersey.

“Intrinsically unstable, a wormhole would need ‘stuff’ with repulsive gravity to hold open each mouth, and the energy equivalent to that emitted by an appreciable fraction of the stars in a galaxy,” reads Science Focus’ story. The idea would be that “if ETs have created a network of wormholes, it might be detectable by gravitational microlensing.”

That technique has been used in the past to detect thousands of distant exoplanets and stars by detecting how they bend light. Whether it could be used to detect wormholes, to be clear, is an open question.

Fortunately, spotting wormholes isn’t our only shot at detecting life elsewhere in the universe. Science Focus also pointed to the search for theoretical megastructures that harness the energy of a star by fully enclosing it, or atmospheric chemicals linked to human pollution, or extremely thin reflective spacecraft called light sails, any of which could theoretically lead us to discover an extraterrestrial civilization.

Pioneering scientists think we should start looking for extraterrestrials in a whole new way: by seeking out alien technology.

The search for alien life is ramping up. But what if, instead of searching for signs of biology, we looked for something more familiar: an extraterrestrial civilisation.

We speak to astrobiologist and extraterrestrial researcher Dr Douglas Vakoch about transmitting messages into the cosmos in the hope of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might be getting excited about the metaverse, but the idea is nothing new.

But with such a rapid expansion into this new virtual world, will it be safe, regulated and, is it something we should fear or accept with open arms?

We talk to David Reid, a Professor of AI and spatial computing at Liverpool Hope University to see what to expect from the future of the metaverse.

There’s a few definitions. You can think of it from a technological viewpoint, where it’s simply the successor of the internet. Computers once took up big rooms, but they’ve shrunk until we got things like pocket-sized smartphones that you constantly interact with. The metaverse takes this a step further, making the actual environment you interact with virtual, removing the interface of computers completely.