Lifeboat Foundation

Yes, it is true, cats are known to possess certain math skills in their own feline manner. Although it is obvious, they don’t have the knowledge of trigonometry or geometry as we do, but they sure understand the concept of ‘more and less’.

Every cat owner knows they get notified by their cat if the food dish is getting empty or the water is relatively less in the bowl. Furthermore, as they grow, cats can adeptly tell the difference between heights.

Albeit, this is still an ongoing study and researchers have found similarities between the thinking process of fish and that of cats. Fish swim in schools, and that’s how they learn to count. Likewise, adult cats or rather mother cats can identify if one of the kittens is missing.

While many artificial materials have advanced properties, they have a long way to go to combine the versatility and functionality of living materials that can adapt to their situation. For example, in the human body bone and muscle continuously reorganise their structure and composition to better sustain changing weight and level of activity.

Now, researchers from Imperial College London and University College London have demonstrated the first spontaneously self-organising laser device, which can reconfigure when conditions change.

The innovation, reported in Nature Physics (“Self-organized Lasers of Reconfigurable Colloidal Assemblies”), will help enable the development of smart photonic materials capable of better mimicking properties of biological matter, such as responsiveness, adaptation, self-healing, and collective behaviour.

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Gene editing with CRISPR can cause off-target mutations, but this seems to happen less often with an enzyme that cuts one of the strands of DNA instead of both.

The potential of quantum computing can in no way be undermined today as it solves some of the most obstinate challenges from bringing down global warming to dramatically bringing down drug discovery time and much more. And with this, several companies are in a spree to bring up quantum computing capabilities.

Nvidia has announced a unified computing platform that will bring in an open environment across quantum processors and classical computers. The company said that the platform aims at speeding enhanced quantum research and development across Artificial Intelligence (AI), High Performance Computing (HPC), health, finance and other disciplines.

The company claims that Nvidia Quantum Optimized Device Architecture or QODA is a first-of-its-kind platform for hybrid quantum-classical computers and aims to make quantum computing more accessible by creating a comprehensive hybrid quantum-classical programming model.

The Tennessee State Veterinarian talks about the new detection of a tickborne illness on cattle in the state.

A Missouri resident likely contracted the amoeba while swimming at a lake in southwest Iowa. It’s almost always fatal.

The world’s water cycle is more widespread than once thought.

More than 11 years after the disaster, a court in Tokyo has awarded executives at the nuclear plant to pay monetary compensation for the damages.

The team of researchers who transplanted a genetically modified pig’s heart into a living human earlier this year have completed two more pig heart transplant surgeries, setting the protocol for such operations.

In January this year, 57-year-old David Bennett became the first man on the planet to receive a heart from a genetically modified pig. Before this, researchers transplanted kidneys from similarly modified pigs into patients that were brain dead.

The organs are sourced from a company called Revivicor which uses genetic engineering to remove specific genes in the pigs to help in reducing transplant rejection while adding some that make the organs more compatible with the human immune system.