Lifeboat News: The Blog – Safeguarding Humanity

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Jun 4
2026

Open-source software unlocks rapid DNA structure generation and analysis in one workflow

Computational chemists at the University of Amsterdam’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences have developed a comprehensive software suite to create accurate models of DNA in biomolecular assemblies. Called MDNA, the user-friendly molecular modeling toolkit helps biochemists, molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, and biophysicists to visualize and analyze DNA structures and perform accurate simulations.

The development of the MDNA suite, led by associate professor Jocelyne Vreede, has been presented in a paper in Nucleic Acids Research.

The software is open-source and publicly available through Figshare and Github. It is easily accessible, providing inspiration to any scientist with an interest in DNA. It has been thoroughly tested by students in mathematics, chemistry and biology, some of whom had hardly any programming experience.

Jun 4
2026

Nanomagnets control diamond qubits, pointing to more scalable quantum hardware

Quantum computing, once only a theoretical possibility, promises to deliver faster, more energy-efficient computers—but only if scientists can build and scale the hardware needed to run the machines. New research from Virginia Commonwealth University brings scientists one small step closer to quantum computing at a practical scale, which could help dramatically reduce energy usage and computing times in some industries.

In the study, recently published in Nature Communications, the researchers used minuscule magnets—twice as small as the wavelength of light—to create the building blocks of quantum computing, pioneering a technique that could decrease the physical space needed to create a viable quantum computer.

“This work has the potential to advance quantum computing,” said Jayasimha Atulasimha, Ph.D., a professor of mechanical and nuclear engineering in VCU’s College of Engineering and the study’s principal investigator. “We’re solving a specific problem for spin-based quantum computing, which has the potential for scaling.”