Lifeboat Foundation

Evaluating the speed at which viruses spread and transmit across host populations is critical to mitigating disease outbreaks. A study published December 3 in PLOS Biology by Simon Dellicour at the University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium, and colleagues evaluate the performance of statistics measuring how viruses move across space and time in infected populations.

Genomic sequencing allows epidemiologists to examine the evolutionary history of pathogenic outbreaks and track the spatial movement of an outbreak. However, the sampling intensity of genomic sequences can potentially impact the accuracy of dispersal insights gained through these evolutionary approaches.

In order to assess the impact of the sampling size, researchers simulated the spread of several pathogens to evaluate three dispersal metrics estimated from the analysis of viral genomes: a lineage dispersal velocity (the speed at which lineages spread), a diffusion coefficient (how fast lineages invade space), and an isolation-by-distance signal (how genomic sequences of a population become less similar over geographic distance) metric.

Froilan Mendoza is Founder & Chief Technology Officer of Fulcrum Solutions.

Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy. They represent 99.9% of all businesses in the country, account for 43.5% of GDP and employ almost half of the U.S. workforce. Yet small business owners have always had to overcome obstacles to survive and succeed. Lack of capital is responsible for 38% of small business failures. Labor costs make up 70% of their expenses, and a national labor shortage of 2 million workers is exacerbating the difficulty of hiring and keeping talent.

The good news is that AI is leveling the playing field for small businesses, giving them easy-to-use tools to optimize their processes and scale their organizations without huge teams or budgets. A 2024 study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 98% of small businesses are already using an AI-enabled tool, and 91% of owners say that AI will fuel future business growth. The use of generative AI tools, such as chatbots and image creators, grew by 40% in the last year.

There’s a common popular science demonstration involving “soap boats,” in which liquid soap poured onto the surface of water creates a propulsive flow driven by gradients in surface tension. But it doesn’t last very long since the soapy surfactants rapidly saturate the water surface, eliminating that surface tension. Using ethanol to create similar “cocktail boats” can significantly extend the effect because the alcohol evaporates rather than saturating the water.

That simple classroom demonstration could also be used to propel tiny robotic devices across liquid surfaces to carry out various environmental or industrial tasks, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv. The authors also exploited the so-called “Cheerios effect” as a means of self-assembly to create clusters of tiny ethanol-powered robots.

As previously reported, those who love their Cheerios for breakfast are well acquainted with how those last few tasty little “O” s tend to clump together in the bowl: either drifting to the center or to the outer edges. The “Cheerios effect is found throughout nature, such as in grains of pollen (or, alternatively, mosquito eggs or beetles) floating on top of a pond; small coins floating in a bowl of water; or fire ants clumping together to form life-saving rafts during floods. A 2005 paper in the American Journal of Physics outlined the underlying physics, identifying the culprit as a combination of buoyancy, surface tension, and the so-called ” meniscus effect.”

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As part of IBM Quantum Network, Mizzou will be able to provide researchers and other institutions cloud access to quantum computing, a new type of computing that’s swiftly advancing and full of potential.

For the study, the researchers conducted microscopy analyses of a zircon grain obtained from Black Beauty, which builds off a 2022 study involving the same zircon grain where researchers found the grain had experienced being “shocked” from a meteorite impact long ago. For this latest study, the researchers found that the zircon grain contained unique evidence regarding past liquid water on the Red Planet.

“We used nano-scale geochemistry to detect elemental evidence of hot water on Mars 4.45 billion years ago,” said Dr. Aaron Cavosie, who is a senior lecturer in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University and a co-author on the study. “Hydrothermal systems were essential for the development of life on Earth and our findings suggest Mars also had water, a key ingredient for habitable environments, during the earliest history of crust formation. Through nano-scale imaging and spectroscopy, the team identified element patterns in this unique zircon, including iron, aluminum, yttrium and sodium. These elements were added as the zircon formed 4.45 billion years ago, suggesting water was present during early Martian magmatic activity.”

You can know a lot of things about birds just by the shape of their wings. A seafaring albatross, stretching out its sail-like airfoils, lives a very different life from a ground-dwelling antpitta with its long legs and short, stubby wings that it uses in rare, short bursts of flight.

But can bird wing shape tell scientists something useful about how nature is organized?

Research from Washington University in St. Louis says that bird wing shape—a proxy for long-distance flying ability—is a trait that influences biodiversity patterns on islands around the world.

Discover trends in motion control, from servo advancements to motor miniaturization and robotics, driving high-speed automation and boosting efficiency across industries.

The Adaptive Immunity and Immunoregulation Section (AIIS) in the Laboratory of Allergic Diseases at #NIAID is seeking an exceptional candidate for a postdoctoral fellowship position.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the largest institutes in the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), conducts and supports basic and applied research to better understand, treat, and ultimately prevent infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.

A postdoctoral fellowship position is available immediately in the Adaptive Immunity and Immunoregulation Section (AIIS) within the Laboratory of Allergic Diseases, NIAID. AIIS seeks highly motivated and collaborative candidates with a strong publication record who are capable of independent reasoning and excited about learning new technologies.

AIIS aims to define the cellular and molecular mechanisms controlling the balance between protective and pathogenic adaptive immune responses to allergens and pathogens. With a particular focus on memory T and B cells and T follicular helper (Tfh) cells, the lab utilizes state-of-the-art cellular and molecular approaches, including in vivo models of infection and allergy, multi-color flow cytometry, adoptive transfer experiments, cell fate tracking experiments, bone marrow chimeras, parabiosis surgery, imaging, conditional knockout and transgenic models, RNA-Seq, and single-cell technologies to characterize memory B-and T-cell responses in different models of food and respiratory allergens and infections.