Lifeboat Foundation

Chiral molecules intercalated into van der Waals gaps.

Andreas StürmerWho knows? Which one of both is fake news?

Sam Bankman-Fried recently hit the news when he was featured in Washington Post, vowing to give away millions worth of BTC, although he admits this is about wooing regulators and onboarding people to FTX.

Black carbon in the atmosphere is like dressing Earth in a black shirt on a sunny day.

In new research published earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) simulates the effect of greatly increased spaceflight on the stratosphere. The results show that planned spaceflight over the next few decades could raise Earth’s temperature, change global air currents, and dampen the ozone layer. The study appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmosphere.

These days, it’s hard to pull up any technology-or science-oriented news site without seeing something about Elon Musk’s satellite launches, his plans to send many ships to Mars, NASA’s big slate of upcoming Artemis mission launches, the rise of private spaceflight, and the increase in national spaceflight from previously unrepresented nations. It’s a huge moment for space, so traffic is about to get worse.

Continue reading “Spaceflight Will Warm Earth’s Stratosphere 4 Degrees, Study Finds” »

Research led by Suresh Alahari, Ph.D., Professor of Biochemistry at LSU Health New Orleans schools of Medicine and Graduate Studies, suggests a combination of drugs already approved by the FDA for other cancers may be effective in treating chemo-resistant triple-negative breast cancer. The results are published in Molecular Cancer.

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors lack estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). A subtype representing 12–55% of triple-negative breast cancer tumors has androgen receptors (AR). Since androgen receptors stimulate tumor cell progression in estrogen receptor-negative breast cancers, they have become a target of triple-negative breast cancer therapy. As well, since a substantial number of patients with triple-negative breast cancer develop resistance to paclitaxel, the FDA-approved chemotherapeutic agent for triple-negative breast cancer, new therapeutic approaches are needed.

Working in a mouse model and tissue from patients with triple-negative breast cancer, the research team screened 133 FDA-approved drugs that have a therapeutic effect against androgen receptor cells. They found that ceritinib, an FDA-approved drug for lung cancers, efficiently inhibited the growth of androgen receptor triple-negative breast cancer cells. To improve the response, they also selected enzalutamide, an FDA-approved androgen receptor antagonist for prostate cancer treatment.

Forget your bulky AR headsets, smart contact lenses are coming to place augmented reality displays right there on your eyeball. Last week, Mojo Vision CEO Drew Perkins volunteered to test the first feature-complete prototype of his company’s design.

Smart wearables are all about super-portable convenience, and until scientists can plumb an AR display directly into your visual cortex, the smallest and most portable form factor we can imagine is that of a contact lens. Mojo Vision has been working on a smart contact lens design since 2015, and its latest prototype Mojo Lens packs in a pretty impressive amount of gear – especially for something that has to live behind your eyelid.

For starters, it has the world’s smallest and highest-density display capable of showing dynamic content – a green monochrome MicroLED display measuring less than 0.5 mm (0.02 in) in diameter, with a resolution of 14,000 pixels per inch. It’s got an ARM Core M0 processor, a 5-GHz radio capable of communicating at ultra-low latency, and enough accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers to track your eye movements with extreme precision, allowing the image to stay stable even as you move your eyes around.

The current electric vehicle market is entirely dominated by lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). However, due to the limited and unequal distribution of LIB raw materials on earth, there is a continuous effort to design alternate storage devices. Among the alternatives to LIBs, sodium-ion batteries (NIBs) are at the forefront because sodium resources are ubiquitous worldwide and virtually inexhaustible. However, one of the major drawbacks of the NIBs is their low specific charge capacity. Since the specific charge capacity of a cell can be improved by increasing the specific charge capacity of the anode material, there is a constant effort to find suitable anode materials. Recent studies suggested that a cobalt-boride (CoB) anti-MXene material (a newly discovered two-dimensional material) can yield superior specific charge capacities for LIBs than traditional graphite-based anodes.

Blockchain is a digital technology that allows a secure and decentralized record of transactions that is increasingly used for everything from cryptocurrencies to artwork. But Yale researchers have found a new use for blockchain: they’ve leveraged the technology to give individuals control of their own genomes.

Their findings are published June 29 in the journal Genome Biology.

“Our primary goal is to give ownership of genomic data back to the individual,” said senior author Mark Gerstein, the Albert L. Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics and professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, of computer science, and of statistics and data science.

Some insightful experiments have occasionally been made on the subject of this review, but those studies have had almost no impact on mainstream neuroscience. In the 1920s (Katz, E. [ 1 ]), it was shown that neurons communicate and fire even if transmission of ions between two neighboring neurons is blocked indicating that there is a nonphysical communication between neurons. However, this observation has been largely ignored in the neuroscience field, and the opinion that physical contact between neurons is necessary for communication prevailed. In the 1960s, in the experiments of Hodgkin et al. where neuron bursts could be generated even with filaments at the interior of neurons dissolved into the cell fluid [ 3 0, 4 ], they did not take into account one important question. Could the time gap between spikes without filaments be regulated? In cognitive processes of the brain, subthreshold communication that modulates the time gap between spikes holds the key to information processing [ 14 ][ 6 ]. The membrane does not need filaments to fire, but a blunt firing is not useful for cognition. The membrane’s ability to modulate time has thus far been assigned only to the density of ion channels. Such partial evidence was debated because neurons would fail to process a new pattern of spike time gaps before adjusting density. If a neuron waits to edit the time gap between two consecutive spikes until the density of ion channels modifies and fits itself with the requirement of modified time gaps, which are a few milliseconds (~20 minutes are required for ion-channel density adjustment [ 25 ]), the cognitive response would become non-functional. Thus far, many discrepancies were noted. However, no efforts were made to resolve these issues. In the 1990s, there were many reports that electromagnetic bursts or electric field imbalance in the environment cause firing [ 7 ]. However, those reports were not considered in work on modeling of neurons. This is not surprising because improvements to the Hodgkin and Huxley model made in the 1990s were ignored simply because it was too computationally intensive to automate neural networks according to the new more complex equations and, even when greater computing powers became available, these remained ignored. We also note here the final discovery of the grid-like network of actin and beta-spectrin just below the neuron membrane [ 26 ], which is directly connected to the membrane. This prompts the question: why is it present bridging the membrane and the filamentary bundles in a neuron?

The list is endless, but the supreme concern is probably the simplest question ever asked in neuroscience. What does a nerve spike look like reality? The answer is out there. It is a 2D ring shaped electric field perturbation, since the ring has a width, we could also state that a nerve spike is a 3D structure of electric field. In Figure 1a, we have compared the shape of a nerve spike, perception vs. reality. The difference is not so simple. Majority of the ion channels in that circular strip area requires to be activated simultaneously. In this circular area, polarization and depolarization for all ion channels should happen together. That is easy to presume but it is difficult to explain the mechanism.

Environmental sensors are a step closer to simultaneously sniffing out multiple gases that could indicate disease or pollution, thanks to a Penn State collaboration. Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, assistant professor of engineering science and mechanics in the College of Engineering, and Lauren Zarzar, assistant professor of chemistry in Eberly College of Science, and their teams combined laser writing and responsive sensor technologies to fabricate the first highly customizable microscale gas sensing devices.

They published their technique this month in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

“The detection of gases is of critical importance to various fields, including pollution monitoring, public safety assurance and personal health care,” Cheng said. “To fill these needs, sensing devices must be small, lightweight, inexpensive and easy to use and apply to various environments and substrates, such as clothing or piping.”