Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Researchers in China have successfully restored the vision of mice with retinitis pigmentosa, one of the major causes of blindness in humans. The study, to be published March 17 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, uses a new, highly versatile form of CRISPR-based genome editing with the potential to correct a wide variety of disease-causing genetic mutations.

Researchers have previously used genome editing to restore the vision of mice with , such as Leber , that affect the , a layer of non-neuronal cells in the eye that supports the light-sensing rod and cone photoreceptor cells. However, most inherited forms of blindness, including , are caused by in the neural photoreceptors themselves.

“The ability to edit the genome of neural retinal cells, particularly unhealthy or dying photoreceptors, would provide much more convincing evidence for the potential applications of these genome-editing tools in treating diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa,” says Kai Yao, a professor at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology.

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I guess bee farmers won’t jut be collecting honey.

Honey bees are more than just pollen collectors! With a sense of smell on par with dogs, honey bees can be trained to detect any smell, like explosives. But how these bees are trained to detect explosives, what their advantage is over sniffer dogs, and how other animals have been trained to perform unbelievable tasks for the armed forces, is #NotWhatYouThink #NWYT #long.

Music:
Gone Without A Trace 2 — Fredrik Ekstrom.
Thyone — Ben Elson.
I Can See Better From Here — Jay Varton.
Serious Development — Blackout Memories.
Santosha — Van Sandano.
Lethal Secrets — Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen.
Human Missile — Craft Case.
Cloak — Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen.

Footage:
Select images/videos from Getty Images.
Shutterstock Enterprise.
National Archives

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Two pairs of gigantic black holes, each in a different dwarf galaxy, are speeding towards each other, and they’re set for two separate, never-before-seen collisions.

Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to spot the four dwarf galaxy black holes racing towards each other, dragging an enormous train of gas and stars in their wake. Some of this material is already being sucked into the black holes, causing them to grow ever larger before their eventual crashes.

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Polarons are localized quasiparticles that result from the interaction between fermionic particles and bosonic fields. Specifically, polarons are formed when individual electrons in crystals distort their surrounding atomic lattice, producing composite objects that behave more like a massive particles than electron waves.

Feliciano Giustino and Weng Hong Sio, two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning the formation of polarons in 2D materials. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, outlines some fundamental mechanisms associated with these particles’ formation that had not been identified in previous works.

“Back in 2019, we developed a new theoretical and computational framework to study polarons,” Feliciano Giustino, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “One thing that caught our attention is that many experimental papers discuss polarons in 3D bulk materials, but we could find only a couple of papers reporting observations of these particles in 2D. So, we were wondering whether this is just a coincidence, or else polarons in 2D are more rare or more elusive than in 3D, and our recent paper addresses this question.”

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Indian astronomers have analyzed observational data of a gamma-ray blazar known as PKS 0402–362, collected in the timespan of nearly 13 years. The study, published March 7 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, provides crucial information regarding the long-term behavior of this blazar.

Blazars are very compact quasars associated with (SMBHs) at the centers of active, giant elliptical galaxies. They belong to a larger group of active galaxies that host (AGN), and are the most numerous extragalactic gamma-ray sources. Their characteristic features are relativistic jets pointed almost exactly toward the Earth.

Based on their optical emission properties, astronomers divide blazars into two classes: (FSRQs) that feature prominent and broad optical emission lines, and BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), which do not.

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Germany, India, Mexico, and Spain. As multiparty democracies, these countries present a more complex picture of what brings people together—or divides them. Using social media data, a group of researchers proposes a novel approach to measuring polarization in nations with multiple political parties.

Complexity Science Hub scientist Samuel Martín-Gutiérrez and his colleagues developed a model that infers opinions from social networks, and measures the left-right political division, as well as other more nuanced sources of tension. They analyzed Twitter data from the Spanish elections of 2015 and 2019.

“It’s important to understand polarization in our society, and our findings shed new light on how are shaped,” says Martín-Gutiérrez. “Our approach can lead to useful insights when applied to real-world debates happening on social media.”

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Compass readings that do not show the direction of true north and interference with the operations of satellites are a few of the problems caused by peculiarities of the Earth’s magnetic field.

The magnetic field radiates around the world and far into space, but it is set by processes that happen deep within the Earth’s core, where temperatures exceed 5,000 degrees Celsius.

New research from geophysicists at the University of Leeds suggests that the way this super-hot core is cooled is key to understanding the causes of the peculiarities—or , as scientists call them—of the Earth’s magnetic field.

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Northwestern Medicine scientists have uncovered a mechanism by which exercise activates metabolic benefits in the body, according to a new study published in Cell Metabolism.

It’s well known that exercise elicits many . However, how this is accomplished is not yet well understood. During exercise, , the body’s cellular recycling system that allows old or damaged cellular structures to be broken down, is activated in both contracting muscles and various non-contracting organs, such as the liver.

In the study, investigators performed proteomic analyses on the blood of mice before and after exercise. They identified a protein secreted from contracting muscle, FN1, which significantly increased in the plasma and serum of mice after exercise.

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