Lifeboat Foundation

Science funders must remember the value of addressing the intrinsic biological questions that help to explain the natural world.

It’s an “extremely rare phenomenon” that sheds light on black hole mysteries.

A new mechanism that enables bacteria to form resistance to antibiotics has been discovered in a recent study conducted by researchers in Perth, Australia. In a process currently undetectable using traditional laboratory testing methods, the team observed the bacteria group A Streptococcus – the cause of strep throat – absorbing nutrients from the host organism that, in turn, enable them to bypass antibiotic treatment.

For bacteria to grow and multiply, they produce folates. Bacteriostatic antibiotics work to stop the bacteria’s ability to produce these folates, thus disabling their ability to multiply. The group A Streptococcus bacteria observed in the study, however, were seen to be using folates from the host when their own folate production was inhibited, causing a resistance to treatment from bacteriostatic antibiotics and likely making any infection worse.

The human body cannot become resistant to antimicrobial treatments. Rather, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) refers to bacteria or fungi’s resistance to antibiotics or antifungals, respectively. AMR is thought to pose a serious and rapidly growing threat to society.

New smart stem cells show a promising power to heal.

Researchers have reprogrammed human fat cells into adaptive smart stem cells that can lie dormant in the body until they are needed to heal various tissues. They demonstrated the cells’ effectiveness at healing damaged tissue in a mouse study.

To create the smart stem cells, the team from UNSW Sydney exposed human fat cells to a compound mixture. After about three and a half weeks, the cells lost their original identity and began acting like stem cells, or iMS (induced multipotent stem cells).

Hive Social, a social media platform that has seen meteoric growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter, abruptly shut down its service on Wednesday after a security advisory warned the site was riddled with vulnerabilities that exposed all data stored in user accounts.

“The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages,” the advisory, published on Wednesday by Berlin-based security collective Zerforschung, claimed. “This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login.”

The post went on to say that after the researchers privately reported the vulnerabilities last Saturday, many of the flaws they reported remained unpatched. They headlined their post “Warning: do not use Hive Social.”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are building swarms of tiny robots that have built-in intelligence, allowing them to build structures, vehicles, or even larger versions of themselves.

The subunit of the robot, which is being developed at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, is called a voxel and is capable of carrying power and data.

“When we’re building these structures, you have to build in intelligence,” MIT Professor and CBA Director Neil Gershenfeld said in a statement. “What emerged was the idea of structural electronics — of making voxels that transmit power and data as well as force.”

Astronomers love colors. A new “Pillars of Creation” image makes science very pretty.

Data from two instruments onboard the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are revealing the famous “Pillars of Creation” in a new way.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, we now know more about the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a distant gas giant, than any other exoplanet.

Scientists at Scripps Research have reported success in initial tests of a new, nanotech-based strategy against autoimmune diseases.

The scientists, who reported their results in ACS Nano, engineered cell-like “nanoparticles” that target only the immune cells driving an autoimmune reaction, leaving the rest of the immune system intact and healthy. The nanoparticles greatly delayed, and in some animals even prevented, severe disease in a mouse model of arthritis.

“The potential advantage of this approach is that it would enable safe, long-term treatment for autoimmune diseases where the immune system attacks its own tissues or organs—using a method that won’t cause broad immune suppression, as current treatments do,” says study senior author James Paulson, Ph.D., Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Chair of Chemistry in the Department of Molecular Medicine at Scripps Research.