Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Argentina has found chromosomal evidence of people living in South America as far back as 18,000 years ago. The group has published a paper describing their work and findings on the open access site PLOS ONE.

Over the past several years, scientists have found evidence of people first traveling to North America from Siberia approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago, using what was then a land bridge to Alaska. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence suggesting that the timeline may have to be pushed back a bit.

Continue reading “Chromosomal study suggests people were living in South America as far back as 18,000 years ago” »

This incredible phenomenon looks like something out of sci-fi, but it’s real!

A new generation of AI image tools can reproduce an artist’s signature style. Some creatives fear for their livelihoods.

Summary: Increasing neurogenesis by deleting the Bax gene in mouse models of Alzheimer’s improved the animals’ performance in tests measuring spatial recognition and contextual memory.

Source: Rockefeller University.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered that increasing the production of new neurons in mice with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) rescues the animals’ memory defects.

A GPT-3-like AI model for science would accelerate innovation and improve reproducibility. Creating it will require us to unlock research.

Summary: Researchers have developed a new sensor that allows scientists to image the brain without missing signals for an extended period of time and deeper in the brain than current technology allows.

Source: Baylor College of Medicine.

As you are reading these words, certain regions of your brain are displaying a flurry of millisecond-fast electrical activity. Visualizing and measuring this electrical activity is crucial to understand how the brain enables us to see, move, behave or read these words.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QfBG3AbW6QA

A novel method for measuring nanoparticle size could have applications in industry and basic materials science research.

Nanoparticles are present in everything from paints to pharmaceutical products. While nanoparticles have many important characteristics, such as molecular composition and shape, it is their size that determines many chemical and physical properties. A new technique relying on an optical vortex—a laser beam whose wave fronts twist around a dark central region—allows researchers to characterize nanoparticle size rapidly and continuously [1]. This light-based size probe might one day find applications in numerous industrial settings and aid fundamental materials science research.

Continue reading “Optical Vortex Sizes Up Nanoparticles” »

Cosmological constraints can be improved by applying machine learning to a combination of data from two leading probes of the large-scale structure of the Universe.

Supercooled water undergoes a liquid–liquid phase transition. The authors show that the two phases have distinct hydrogen-bond networks, differing in their degree of entanglement, and thus the transition can be described by the topological changes of the network.