Lifeboat Foundation

Early detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria in food and water samples are essential to public health. Bacterial infections cause millions of deaths worldwide and bring a heavy economic burden, costing more than 4 billion dollars annually in the United States alone. Among pathogenic bacteria, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and other coliform bacteria are among the most common ones, and they indicate fecal contamination in food and water samples. The most conventional and frequently used method for detecting these bacteria involves culturing of the samples, which usually takes 24 hours for the final read-out and needs expert visual examination. Although some methods based on, for example, the amplification of nucleic acids, can reduce the detection time to a few hours, they cannot differentiate live and dead bacteria and present low sensitivity at low concentrations of bacteria. That is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approves no nucleic acid-based bacteria sensing method for screening water samples.

In an article recently published in ACS Photonics, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), a team of scientists, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and co-workers have developed an AI-powered smart bacterial colony detection system using a thin-film transistor (TFT) array, which is a widely used technology in mobile phones and other displays.

The ultra-large imaging area of the TFT array (27 mm × 26 mm) manufactured by researchers at Japan Display Inc. enabled the system to rapidly capture the growth patterns of bacterial colonies without the need for scanning, which significantly simplified both the hardware and software design. This system achieved ~12-hour time savings compared to gold-standard culture-based methods approved by EPA. By analyzing the microscopic images captured by the TFT array as a function of time, the AI-based system could rapidly and automatically detect colony growth with a deep neural network. Following the detection of each colony, a second neural network is used to classify the bacteria species.

An international team of researchers has discovered 1.2-billion-year-old groundwater deep in a gold-and uranium-producing mine in Moab Khotsong, South Africa, shedding more light on how life is sustained below the Earth’s surface and how it may thrive on other planets.

The findings were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time, we have insight into how energy stored deep in the Earth’s subsurface can be released and distributed more broadly through its crust over time,” says Oliver Warr, research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study. “Think of it as a Pandora’s Box of helium-and-hydrogen-producing power, one that we can learn how to harness for the benefit of the deep biosphere on a global scale.”

The Last Human – A Glimpse Into The Far Future.

German animation and design studio, Kurzgesagt, explores the far future of humanity and how our population may change over the aeons.

Given the numerous global threats we face during this century and beyond – from climate change to nuclear war, asteroid impacts and killer viruses – many of us are concerned that humans could go extinct. But there are reasons to be optimistic, according to this latest video from Kurzgesagt. Rather than approaching the end of human history, we may actually be living at the dawn of our species; the mere prelude for a vast and exciting future that lies ahead.

Way too many batteries still end up in a landfill, though it depends on the type. While 90% of lead acid batteries are recycled, experts estimate that only about 5% of lithium-ion batteries currently enter a recycling stream. Many more lurk in drawers or end up in the trash. That’s a problem.

Why you shouldn’t throw batteries in the trash

Lithium-ion batteries can cause fires when exposed to heat, mechanical stress, or other waste materials. Once exposed, the elements contained in the batteries could leach into the environment and contaminate the soil and groundwater. While this shouldn’t present an issue at a well-managed domestic facility, exported trash might end up at a more lenient landfill. Richa et al. note that “the greater risk is loss of valuable materials.”

It was thought that spongy bone in woodpeckers’ heads cushioned their brains from hard knocks, but in fact their skulls are stiff like a hammer.

The entirely theoretical cloud of icy space debris marks the frontiers of our solar system.

The Oort cloud represents the very edges of our solar system. The thinly dispersed collection of icy material starts roughly 200 times farther away from the sun than Pluto and stretches halfway to our sun’s nearest starry neighbor, Alpha Centauri. We know so little about it that its very existence is theoretical — the material that makes up this cloud has never been glimpsed by even our most powerful telescopes, except when some of it breaks free.

“For the foreseeable future, the bodies in the Oort cloud are too far away to be directly imaged,” says a spokesperson from NASA. “They are small, faint, and moving slowly.”

Continue reading “Mysteries of the Oort cloud at the edge of our solar system” »

A geological mystery is unfolding far beneath our feet, and it may shed light on the life-sustaining magnetic field that extends far above our heads.

Each year, the solid-iron inner core at the heart of our planet expands by about a millimeter as the Earth’s nether regions cool and solidify. According to a recent study, one side appears to be growing faster — but scientists don’t know why.

This phenomenon likely dates back to the inner core’s creation, between 1.5 billion and half a billion years ago. At this point, after billions of years of cooling, the Earth’s fiery interior finally lost enough heat to begin an ongoing process of crystallization. Now, as the outer core’s molten iron loses heat, it crystallizes to become the newest layer of the inner core.

Continue reading “Earth’s inner core is growing lopsided” »

An international team of astronomers has conducted an astrometric and photometric wide-field study of the open cluster Messier 37. As a result, the researchers completed a comprehensive catalog of more than 200,000 sources in the field of Messier 37 and identified the hottest white dwarf candidate members of this cluster. The study was detailed in a paper published July 7 on arXiv.org.

Open clusters (OCs), formed from the same giant molecular cloud, are groups of stars loosely gravitationally bound to each other. So far, more than 1,000 of them have been discovered in the Milky Way, and scientists are still looking for more, hoping to find a variety of these stellar groupings. Studying OCs in detail could be crucial for improving our understanding of the formation and evolution of our galaxy.

Messier 37 (or M37, also known as NGC 2099) is the brightest and richest Galactic OC in the constellation Auriga, located at a distance of about 4,500 light years. The cluster has a radius of at least 10 light years and a total mass of some 1,500 solar masses. The age of Messier 37 is estimated to be between 400 and 550 million years, while its metallicity is at a level of 0.02–0.08.

Circa 2008

From endpoint fluorescence to melting curve analysis.

Today’s research on somatic, genetic and epigenetic variation in eukaryotic cells requires fast, accurate and cost-effective methods for screening large numbers of samples or loci in parallel. Variations identified by genomic sequencing or array studies need to be subsequently confirmed and validated.

Continue reading “The LightCycler® 480 real-time PCR system: a versatile platform for genetic variation research” »