Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 477

The ability of plants to convert sunlight into food is an enviable superpower. Now, researchers have shown they can get animal cells to do the same thing.

Photosynthesis in plants and algae is performed by tiny organelles known as chloroplasts, which convert sunlight into oxygen and chemical energy. While the origins of these structures are hazy, scientists believe they may have been photosynthetic bacteria absorbed by primordial cells.

Our ancestors weren’t so lucky, but now researchers from the University of Tokyo have managed to rewrite evolutionary history. In a recent paper, the team reported they had successfully implanted chloroplasts into hamster cells where they generated energy for at least two days via the photosynthetic electron transport process.

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An exciting Focused Research Organization (FRO): is systematically developing tools for working with non-model microorganisms.

As we walked, Lee told me that’s efforts to make “extraordinary” organisms accessible almost always follow the same basic steps. First, the team orders a microbe from ATCC, a non-profit group that has been storing and mailing microbes to researchers since 1925. The ATCC catalog includes more than 14,000 bacterial strains, the vast majority of which gather dust and are rarely ordered by researchers.

After receiving a microbe in the mail, sequences it. Mutations can creep into strains over time, and even a seemingly minor alteration—a single base swapped here or there—can change how cells grow and respond to their environment.

Lee told me that he once sequenced Vibrio natriegens stored in the ATCC database. Ten years later, a professor at Harvard ordered the same microbe from ATCC and sequenced its genome again. But the professor noticed a small change: the Vibrio cells now carried a single mutation in a ribosomal gene that made the cells sickly and slow-growing. This mutation had not been present when Lee studied the same microbes just a decade prior: evidence that nothing in biology remains constant. By sequencing the genome, constructs a record from which to diagnose future problems.

Continue reading “Inside the Laboratory for Extraordinary Microbes” | >

Bluesky has apparently become such a successful X-formerly-Twitter alternative that even Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously taking notice. At this rate, the social site could potentially outpace Threads — and Meta clearly isn’t happy.

“The race to replace Twitter has accelerated,” Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at the market research company eMarketer, told The Washington Post. “Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition.”

X-formerly-Twitter, the giant in the space, has something like 300 million active monthly users — a number that’s been plummeting ever since Elon Musk acquired the site in 2022, opening up room for a proliferation of new challengers.

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The “MANIFEST-17K” international study is the first to show important…

Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is safe for treating patients with common types of atrial fibrillation (AF), according to the largest study of its kind on this new technology, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The “MANIFEST-17K” international study is the first to show important safety outcomes in a large patient population, including no significant risk of esophageal damage, with PFA is the latest ablation modality approved by the Food and Drug Administration that can be used to restore a regular heartbeat. The findings, published July 8 in Nature Medicine, could lead to more frequent use of PFA instead of conventional therapies to manage AF patients.

Continue reading “Pulsed Field Ablation Procedures Found Safe and Effective for Atrial Fibrillation Patients” | >

Cooling systems are an integral part of many modern technologies, as heat tends to wear down materials and decrease performance in several ways. In many cases, however, cooling can be an inconvenient and energy-intensive process. Accordingly, scientists have been seeking innovative and efficient methods to cool substances down.

Solid-state optical cooling is a prominent example that leverages a very unique phenomenon called anti-Stokes (AS) emission. Usually, when materials absorb photons from incoming light, their electrons transition into an “excited” state.

Under ideal conditions, as electrons return to their original state, part of this excess energy is released as light, while the rest is converted into heat.

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On a cool morning this summer, I visited a former shopping mall in Mountain View, California, that is now a Google office building. On my way inside, I passed a small museum of the company’s past “moonshots,” including Waymo’s first self-driving cars. Upstairs, Jonathan Tompson and Danny Driess, research scientists in Google DeepMind’s robotics division, stood in the center of what looked like a factory floor, with wires everywhere.

At a couple of dozen stations, operators leaned over tabletops, engaged in various kinds of handicraft. They were not using their own hands—instead, they were puppeteering pairs of metallic robotic arms. The setup, known as ALOHA, “a low-cost open-source hardware system for bimanual teleoperation,” was once Zhao’s Ph.D. project at Stanford. At the end of each arm was a claw that rotated on a wrist joint; it moved like the head of a velociraptor, with a slightly stiff grace. One woman was using her robotic arms to carefully lower a necklace into the open drawer of a jewelry case. Behind her, another woman prized apart the seal on a ziplock bag, and nearby a young man swooped his hands forward as his robotic arms folded a child’s shirt. It was close, careful work, and the room was quiet except for the wheeze of mechanical joints opening and closing. “It’s quite surprising what you can and can’t do with parallel jaw grippers,” Tompson said, as he offered me a seat at an empty station. “I’ll show you how to get started.”

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