Lifeboat Foundation

This disparity gets at the difference between one’s chronological age — how old they are in years — and their biological age, which is how their body has aged naturally and in response to its environment. The two can diverge in ways that are either blessings or curses. Hence why those who grow up under extreme stress or in polluted environments may look much older than they actually are.

And yellow-bellied marmots can tell us something about these two ages.

Yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) are no burrow-dwelling meteorologists like the groundhog. They may sound craven, but these quirky critters, also known as whistle pigs, make for fascinating subjects: the cat-sized rodents have a longer lifespan than expected for a mammal of their size. On average, marmots live 15 years.

Researchers have discovered a wholly-in tact Roman vessel that sank around the fourth century AD off the coast of Mallorca in Spain.

A deep neural network could help classicists restore incomplete inscriptions from ancient times — and reveal new works of literature.

New research from Griffith University has shown that a bacterium commonly present in the nose can sneak into the brain and set off a cascade of events that may lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

Associate Professor Jenny Ekberg and colleagues from the Clem Jones Centre for Neurobiology and Stem Cell Research at Menzies Health Institute Queensland and Griffith Institute for Drug Discovery, in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology, have discovered that the bacterium Chlamydia pneumoniae can invade the brain via the nerves of the nasal cavity.

Decentralizing talent

More than 50 million creators are driving their own economy of talent, attracting in excess of $800 million in venture capital. Such figures are but a shadow of what they can become later, as new venues are rapidly becoming available.

The development of blockchain technologies has resulted in a sweeping revolution across financial markets, empowering individuals instead of institutions and channeling ownership of data and funds to their holders. The qualities of the blockchain — immutability, full transparency and the trustless nature of operations — have permeated many industries, swooning the balance of business orientation from centralized corporate reliance to decentralization. This shift in the basic concepts that govern relations between participants to transactions, facilitated by smart contracts, has not gone unnoticed in the creator economy.

NASA rolled out the rocket that will power its Artemis missions, giving the public a glimpse at the sheer scale of the agency’s ambitious space launch vehicle.

Work will aid design of other unusual quantum materials with many potential applications.

MIT physicists and colleagues, including scientists from Berkeley Lab, have discovered the “secret sauce” behind the exotic properties of a new quantum material known as a kagome metal.

Kagome metals have long mystified scientists for their ability to exhibit collective behavior when cooled below room temperature.

A challenge in materials design is that in both natural and manmade materials, volume sometimes decreases, or increases, with increasing temperature. While there are mechanical explanations for this phenomenon for some specific materials, a general understanding of why this sometimes happens remains lacking.

However, a team of Penn State researchers has come up with a theory to explain and then predict it: Zentropy.

Zentropy is a play on entropy, a concept central to the second law of thermodynamics that expresses the measure of the disorder of a system that occurs over a period of time when there is no energy applied to keep order in the system. Think of a playroom in a preschool; if no energy is put into keeping it tidy, it quickly becomes disordered with toys all over the floor, a state of high entropy. If energy is put in via cleaning up and organizing the room once the children leave, then the room returns to a state of order and low entropy.

“Moore’s law could once again get a reprieve, in spite of the naysayers.”

Using graphene and molybdenum disulphide, scientists in China have made a transistor gate with a length of only 0.3 nanometres, equivalent to just one carbon atom, by exploiting the vertical aspect of the device.

In 1959, scientists at Bell Labs invented the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET). This led to mass-production of transistors for a wide range of applications – including computer processors. The Intel 4,004, the first commercially produced microprocessor, debuted in 1971 and featured 2,250 transistors on a single chip, using a 10,000 nm (10 µm) fabrication process.

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