Lifeboat Foundation

Water is the most abundant yet least understood liquid in nature. It exhibits many strange behaviors that scientists still struggle to explain. While most liquids get denser as they get colder, water is most dense at 39 degrees Fahrenheit, just above its freezing point. This is why ice floats to the top of a drinking glass and lakes freeze from the surface down, allowing marine life to survive cold winters. Water also has an unusually high surface tension, allowing insects to walk on its surface, and a large capacity to store heat, keeping ocean temperatures stable.

Now, a team that includes researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and Stockholm University in Sweden have made the first direct observation of how hydrogen atoms in water molecules tug and push neighboring water molecules when they are excited with laser light. Their results, published in Nature today, reveal effects that could underpin key aspects of the microscopic origin of water’s strange properties and could lead to a better understanding of how water helps proteins function in living organisms.

“Although this so-called nuclear quantum effect has been hypothesized to be at the heart of many of water’s strange properties, this experiment marks the first time it was ever observed directly,” said study collaborator Anders Nilsson, a professor of chemical physics at Stockholm University. “The question is if this quantum effect could be the missing link in theoretical models describing the anomalous properties of water.”

In ‘Flashes of Creation,’ author Paul Halpern tells the story of George Gamow, Fred Hoyle and their decades-long sparring match about the Big Bang.

Flashes of Creation Paul Halpern Basic Books, $30

The Big Bang wasn’t always a sure bet. For several decades in the 20th century, researchers wrestled with interpreting cosmic origins, or if there even was a beginning at all. At the forefront of that debate stood physicists George Gamow and Fred Hoyle: One advocated for an expanding universe that sprouted from a hot, dense state; the other for a cosmos that is eternal and unchanging. Both pioneered contemporary cosmology, laid the groundwork for our understanding of where atoms come from and brought science to the masses.

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A Norwegian company called Yara International claims to have created the world’s first zero-emission ship that can also transport cargo autonomously. The Yara Birkeland electric cargo ship was first conceptualized in2017but now looks to make its first voyage with no crew members onboard later this year in Norway.

Yara International is a Norwegian company that was founded in1905to combat the rising famine in Europe at the time. The company created the world’s first nitrogen fertilizer, which remains its largest business focus today.

In addition to its perpetual battle against hunger, Yara focuses on emissions abatement and sustainable agricultural practices. While the company wants to continue finding success in feeding the planet, it believes it can also do so sustainably.

https://www.futuretimeline.net/images/socialmedia/ Systems, a California-based developer of semiconductors and AI, has announced a new system that can support models of 120 trillion parameters in a single computer.

A new photograph from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a stunning “Einstein Ring” billions of light-years from Earth — a phenomenon named after Albert Einstein, who predicted that gravity could bend light.

The round object at the center of the photograph released by the European Space Agency is actually three galaxies that appear as seven, with four separate images of the most distant of the galaxies forming a visible ring around the others.

The farthest galaxy — a special type of very bright galaxy with a gigantic black hole at its center known as a quasar — is about 15 billion light-years from Earth.

ABOVE: MAPT, one of the genes linked to both heavy drinking and neurodegenerative diseases, codes for the protein tau (blue in this illustration) inside a neuron. NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING/ NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH

Some genetic risk factors for alcohol use disorder overlap with those for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, scientists reported in Nature Communications on August 20. The study, which relied on a combination of genetic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic data, also offers insight into the molecular commonalities among these disorders, and their connections to immune disfunction.

“By meshing findings from genome wide association studies… ith gene expression in brain and other tissues, this new study has prioritized genes likely to harbor regulatory variants influencing risk of Alcohol Use Disorder,” writes David Goldman, a neurogenetics researcher at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), in an email to The Scientist. “Several of these genes are also associated with neurodegenerative disorders—an intriguing connection because of alcohol’s ability to prematurely age the brain.”

Pico technology is hypothetical future level of technology which will revolutionized the scientist world. This technology is combination of pico and meter with scale of trillionths of a meter (10⁻¹²). This atomic and subatomic range particles reveals extraordinary properties and pave the way for tremendous applications [1].

The way lengths and angles attach together is the main determine of the materials properties. Alterable or reversible bonds distortions at pico-meter scale which changes the electronic conformation causes multiple properties for materials.

On the other hand, pico-scale particles changes the material properties by converting energy state of electrons within an atom. Physical and chemical properties of systems such as melting point, fluorescence, electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability, and chemical reactivity changes basically at pico-scale due to quantum effects of materials [2]. Moreover, surface energy of atoms increases by alternation of electron distribution and therefore, enhances protein and molecules adsorption on to materials. This privileges will resulting in tracing proteins, DNA and molecules and labeling them for various purpose.

It seems we have another accident involving a drone.

An Envoy Air passenger plane reported striking a drone while departing Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Sunday, in what is the just most recent incident of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) endangering commercial craft in restricted airspaces around the globe.

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New research has found that artificial intelligence (AI) analyzing medical scans can identify the race of patients with an astonishing degree of accuracy, while their human counterparts cannot. With the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approving more algorithms for medical use, the researchers are concerned that AI could end up perpetuating racial biases. They are especially concerned that they could not figure out precisely how the machine-learning models were able to identify race, even from heavily corrupted and low-resolution images.

In the study, published on pre-print service Arxiv, an international team of doctors investigated how deep learning models can detect race from medical images. Using private and public chest scans and self-reported data on race and ethnicity, they first assessed how accurate the algorithms were, before investigating the mechanism.

“We hypothesized that if the model was able to identify a patient’s race, this would suggest the models had implicitly learned to recognize racial information despite not being directly trained for that task,” the team wrote in their research.