Lifeboat Foundation

Slow-wave sleep plays a crucial role in strengthening memory by enhancing synaptic connections in the brain, with new findings suggesting potential methods for boosting memory through targeted stimulation.

For nearly two decades, scientists have known that slow, synchronized electrical waves in the brain during deep sleep play a key role in forming memories. However, the underlying reason remained unclear — until now. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin propose an explanation. They found that these slow waves make the neocortex, the brain’s long-term memory center, especially receptive to new information. This discovery could pave the way for more effective memory-enhancing treatments in the future.

How Memories Form During Sleep

Aging is an inevitable aspect of life, but age-related diseases are not an inseparable part of the aging process, and their risk can be reduced through a healthy lifestyle. Vitamin K has a broader impact than just blood clotting, and yet it remains overshadowed by other vitamins and underestimated by both doctors and consumers. Vitamin K (VK) is a multifunctional micronutrient with anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties, whose deficiency may cause age-related diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and osteoporosis. There is a growing body of evidence supporting the role of vitamin K as a protective nutrient in aging and inflammation. This review summarizes the current knowledge regarding the molecular aspects of the protective role of vitamin K in aging and age-related diseases and its clinical implications.

New observations show that planets forming in protoplanetary disks like that around PDS 70 can trigger the formation of subsequent planets.

This finding, based on high-resolution images from ALMA, supports the domino effect in the sequential formation of planetary systems.

Discoveries in Multi-Planet Systems.

How and where particles are accelerated in the jets of supermassive black holes has been a long-standing mystery.

A new solar cell process using Sn(II)-perovskite oxide material offers a promising pathway for green hydrogen production through water splitting, advancing sustainable energy technologies.

Experts in nanoscale chemistry have made significant progress toward sustainable and efficient hydrogen production from water using solar power.

An international collaborative study led by Flinders University, involving researchers from South Australia, the US, and Germany, has uncovered a novel solar cell process that could play a key role in future technologies for photocatalytic water splitting—a critical step in green hydrogen production.

Understanding unfolded proteins could boost drug discovery and decipher origins of life mysteries.

An initially “unknown” illness affecting hundreds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may be attributable to malaria, malnutrition and a viral infection. But investigations are ongoing.

In recent years, roboticists have developed a wide range of systems that could eventually be introduced in health care and assisted living facilities. These include both medical robots and robots designed to provide companionship or assistance to human users.

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology recently developed a robotic system that could give human users a massage that employs traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) techniques. This new robot, introduced in a paper on the arXiv preprint server, could eventually be deployed in health care, wellness and rehabilitation facilities as additional therapeutic tools for patients who are experiencing different types of pain or discomfort.

“We adopt an adaptive admittance control algorithm to optimize force and position control, ensuring safety and comfort,” wrote Yuan Xu, Kui Huang, Weichao Guo and Leyi Du in their paper. “The paper analyzes key TCM techniques from kinematic and dynamic perspectives and designs robotic systems to reproduce these massage techniques.”

Westlake University in China and the California Institute of Technology have designed a protein-based system inside living cells that can process multiple signals and make decisions based on them.

The researchers have also introduced a unique term, “perceptein,” as a combination of protein and perceptron. Perceptron is a foundational artificial neural network concept, effectively solving binary classification problems by mapping input features to an output decision.

By merging concepts from neural network theory with protein engineering, “perceptein” represents a biological system capable of performing classification computations at the protein level, similar to a basic artificial neural network. This “perceptein” circuit can classify different signals and respond accordingly, such as deciding to stay alive or undergo programmed cell death.