Lifeboat Foundation

“Our research may help us understand how abnormalities in anxiety-like behavior occur and design circuit-based therapeutic approaches for correcting them,” remarks Professor Ji Won Um from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at DGIST, who led the study.

Summary: Study identifies the role a specific protein plays in regulating the development of inhibitory synapses in the hippocampus in the context of anxiety-related behaviors.

Source: DGIST

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As a wind catcher requires no electricity to power it, it is both a cost-efficient and green form of cooling. With conventional mechanical air conditioning already accounting for a fifth of total electricity consumption globally, ancient alternatives like the wind catcher are becoming an increasingly appealing option.

From ancient Egypt to the Persian Empire, an ingenious method of catching the breeze kept people cool for millennia. Now, it could come to our aid once again.

According to findings published in Learning and Individual Differences, a secure bond between father and child is particularly important for children’s development of coping skills related to mathematics. The longitudinal study found that the father-child bond predicted children’s math anxiety one year later, while the mother-child bond did not.

The term “math anxiety” is used to describe fear and apprehension surrounding math and can occur in children and adults alike. Math anxiety can arise in response to any situation that requires mathematics — from solving a math problem at school to calculating the tip at a restaurant.

Previous studies have uncovered parental factors that play a role in the development of math anxiety among children — for example, parents’ use of math at home with their children. There is also evidence that that the quality of the parent-child relationship influences math anxiety among children, but until now, no study had teased apart the specific roles of the mother-child versus father-child bond.

The three-body problem, which has been a focus of scientific study for over 400 years, represented a stumbling block for famous astronomers such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler.

Spiraling costs and repeated delays are imperiling the agency’s moon mission. Surely there’s a better way?

A freely moving diamond trapped inside another diamond was discovered in Siberia by Alrosa in 2019. The unusual diamond, nicknamed the “Matryoshka” after the traditional Russian nesting dolls, attracted widespread interest in how this feature formed The 0.62 ct flat octahedral diamond, a twinned macle, was recently examined by the New York laboratory. Flat-bottom trigon etch pits were well developed on the face {111} (figure 1). The crystal showed a clear green bodycolor, with small dark green radiation stains in shallow fractures along the edges when viewed from the top of the crystal. Two etch channels on opposite sides of the edges had rectangular openings about 0.2 mm in width. The channels extended into the internal enclosed cavity. These features made this diamond unique. Trapped in the cavity was a small, flat diamond crystal with a hexagonal outline. The small diamond, covered with some green radiation stains on the surface, is entirely detached from its host crystal and can move freely inside. The surface of the small diamond was covered with groups of straight parallel striations following the diamond crystal symmetry. No etched trigons were observed on the surfaces of the small diamond (figure 2). Except for tiny foreign-material contaminations at the two entrances of the open channels, no other inclusions were observed in this crystal (figure 3).

So what would the furniture of the future be like? some future furniture.

Once you have your own place, you want to make it truly yours by choosing the decoration and furniture. Even if you aren’t, you can’t miss these smart pieces of furniture. Some are surprising, others seem completely SciFi. Check out this review of smart furniture and let us know what you think!

Continue reading “Smart Furniture | Ingenious Space Saving Designs And Hidden Doors” »

Widespread human SARS-CoV-2 infections combined with human-wildlife interactions create the potential for reverse zoonosis from humans to wildlife. We targeted white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for serosurveillance based on evidence these deer have ACE2 receptors with high affinity for SARS-CoV-2, are permissive to infection, exhibit sustained viral shedding, can transmit to conspecifics, and can be abundant near urban centers. We evaluated 624 pre-and post-pandemic serum samples from wild deer from four U.S. states for SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Antibodies were detected in 152 samples (40%) from 2,021 using a surrogate virus neutralization test. A subset of samples was tested using a SARS-CoV-2 virus neutralization test with high concordance between tests. These data suggest white-tailed deer in the populations assessed have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2.

One-Sentence Summary Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 were detected in 40% of wild white-tailed deer sampled from four U.S. states in 2021.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans, can infect multiple domestic and wild animal species (1 – 7). Thus, the possibility exists for the emergence of new animal reservoirs of SARS-CoV-2, each with unique potential to maintain, disseminate, and drive novel evolution of this virus. Of particular concern are wildlife species that are both abundant and live in close association with human populations (5).

As reported in a new article in Nature Reviews Physics, instead of waiting for fully mature quantum computers to emerge, Los Alamos National Laboratory and other leading institutions have developed hybrid classical/quantum algorithms to extract the most performance—and potentially quantum advantage—from today’s noisy, error-prone hardware. Known as variational quantum algorithms, they use the quantum boxes to manipulate quantum systems while shifting much of the work load to classical computers to let them do what they currently do best: solve optimization problems.

“Quantum computers have the promise to outperform classical computers for certain tasks, but on currently available quantum hardware they can’t run long algorithms. They have too much noise as they interact with environment, which corrupts the information being processed,” said Marco Cerezo, a physicist specializing in quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos and a lead author of the paper. “With variational quantum algorithms, we get the best of both worlds. We can harness the power of quantum computers for tasks that classical computers can’t do easily, then use classical computers to compliment the computational power of quantum devices.”

Current noisy, intermediate scale quantum computers have between 50 and 100 qubits, lose their “quantumness” quickly, and lack error correction, which requires more qubits. Since the late 1990s, however, theoreticians have been developing algorithms designed to run on an idealized large, error-correcting, fault tolerant quantum computer.