Lifeboat Foundation

For nearly 60 million years, our home planet was likely frozen into a big snowball.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence of Earth’s transition from a tropical underwater world, writhing with photosynthetic bacteria, to a frozen wasteland – all preserved within the layers of giant rocks in a chain of Scottish and Irish islands.

The team, led by researchers from University College London (UCL), examined more than 2,000 grains of zircon from 11 sandstone samples, taken from up to 200 meters within the 1.1 km-thick (0.7 miles) Port Askaig formation, and the older, underlying Garbh Eileach formation, which is 70 meters thick.

A study has tied a substance in the blood to colorectal cancer in people under age 50. It may act as an early signal of the disease, scientists say, but that needs to be confirmed.

Thank you @LiamVickersAnimation made us such a wonderful animated series, we wish you good luck in your life in the meantime, enjoy the movie of all the epi…

A 50-year-old man presented with headache. Examination showed left sided ataxic hemiparesis and elevated blood pressure. Brain imaging revealed an acute intracerebral hemorrhage in the right lentiform nucleus, deep and periventricular white matter hyperintensities, and predominantly deep cerebral microbleeds. Fundus examination showed important arteriolar tortuosity involving several blood vessels. In this young patient, we explain the diagnostic approach to intracerebral hemorrhage, the causes of cerebral small vessel disease, and the interpretation of biomolecular tests.

Prof Lee said, “Existing breakthrough studies in quantum advantage are limited to highly-specific tailored problems. Finding new applications for which quantum computers provide unique advantages is the central motivation of our work.”

“Our approach allows us to explore the intricate signatures of topological materials on quantum computers with a level of precision that was previously unattainable, even for hypothetical materials existing in four dimensions,” added Prof Lee.

Despite the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, the team is able to measure topological state dynamics and protected mid-gap spectra of higher-order topological lattices with unprecedented accuracy, thanks to advanced in-house developed error mitigation techniques. This advance demonstrates the potential of current quantum technology to explore new frontiers in material engineering.

Laser-plasma accelerators take up less space than conventional facilities, which are sometimes kilometers long. Such compact particle sources can accelerate electron bunches efficiently, enabling X-ray lasers that fit in the basement of a university institute.

A study, published in the journal Science Bulletin and led by Dr. Haiping Hu from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOP, CAS), explores the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE) and non-Bloch bands.

An article in Opto-Electronic Advances, discusses complete-basis-reprogrammable coding metasurface for generating dynamically-controlled holograms under arbitrary polarization states.

Recently, an inelastic neutron scattering work on the bilayer nickelate La3Ni2O7-δ polycrystal finished by a team from Sun Yat-sen University was published in Science Bulletin. The team employed neutron spectroscopy to study the magnetic ground state and spin dynamics of La3Ni2O7-δ at ambient pressure.