Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have created new kinds of ‘living materials’ by tweaking the base ingredients of kombucha – the popular tea drink fermented with a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY).

This kind of ‘tea fungus’ – sometimes called ‘kombucha mother’ – can do a lot more than just produce sour-tasting beverages, it seems.

By modifying the mixture of the culture, researchers were able to make engineered living materials (ELMs) that could one day have all sorts of practical applications, such as sensing light or detecting contaminants.

How many particles do you need before individual atoms start behaving collectively? According to new research, the number is incredibly low. As few as six atoms will start transitioning into a macroscopic system, under the right conditions.

Using a specially designed ultra-cold laser trap, physicists observed the quantum precursor of the transition from a normal to a superfluid phase – offering a way to study the emergence of collective atomic behaviour and the limits of macroscopic systems.

Many-body physics is the field that seeks to describe and understand the collective behaviour of large numbers of particles: a bucket of water, for example, or a canister of gas. We can describe these substances in terms of their density, or their temperature – the way the substance is acting as a whole.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is probably more diverse than our traditional models suggest.

Postmortem, RNA sequencing has revealed three major molecular subtypes of the disease, each of which presents differently in the brain and which holds a unique genetic risk.

Such knowledge could help us predict who is most vulnerable to each subtype, how their disease might progress and what treatments might suit them best, potentially leading to better outcomes.

You might not think of volcanoes as particularly musical, but they do actually generate infrasound! And scientists may be able to use that sound to help predict when a volcano is about to erupt.

Hosted by: Michael Aranda.

Continue reading “How Volcanoes’ Music Could Help Us Predict Them” »

Scientists have used a “galaxy-sized” space observatory to find possible hints of a unique signal from gravitational waves, or the powerful ripples that course through the universe and warp the fabric of space and time itself.

The new findings, which appeared recently in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, hail from a U.S. and Canadian project called the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav).

For over 13 years, NANOGrav researchers have pored over the light streaming from dozens of pulsars spread throughout the Milky Way Galaxy to try to detect a “gravitational wave background.” That’s what scientists call the steady flux of gravitational radiation that, according to theory, washes over Earth on a constant basis. The team hasn’t yet pinpointed that target, but it’s getting closer than ever before, said Joseph Simon, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead author of the new paper.

Welcome to “The curious observer’s guide to quantum mechanics”–featuring particle/wave duality.

Scientists have developed a new way to detect four-stranded DNA and observe how it behaves in living cells.

A team led by University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers has discovered a groundbreaking one-step process for creating materials with unique properties, called metamaterials. Their results show the realistic possibility of designing similar self-assembled structures with the potential of creating “built-to-order” nanostructures for wide application in electronics and optical devices.

The research was published and featured on the cover of Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Chemical Society.

In general, metamaterials are materials made in the lab so as to provide specific physical, chemical, electrical, and optical properties otherwise impossible to find in naturally occurring materials. These materials can have unique properties which make them ideal for a variety of applications from optical filters and medical devices to aircraft soundproofing and infrastructure monitoring. Usually these nano-scale materials are painstakingly produced in a specialized clean room environment over days and weeks in a multi-step fabrication process.

Summary: A newly developed technique dubbed NeuroPAL is helping researchers investigate the dynamics of neural networks in the nervous system of microscopic worms.

Source: Columbia University.

The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons, or nerve cells, woven together by an estimated 100 trillion connections, or synapses. Each cell has a role that helps us to move muscles, process our environment, form memories, and much more.