Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors.

The transition from a foraging lifestyle, which humanity had followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to a settled farming one about 12,000 years ago has been widely discussed in popular books like “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari.

Researchers from the University of Bath, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the University of Cambridge, UCL, and others have developed a new mathematical model that challenges the traditional view that this major transition was driven by external factors, such as climate warming, increased rainfall, or the development of fertile river valleys.

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The ice-giant planet Uranus, which travels around the sun tipped on its side, is a weird and mysterious world. Now, in an unprecedented study spanning two decades, researchers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered new insights into the planet’s atmospheric composition and dynamics. This was possible only because of Hubble’s sharp resolution, spectral capabilities, and longevity.

The team’s results will help astronomers to better understand how the atmosphere of Uranus works and responds to changing sunlight. These long-term observations provide valuable data for understanding the atmospheric dynamics of this distant ice giant, which can serve as a proxy for studying exoplanets of similar size and composition.

When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986, it provided a close-up snapshot of the sideways planet. What it saw resembled a bland, blue-green billiard ball. By comparison, Hubble chronicled a 20-year story of seasonal changes from 2002 to 2022. Over that period, a team led by Erich Karkoschka of the University of Arizona, and Larry Sromovsky and Pat Fry from the University of Wisconsin used the same Hubble instrument, STIS (the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph), to paint an accurate picture of the atmospheric structure of Uranus.

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Researchers at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have developed a compact, battery-powered brain stimulation device capable of delivering therapeutic magnetic pulses while a person is walking or performing everyday activities.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation is used to treat conditions such as depression, stroke-related motor impairment, and other neuropsychiatric disorders. It is also used in cognitive and motor function research.

Existing systems need to be plugged into a power supply and have bulky designs meant for stationary use in . These limitations prevent stimulation during natural movement, such as standing and walking, making at-home or on-the-go treatments impractical.

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People breathing contaminated air over the course of years are at greater risk of developing numerous diseases. This is thought to be due to highly reactive components in particulate matter, which affect biological processes in the body. However, researchers from the University of Basel, Switzerland, have now shown that precisely these components disappear within hours and that previous measurements therefore completely underestimate the quantities in which they are present.

From chronic respiratory problems to cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and dementia, health damage caused by air pollution is wide-ranging and serious. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that over six million deaths a year are caused by increased exposure to particulate matter.

The chemical composition of these tiny particles in the air, which come from a wide range of both anthropogenic and natural sources, is highly complex. Which particles trigger which reactions and long-term diseases in the body is the subject of intensive research.

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Europe’s physics lab CERN is planning to build a particle-smasher even bigger than its Large Hadron Collider to continue searching for answers to some of the universe’s tiniest yet most profound mysteries.

The Future Circular Collider (FCC) has not yet received a political green light or funding. Even if approved, the vast project would not start operations until the 2040s—or be completed until the end of the century.

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which famously discovered the “God particle” Higgs boson and is currently the world’s powerful particle accelerator, is expected to have run its course by the 2040s.

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Nuclear fusion is a source of great hope for future energy security, with this field being explored in research reactors around the world. Accurately detecting their performance requires measurement systems that supply valid data even under extreme conditions. And the centerpiece of those systems are the bolometers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Microengineering and Microsystems IMM. Experts from the institute will be presenting their sophisticated sensors at the joint Fraunhofer booth (Hall 2, Booth B24) at this year’s Hannover Messe trade show from March 31 to April 4.

Fusion technology could be the solution to the increasing energy needs of the growing global population, but it is a highly demanding technology. The current challenge is to carry out experiments that produce more energy than they consume. To accurately capture advances in this field, specialists need exceptionally sensitive measuring instruments to analyze and control the complex processes taking place inside the reactors. Determining how much power is emitted from the fusion plasma is crucial to this.

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Foie gras—the fattened liver of ducks or geese—is a French delicacy prized for its rich, buttery flavor. But its production, which involves force-feeding the animals, has led to bans in several countries.

Now, a team of scientists says they’ve developed a more ethical alternative: one that mimics the taste and texture of the dish, minus the controversy.

The results were published Tuesday in the journal Physics of Fluids.

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A newly developed framework for quantifying uncertainties enhances the predictive power of analog quantum simulations. Simulating quantum many-body systems is a major objective in nuclear and high-energy physics. These systems involve large numbers of interacting particles governed by the laws of

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The interactions between light and nitroaromatic hydrocarbon molecules have important implications for chemical processes in our atmosphere that can lead to smog and pollution. However, changes in molecular geometry due to interactions with light can be very difficult to measure because they occur at sub-Angstrom length scales (less than a tenth of a billionth of a meter) and femtosecond time scales (one millionth of a billionth of a second).

The relativistic ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) instrument at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory provides the necessary spatial and time resolution to observe these ultrasmall and ultrafast motions. The LCLS is a Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science light source user facility.

In this research, scientists used UED to observe the relaxation of photoexcited o–nitrophenol. Then, they used a genetic structure fitting algorithm to extract new information about small changes in the molecular shape from the UED data that were imperceptible in previous studies. Specifically, the experiment resolved the key processes in the relaxation of o-nitrophenol: proton transfer and deplanarization (i.e., a rotation of part of the molecule out of the molecular plane). Ab-initio multiple spawning simulations confirmed the experimental findings. The results provide new insights into proton transfer-mediated relaxation and pave the way for studies of proton transfer in more complex systems.

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NASA scientists are using space-based imaging technology to unlock the hidden world of flowers. By tracking wildflower blooms across California nature preserves using advanced spectrometers, researchers are uncovering how flower color and timing reflect broader environmental changes. This new met

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