Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Unusual bonds reorganize structure and magnetism in vanadium material

While chemical bonds usually determine the structure and properties of a material, bonds between neighboring metal atoms can also change as temperature or other conditions change. These changes can lead to unusual electronic and magnetic behaviors.

A new study on Li₀.₅VS₂ shows that bonding between vanadium atoms can reorganize as the material passes through successive structural changes. The study was led by assistant professor Keita Kojima from the Graduate School of Environment, Life, Natural Science and Technology at Okayama University in Japan, along with professor Naoyuki Katayama from Okayama University.

The study is published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

New video game could help reveal how people with autism perceive the world

People with autism often come at life from a different angle—seeing details others miss, focusing on patterns rather than faces, experiencing heightened or dimmed physical sensations. Although researchers have tracked some of the many ways the neurodevelopmental disorder alters perception of the world, the precise brain mechanisms involved remain obscure, says Boston University researcher Benjamin Scott. One reason: Research often excludes people with more severe symptoms.

Scott and his colleagues have created a more inclusive approach: a video game that measures how people with autism understand and interpret information—and that can be played by people across the disorder’s spectrum of symptom severity, including those who are nonverbal. The researchers say it could spur fresh insights into how the autistic brain works and help refine the development and testing of new drugs and therapies.

Around 1 in 31 children in the United States have autism, according to the nonprofit Autism Speaks, with symptoms that affect communication and other social skills and include restricted and repetitive behaviors. At the moment, scientists studying these issues often rely on subjective assessments from family members—particularly of people with significant communication issues—rather than input from the patients themselves. The game changes that.

New ‘smart’ nanoparticles help the immune system better attack tumors

Adelaide University researchers have developed a new way to use mRNA technology to reprogram tumor-supporting immune cells and strengthen the body’s anticancer immune response.

The scientific team, spanning engineering, biomedical, oncology and immunology experts, has developed tiny, targeted particles that could help the immune system fight cancer by reprogramming immune cells within the tumor environment.

The findings have been published in Science Advances today.

The Universe Has Plenty of Fuel. So Why Is It Making Fewer Stars?

The Universe still has plenty of hydrogen, but its ability to turn that fuel into new stars appears to be fading.

The Universe is producing far fewer new stars than it did billions of years ago. Over the past 4.5 billion years, the cosmic star formation rate has fallen to less than half its former level. Yet one of the most important ingredients needed to make stars has declined only modestly.

An international team led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project, reached this conclusion after studying the evolution of neutral atomic hydrogen across the Universe. The researchers used China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) to make exceptionally precise measurements spanning the past 4.5 billion years.

NASA Just Proved Satellites Can Navigate Without GPS

NASA has demonstrated a new way for satellites to navigate without GPS by using the objects around them as landmarks in space.

NASA’s Starling mission has reached another milestone in spacecraft autonomy with a new system that can determine a satellite’s position by using other objects in space as reference points rather than depending on a traditional navigation network.

The FALCON (Fast Autonomous Lost-in-space Catalog-based Optical Navigation) technology demonstration represents another step toward spacecraft that can operate with greater independence. As NASA prepares for more missions beyond Earth’s orbit, systems such as FALCON could support lunar satellite swarms, distributed science missions, and future human exploration.

A Cosmic Catastrophe May Have Turned Neptune’s Ancient Moons Inside Out

Neptune’s tiny moons may be ancient wreckage, preserving material exposed when a catastrophic event shattered much larger icy worlds.

In 1989, Voyager 2 discovered six previously unknown moons around Neptune. Five of them are tiny satellites that travel just beyond the planet’s main rings. Their small size and great distance from Earth have made them especially difficult to study in detail.

Now, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has given scientists a much closer look. A Caltech-led team examined Neptune’s rings along with three of its moons, Larissa, Galatea, and Proteus, and found that their composition appears unlike that of other known bodies in the outer solar system.

This Tiny Animal Can Pass Radiation Damage to Its Offspring — And Repair It Over Generations

In the mosses and lichens of the world – the in-between places, where living conditions rapidly fluctuate – lives a tiny animal with an extraordinary survival skill.

No, not tardigrades – it’s their much weirder housemate, the bdelloid rotifer.

Just like tardigrades, bdelloid rotifers can dry out almost completely and spring back to life when water returns. They can be blasted with radiation hundreds of times greater than what would kill a human, and live to tell the tale, even while their chromosomes are shattered.

Physicists Blasted a Quantum Material With Lasers — Then Watched It Rebuild Itself

We already have quantum computers, but they’re highly specialized, not particularly practical, and only cover a fraction of the performance potential that scientists think this technology could ultimately unlock.

Quantum materials can host several competing electronic states, and figuring out how those states form is a longstanding challenge – which brings us to a new study published in Nature Physics.

The study by an international team of researchers investigates how two charge density wave (CDW) phases can emerge and co-exist in the same material.

/* */