Lifeboat Foundation

New research shows that ferroptosis, a form of cell death, occurs in severe COVID-19 patient lungs. Stopping it improves outcomes. In some severe cases of COVID-19, the lungs undergo extreme damage, resulting in a range of life-threatening conditions like pneumonia, inflammation, and acute respiratory distress syndrome. The root cause of those wide-ranging reactions in the lungs has until now remained unclear.

A new study by researchers at Columbia and the Columbia University Irving Medical Center sheds light on this mystery.

The study found that ferroptosis, a form of cell death first named and identified at Columbia in 2012, is the major cell death mechanism that underlies COVID-19 lung disease.

A future space observatory could use exo-eclipses to tease out exomoon populations.

If you’re like us, you’re still coming down from the celestial euphoria that was last month’s total solar eclipse. The spectacle of the moon blocking out the sun has also provided astronomers with unique scientific opportunities in the past, from the discovery of helium to proof for general relativity. Now, eclipses in remote exoplanetary systems could aid in the hunt for elusive exomoons.

A recent study out of the University of Michigan in partnership with Johns Hopkins APL and the Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled “Exomoons & Exorings with the Habitable Worlds Observatory I: On the Detection of Earth-Moon Analog Shadows & Eclipses,” posted to the arXiv preprint server, looks to use a future mission to hunt for eclipses, transits and occultations in distant systems.

Scientists may be one step closer to unraveling one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Their recent calculations suggest that neutron stars could play a crucial role in shedding light on the mysterious dark matter.

In a paper published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, physicists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, led by the University of Melbourne, calculated that energy transferred when dark matter particles collide and annihilate inside cold dead neutron stars can heat the stars up very quickly.

It was previously thought that this energy transfer could take a very long time, in some cases, longer than the age of the universe itself, rendering this heating irrelevant.

The AI boom and soaring demand for Nvidia GPUs have propelled the company’s stock and earned the Nvidia CEO a reputation as a visionary. Even Mark Zuckerberg calls him the “Taylor Swift of tech.”

People who have worked for Huang on Nvidia’s journey to become a $3 trillion-plus company previously described how he can be a “demanding” boss.

Eight current and former Nvidia employees spoke to Business Insider about Huang’s leadership style and what it’s like to be grilled by him. These people asked not to be named as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

National University of Singapore (NUS) chemists have developed hexavalent photocatalytic covalent organic frameworks (COFs) which mimic natural photosynthesis for the production of hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O₂), an important industrial chemical.

The conventional method of H 2 O₂ production involves using anthraquinone as a catalyst to convert air and hydrogen into H 2 O₂. However, this process requires substantial energy, costly noble metal catalysts, high-pressure hydrogen gas and hazardous solvents. Artificial photosynthesis of H 2 O₂, resembling the natural photosynthesis process with the use of sunlight as an energy source and abundant water and air as feedstocks, presents a sustainable and promising alternative to the conventional anthraquinone process.

However, such an artificial system faces three key challenges: insufficient charge carrier generation and fast charge recombination, which lowers the efficiency; limited number of available catalytic sites, which results in low productivity; and lack of efficient delivery of charges and reactants to the catalytic sites, which causes sluggish reaction kinetics.

This is the question of the origin of our Universe. Every star, every galaxy and every planet we see came from the Big Bang. But what was before it?

Is dark matter primordial black holes? If so, could we find them using Apollo-era technology on the moon?
A new paper suggests the answer may be yes to both. I interviewed David Kaiser, one of the paper’s co-authors, former student of inflationary cosmology pioneer Alan Guth, and now Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science at MIT.
For the preprint of the full paper:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.16877
and other press about the paper.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n…
https://news.mit.edu/2024/exotic-blac…
And some other related papers:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract…
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02168
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.17217
a timeline is below.
00:00 introduction.
00:57 primordial black holes.
3:05 particle dark matter and modified gravity.
6:33 LIGO and EHT
11:03 window of opportunity.
15:16 observaitonal signatures.
20:30 Apollo era tech.
25:19 Star Wars.
25:54 the future.

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And manufacturers are keen to bring additional screens into play, from 2009’s Lenovo’s Thinkpad W700 with its built-in extendable tablet to modern devices like the Asus ZenBook Duo, or Lenovo Yoga Book 9i — and some frankly absurd variants along the way.

But what’s next for the laptop? Will it be Lenovo’s transparent laptop or will AI transform the laptop into handheld devices like how the Steam Deck and ROG Ally X represent a potential reinvention of the gaming laptop? Well, in my opinion, and many others, the next step is augmented reality.

Modern laptops are stuck between two desires, smaller form factors and larger displays. Both of which have their benefits, but you can’t gain more of one without giving up some of the other.