Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2018

KOOTENAY NATIONAL PARK IN CANADA— The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn’t seen sunlight in half a billion years. “Woo!” says paleontologist Cédric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab of rock upright.

Its underside bears charcoal-colored smudges that look vaguely like horseshoe crabs or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. “It’s a spaceship landing area here,” says expedition leader Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Canada.

Continue reading “Some of Earth’s first animals—including a mysterious, alien-looking creature—are spilling out of Canadian rocks” »

United Parcel Service is taking package delivery to new heights, literally, with the purchase of 10 electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft from Beta Technologies.

In an announcement Wednesday, Atlanta-based UPS said it will test the eVTOLs for use in its Express Air delivery network, focusing on small and medium markets. The company will operate the eVTOLs under its Flight Forward division, which is also exploring drone delivery.

The new type of aircraft, which looks like a cross between a plane and a helicopter, “unlocks new business models that don’t exist today,” Bala Ganesh, vice president of the UPS Advanced Technology Group, told CNBC. “For example, you can see a future where it’s carrying, let’s say 1000 pounds, 1500 pounds to rural hospitals,” and landing on a helipad instead of an airport.

O, o circa 2013.

They were once used to treat everything from headaches to strangulation, and leeches are still a vital part of surgery. But how are they farmed?

Cystic fibrosis is diagnosed in infants by use of sweat testing as elevated chloride concentrations in sweat are indicative of cystic fibrosis. The current approach can have poor sensitivity and require repeated testing. Toward the goal of developing a noninvasive, simple test for cystic fibrosis, Ray et al. devised an adhesive microfluidic device, or “sweat sticker,” to capture and analyze sweat in real time with colorimetric readout. Benchtop testing and validation in patients with cystic fibrosis showed that smartphone imaging of sweat stickers adhered to the skin could monitor sweat chloride concentrations. Results support further testing of the sweat stickers in larger studies.

The concentration of chloride in sweat remains the most robust biomarker for confirmatory diagnosis of cystic fibrosis (CF), a common life-shortening genetic disorder.

In this study we aimed to generate mouse antibodies against epitopes found on NPCs. We isolated one antibody (NSC-6) and characterized it in detail. Mass spectrometry using human hippocampal tissue revealed the identity of the recognized antigen as BASP1, a signaling protein that plays a key role in neurite outgrowth and plasticity^{14,15,16,17,18,19}, but here, we demonstrate that it might be utilized as a marker of NSCs in the adult brain.

Similar approaches to developing antibodies against mouse embryonic stem cells have been attempted in the past utilizing mice^46,47 and rabbits⁴⁸. Major drawbacks in mice include immune tolerance to mouse embryonic stem cell surface antigens leading to low antibody production, which could be overcome by immunizing rabbits instead. Regardless of the animal used as a host, a significant number of antibodies are typically generated against intracellular epitopes when animals are immunized with whole cells as was observed in our study.

We found that NSC-6-labeled BASP1 localizes to all radial glia at the E12 stage of brain development, while postnatally, it restricts to the neurogenic areas of the mouse brain but not the cortex. This expression pattern contrasts previous study using DAB-based immunolabeling for NAP-22 (BASP1 alias) in the adult rat brain, which demonstrated robust labeling of cerebral cortex²⁷. While we do not know the basis of this difference in immunolabeling of cortex, possibilities include species variations between rat and mouse expression of BASP1, or differences in epitope recognition between the two antibodies used that could yield distinct patterns of immunoreactivity. Indeed, the two commercial BASP1 polyclonal antibodies did not immunolabel NSCs and in general, exhibited poor staining of the mouse brain tissue.

Russian firm Aerosmena’s plans to build enormous cargo airships may be more than just hot air.

The European Union today proposed rules governing the use of artificial intelligence that could wind up becoming a de facto standard for how the technology is governed in much of the globe.

Or is it about to consign itself to also-ran status, as the U.S. tech lobby is arguing?

The European Union is finalizing plans for an ambitious “digital twin” of planet Earth that would simulate the atmosphere, ocean, ice, and land with unrivaled precision, providing forecasts of floods, droughts, and fires from days to years in advance. Destination Earth, as the effort is called, won’t stop there: It will also attempt to capture human behavior, enabling leaders to see the impacts of weather events and climate change on society and gauge the effects of different climate policies.

“It’s a really bold mission, I like it a lot,” says Ruby Leung, a climate scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. By rendering the planet’s atmosphere in boxes only 1 kilometer across, a scale many times finer than existing climate models, Destination Earth can base its forecasts on far more detailed real-time data than ever before. The project, which will be described in detail in two workshops later this month, will start next year and run on one of the three supercomputers that Europe will deploy in Finland, Italy, and Spain.

Destination Earth rose out of the ashes of Extreme Earth, a proposal led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for a billion-euro flagship research program. The European Union ultimately canceled the flagship program, but retained interest in the idea. Fears that Europe was falling behind China, Japan, and the United States in supercomputing led to the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, an €8 billion investment to lay the groundwork for eventual “exascale” machines capable of 1 billion billion calculations per second. The dormant Extreme Earth proposal offered a perfect use for such capacity. “This blows a soul into your digital infrastructure,” says Peter Bauer, ECMWF’s deputy director of research, who coordinated Extreme Earth and has been advising the European Union on the new program.

Lost, not forgotten.

Arecibo Observatory’s collapse on Dec. 1, 2020 was a devastating blow for science, but its decades of observations will inform research for years to come.