Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science at the University of Tokyo sifted through experimental data to probe the possibility that supercooled water has a liquid-to-liquid phase transition between disordered and tetrahedrally structured forms. They found evidence of a critical point based on the cooperative formation of tetrahedra, and show its minor role in water’s anomalies. This work shows that water’s special qualities—which are essential for life—originate predominantly from the two-state feature.

Liquid water is indispensable for life as we know it, yet many of its properties do not conform with the way other fluids behave. Some of these anomalies, such as water’s maximum density at 4°C and its large heat capacity, have important implications for living organisms. The origin of these features has sparked fierce debates in the scientific community since the time of Röntgen.

Now, researchers at The University of Tokyo have utilized a two-state model that posits the dynamical coexistence of two types of molecular structures in liquid water. These are the familiar disordered normal-liquid structure and a locally favored tetrahedral structure. As with many other phase transitions, there may be a “critical point” at which the correlation between tetrahedra takes on a power-law form, which means there will no longer be any “typical” length scale.

Virtual reality software which allows researchers to ‘walk’ inside and analyse individual cells could be used to understand fundamental problems in biology and develop new treatments for disease.

The software, called vLUME, was created by scientists at the University of Cambridge and 3D image analysis software company Lume VR Ltd. It allows super-resolution microscopy data to be visualised and analysed in virtual reality, and can be used to study everything from individual proteins to entire cells. Details are published in the journal Nature Methods.

Super-resolution microscopy, which was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2014, makes it possible to obtain images at the nanoscale by using clever tricks of physics to get around the limits imposed by light diffraction. This has allowed researchers to observe molecular processes as they happen. However, a problem has been the lack of ways to visualise and analyse this data in three dimensions.

In first-of-their-kind observations in the human brain, an international team of researchers has revealed two well-known neurochemicals–dopamine and serotonin–are at work at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action based on their perception.

Furthermore, the neurochemicals appear to integrate people’s perceptions of the world with their actions, indicating dopamine and serotonin have far more expansive roles in the human nervous system than previously known.

Known as neuromodulators, dopamine and serotonin have traditionally been linked to reward processing–how good or how bad people perceive an outcome to be after taking an action.

Continue reading “Scientists find neurochemicals have unexpectedly profound roles in the human brain” »

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, has announced that his space internet project is ready for public use. The statement comes after SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit last week, bringing the total number to almost 800.

Eventually, SpaceX plans to launch tens of thousands of Starlink satellites to create a blanket around the Earth capable of beaming high-speed broadband internet to 99% of the inhabited world.

Starlink’s limited beta hooked up a reservation in rural Washington state.

The OEC need some VR sets next year.

Star Trek’s holodeck, that lets people physically interact with a virtual world could be a step closer thanks to a ‘universal law of touch’, discovered by British scientists.

Continue reading “VR objects you FEEL are a step closer thanks to new ‘law of touch’” »

Mankind has mastered the art of flight for well over a century, and the concept has become so normalized that we tend to take for granted this amazing accomplishment, but as advanced as modern airplanes are, we are still not much closer to developing a vehicle that can travel as well on land as it can in the air. The concept of a flying car has haunted engineers for decades, and companies such as Hyundai have dedicated some serious research and development to make this dream come true. But now an Italian upstart named Firenze has come up with a new and exciting concept that will be powered by the same electric motors that power the Tesla Model S.

This week, NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) hosted a community workshop at their headquarters in Washington, DC. Known as the “Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop”, this event ran from February 27th to March 1st, and saw scientists and researchers from all over the world descend on the capitol to attend panel discussions, presentations, and talks about the future of space exploration.

One of the more intriguing presentations took place on Wednesday, March 1st, where the exploration of Mars by human astronauts was discussed. In the course of the talk, which was titled “A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration”, Director Jim Green discussed how deploying a magnetic shield could enhance Mars’ atmosphere and facilitate crewed missions there in the future.

The current scientific consensus is that, like Earth, Mars once had a magnetic field that protected its atmosphere. Roughly 4.2 billion years ago, this planet’s magnetic field suddenly disappeared, which caused Mars’ atmosphere to slowly be lost to space. Over the course of the next 500 million years, Mars went from being a warmer, wetter environment to the cold, uninhabitable place we know today.

The CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool is one of the most promising approaches to advancing treatments of genetic diseases—including cancer—an area of research where progress is constantly being made. Now, the Molecular Cytogenetics Unit led by Sandra Rodríguez-Perales at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has taken a step forward by effectively applying this technology to eliminate so-called fusion genes, which in the future could open the door to the development of cancer therapies that specifically destroy tumors without affecting healthy cells. The paper is published in Nature Communications.

Fusion genes are the abnormal result of an incorrect joining of DNA fragments that come from two different genes, an event that occurs by accident during the process of cell division. If the cell cannot benefit from this error, it will die and the fusion genes will be eliminated. But when the error results in a reproductive or survival advantage, the carrier cell will multiply and the fusion genes and the proteins they encode thus become an event triggering tumor formation. “Many chromosomal rearrangements and the fusion genes they produce are at the origin of childhood sarcomas and leukaemias,” explains Sandra Rodríguez-Perales, lead co-author of the study now published by the CNIO. Fusion genes are also found in among others prostate, breast, lung and brain tumors: in total, in up to 20% of all cancers.

Because they are only present in tumor cells, fusion genes attract a great deal of interest among the scientific community because they are highly specific therapeutic targets, and attacking them only affects the tumor and has no effect on healthy cells.