Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A study in fruit fly models of autism reveals sleep disruption associated with the neurodevelopmental disorder is associated with elevated levels of serotonin. The origin of the higher levels of serotonin was discovered to be in glial cells in the blood-brain barrier.

Source: Radboud University.

Bad sleep causes severe health issues and affects our ability to concentrate, memorize, and cope with challenging situations. Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism and intellectual disability, frequently suffer from sleep problems. However, little is known about their underlying mechanisms.

Physicists have proved that a subatomic particle can switch into its antiparticle alter-ego and back again, in a new discovery revealed today.

The extraordinarily precise measurement was made by UK researchers using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment at CERN.

It has provided the first evidence that charm mesons can change into their antiparticle and back again.

Early Tuesday morning, large portions of the web sputtered out for about an hour. The downed sites shared no obvious theme or geography; the outages were global, and they hit everything from Reddit to Spotify to The New York Times. (And yes, also WIRED.) In fact, the only thing they have in common is Fastly, a content-delivery network (CDN) provider whose predawn hiccup reverberated across the internet.

You may not have heard of Fastly, but you likely interact with it in some fashion every time you go online. Along with Cloudflare and Akamai, it’s one of the biggest CDN providers in the world. And while Fastly has been vague about what specific glitch caused Tuesday’s worldwide disruptions, the incident offers a stark reminder of how fragile and interconnected internet infrastructure can be, especially when so much of it hinges on a handful of companies that operate largely outside of public awareness.

GPU shipments were way up during Q1 as Nvidia, AMD, and others struggle to meet ongoing pandemic-driven demand.

Echolocation for humans. Original post https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article…

With enough training, most humans can learn how to echolocate, using their tongue to make clicking sounds, and interpreting the sounds of the echoes that come back, reflected from the surrounding environment.

In as few as 10 weeks, researchers were able to teach participants how to navigate obstacles and recognize the size and orientation of objects using the rebounding calls of their clicks. The experiment involved 12 participants who’d been diagnosed as legally blind during their childhood, and 14 sighted people.

Continue reading “Humans Can Learn How to ‘Echolocate’ in Just 10 Weeks, Experiment Shows” »

Relativity Space, a California-based aerospace manufacturer, has revealed a new rocket that is both 3D printed and fully reusable. The Terran R could serve as a competitor to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and is planned for launch in 2024.

Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson could fly to space just a bit earlier than Blue Origin and SpaceX’s founders.

B.1.1.28.2 variant.

India News: The National Institute of Virology, Pune, has detected a new Covid-19 variant — B.1.1.28.2 — through genome sequencing of samples from international t.

The world is entering a new era of warfare, with artificial intelligence taking center stage. AI is making militaries faster, smarter and more efficient. But if left unchecked, it threatens to destabilize the world.