Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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According to a new study, the mood of background music in a movie scene affects a person’s empathy toward the main character and their interpretation of the plot, environment, and character’s personality traits. The findings were published in Frontiers in Psychology.

While researchers have long studied the impact of music on human behavior, fewer studies have explored how music can affect a person’s interpretation of film. Study authors Alessandro Ansani and team aimed to explore this by experimentally manipulating the soundtrack of an ambiguous movie scene.

“I’ve always been interested in music and cinema, since I was a baby; my mother told me she used to put me in front of our stereo to calm me down when I was crying, for some reason,” said Ansani, a PhD student at Sapienza University of Rome and research assistant at the CoSMIC Lab.

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Well, maybe they would be good memories. 😃

Quantum computers, according to experts, will one day be capable of performing incredible calculations and nearly unfathomable feats of logic. In the near future, we know they’ll help us discover new drugs to fight disease and new materials to build with. But the far future potential for these enigmatic machines is as vast as the universe itself.

The realm of classic science fiction is littered with ideas that today’s experts believe lie within the realm of reality – if not today’s reality, then perhaps tomorrow’s quantum computer-laden one. One of those ideas comes straight out of a Paul Verhoeven film from over thirty years ago: Total Recall.

In fairness, the film (we’re talking about the 1990 one starring the former governor of California not the 2012 remake) was based on a short story by Phillip K Dick. But for the purposes of this article we’ll be discussing the movie’s depiction of “Rekall,” a mysterious company portrayed in the film.

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Self-assembly is ubiquitous in the natural world, serving as a route to form organized structures in every living organism. This phenomenon can be seen, for instance, when two strands of DNA—without any external prodding or guidance—join to form a double helix, or when large numbers of molecules combine to create membranes or other vital cellular structures. Everything goes to its rightful place without an unseen builder having to put all the pieces together, one at a time.

For the past couple of decades, scientists and engineers have been following nature’s lead, designing molecules that assemble themselves in , with the goal of making nanostructures, primarily for such as drug delivery or tissue engineering. “These small-molecule-based materials tend to degrade rather quickly,” explains Julia Ortony, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), “and they’re chemically unstable, too. The whole structure falls apart when you remove the water, particularly when any kind of external force is applied.”

She and her team, however, have designed a new class of small molecules that spontaneously assemble into nanoribbons with unprecedented strength, retaining their structure outside of water. The results of this multi-year effort, which could inspire a broad range of applications, were described on Jan. 21 in Nature Nanotechnology by Ortony and coauthors.

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Axions may be produced thermally inside the cores of neutron stars (NSs), escape the stars due to their feeble interactions with matter, and subsequently convert into x rays in the magnetic fields surrounding the stars. We show that a recently discovered excess of hard x-ray emission in the 2—8 keV energy range from the nearby magnificent seven isolated NSs could be explained by this emission mechanism. These NSs are unique in that they had previously been expected to only produce observable flux in the UV and soft x-ray bands from thermal surface emission at temperatures $\ensuremath{\sim}100\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{eV}$. No conventional astrophysical explanation of the magnificent seven hard x-ray excess exists at present.

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Our goal is audacious — some might even say naive. The aim is to evaluate every gene and drug perturbation in every possible type of cancer in laboratory experiments, and to make the data accessible to researchers and machine-learning experts worldwide. To put some ballpark numbers on this ambition, we think it will be necessary to perturb 20000 genes and assess the activity of 10000 drugs and drug candidates in 20000 cancer models, and measure changes in viability, morphology, gene expression and more. Technologies from CRISPR genome editing to informatics now make this possible, given enough resources and researchers to take on the task.

It is time to move beyond tumour sequencing data to identify vulnerabilities in cancers.

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I think we may need to be more careful about brain implants in the future. 😃

Cutting down on the number of invasive surgeries associated with implants is one thing, but the wireless implant also stands to improve the quality of animal research. Without wireless controls or charging, animals needed to be wired up to power sources or other electronics with invasive, restrictive tethers. Doing away with those allows the animals to behave how they normally would have.

In the case of this particular test, KAIST scientists used the implant to block cocaine-associated behaviors in rats who they had just injected with the drug. But they suspect the underlying tech could be used in all sorts of implants and medical devices.

“We believe that the same basic technology can be applied to various types of implants, including deep brain stimulators, and cardiac and gastric pacemakers,” Jeong said in the release, “to reduce the burden on patients for long-term use within the body.”

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I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

After careful study, astronomer Andrew King of the University of Leicester in the UK identified a potential cause — a dead star that’s endured its brush with a black hole, trapped on a nine-hour, elliptical orbit around it. Every close pass, or periastron, the black hole slurps up more of the star’s material.

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