Lifeboat Foundation

Caltech scientists have discovered a new species of worm thriving in the extreme environment of Mono Lake. This new species, temporarily dubbed Auanema sp., has three different sexes, can survive 500 times the lethal human dose of arsenic, and carries its young inside its body like a kangaroo.

Mono Lake, located in the Eastern Sierras of California, is three times as salty as the ocean and has an alkaline pH of 10. Before this study, only two other species (other than bacteria and algae) were known to live in the lake—brine shrimp and diving flies. In this new work, the team discovered eight more species, all belonging to a class of microscopic worms called nematodes, thriving in and around Mono Lake.

The work was done primarily in the laboratory of Paul Sternberg, Bren Professor of Biology. A paper describing the research appears online on September 26 in the journal Current Biology.

Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI, highlighted among other findings, disagreements about the impact of chatbots: Do purchase rates go down when people find out they are interacting with a chatbot? Or do chatbots actually increase customer satisfaction and loyalty? And are chatbots already successful in replacing human workers?

NASA has released a stunning image of three black holes about to collide with each other.

The ultra-rare is the best evidence yet of a so-called “triple system” – three active supermassive black holes smashing in to each other.

Each of the black holes is at the centre of its own galaxy.

DARK MATTER has long eluded our understanding but scientists searching for evidence of new physics capable of explaining such enduring mysteries of the Universe may have moved one step closer, following the latest CERN research.

By this time, we can all conclude that Facebook is really ambitious when it comes to the production of high-end gadgets. This when you consider the Oculus line of devices, a VR wristband and RayBan AR glasses. And if that wasn’t enough, a new device is up for development.

The company has now revealed plans to build a mind-reading wristband letting people control devices without touching them. This is after the company finally acquired CTRL-Labs, a startup that is currently venturing into brain-computer interfaces. The deal has been reported to value at $1 billion.

The deal was then announced by Andrew Bosworth, Vice President of AR and VR at Facebook. “We spend a lot of time trying to get our technology to do what we want rather than enjoying the people around us,” he said.

A U.S. Army research result brings the quantum internet a step closer. Such an internet could offer the military security, sensing and timekeeping capabilities not possible with traditional networking approaches.

The U.S. Army’s Combat Capability Development’s Army Research Laboratory’s Center for Distributed Quantum Information, funded and managed by the lab’s Army Research Office, saw researchers at the University of Innsbruck achieve a record for the transfer of quantum entanglement between matter and light—a distance of 50 kilometers using fiber optic cables.

Entanglement is a correlation that can be created between quantum entities such as qubits. When two qubits are entangled and a measurement is made on one, it will affect the outcome of a measurement made on the other, even if that second qubit is physically far away.

In a mind-bending new paper, researchers suggest that there could be black holes orbiting the Sun, out past Pluto.

Scientists have long speculated that a “planet 9,” in orbit very far from the Sun, could explain why other bodies in our solar system have strange, hard-to-explain orbits.

Now, a pair of astrophysicists are suggesting a strange twist on that idea: that a black hole — or even a number of them — could be orbiting our Sun right now, way beyond Neptune.

Continue reading “Astrophysicists: There May Be Black Holes Orbiting Our Sun” »

Imagine waking up every morning in a house that is just as alive as you are. With synthetic biology, your future home could be a living, breathing marvel of nature and biotechnology. Yes, it’s a bold ambition. But this kind of visionary thinking could be the key to achieving sustainability for modern cities.

Our current homes and cities are severely outdated. Dr. Rachel Armstrong, a synthetic biologist and experimental architect, says, “All our current buildings have something in common: they’re built using Victorian technologies.” Traditional design, manufacturing, and construction processes demand huge amounts of energy and resources, but the resulting buildings give nothing back. To make our future sustainable, we need dynamic structures that give as much as they take. We need to build with nature, not against it.

In nature, everything is connected. For the world’s tallest trees—the California redwoods— their lives depend on their connection to each other as well as on a host of symbiotic organisms. Winds and rain batter the California coast, so redwoods weave their roots together for stability, creating networks that can stretch hundreds of miles. The rains also leach nutrients from the soil. But fungi fill the shortage by breaking down dead organic matter into food for the living. A secondary network of mycelia—the root-like structures of the fungi—entwine with the tree roots to transport nutrients, water, and chemical communications throughout the forest. What if our future cities functioned like these symbiotic networks? What if our future homes were alive?

Hidden deep in a basement at Stanford stands a 10-meter-tall tube, wrapped in a metal cage and draped in wires. A barrier separates it from the main room, beyond which the cylinder spans three stories to an apparatus holding ultra-cold atoms ready to shoot upward. Tables stocked with lasers to fire at the atoms—and analyze how they respond to forces such as gravity—fill the rest of the laboratory.

The tube is an atom interferometer, a custom-built device designed to study the wave nature of atoms. According to quantum mechanics, atoms exist simultaneously as particles and waves. The Stanford instrument represents a model for an ambitious new instrument ten times its size that could be deployed to detect gravitational waves—minute ripples in spacetime created by energy dissipating from moving astronomical objects. The instrument also could shed light on another mystery of the universe: dark matter.

Stanford experimental physicists Jason Hogan and Mark Kasevich never intended for their device to be implemented this way. When Hogan began his graduate studies in Kasevich’s lab, he focused instead on testing gravity’s effects on atoms. But conversations with theoretical physicist Savas Dimopoulos, a professor of physics, and his graduate students—often lured downstairs by an espresso machine housed directly across the hall from Kasevich’s office—led them to start thinking about its utility as a highly sensitive detector.