Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7379

As cells bump into each other, forces cause them to move and shake, or even sometimes rupture.

“Cells are constantly generating forces and responding to them. They are being pulled on by their environment,” said Jonathan Winkelman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. Winkelman works in the lab of Margaret Gardel, professor in the Department of Physics and the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Unlike a that breaks when you stretch it too much, an overstretched cell initiates a response to repair itself. This phenomenon has been observed using microscopy, but the question of how the repair and adaptation process initiates inside the has remained unanswered until now.

Read more | >

Spintronic devices are attractive alternatives to conventional computer chips, providing digital information storage that is highly energy efficient and also relatively easy to manufacture on a large scale. However, these devices, which rely on magnetic memory, are still hindered by their relatively slow speeds, compared to conventional electronic chips.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Electronics, an international team of researchers has reported a new technique for magnetization switching—the process used to “write” information into magnetic memory—that is nearly 100 times faster than state-of-the-art spintronic devices. The advance could lead to the development of ultrafast magnetic memory for computer chips that would retain data even when there is no power.

In the study, the researchers report using extremely short, 6-picosecond to switch the magnetization of a thin film in a magnetic device with great energy efficiency. A picosecond is one-trillionth of a second.

Read more | >

The scientist claims that this design could enable propulsion while only relying on electricity.

But take it with a grain of salt. It seems the propulsion system is based on ideas that are still being validated.

The drive would provide enough thrust for a spacecraft to travel near the speed of light using only electricity, says physicist Jim Woodward.

Continue reading “NASA-funded scientist says ‘MEGA drive’ could enable interstellar travel” | >

One of the major updates to the latest version of Photoshop is the addition of Sky Replacement: a tool that has the potential to save you a ton of time when editing your landscape images. But as Aaron Nace explains in this video, this AI-powered tool requires a bit of thought if you want to get professional results.

AI-powered photo editing tools are always sold as “one click” or “a few clicks” solutions that can transform a photo with next-to-no input from you. But even with the most advanced machine learning available, no automated tool can generate fool-proof results without a little bit of thought from the creator on the other end of that mouse.

Read more | >

Article. I guess having implants directly on the brain isn’t the only way to have a brain to machine interface. The scientists involved in the study found an alternative by picking up signals through the blood vessels.

It’s not as information packed as a direct brain connection, but it’s not as invasive.

I think it would be a good alternative or even complementary to direct brain implants. Interesting. 😃

Electrodes threaded through the blood vessels that feed the brain let people control gadgets with their minds.

Continue reading “A New Way to Plug a Human Brain Into a Computer: via Veins” | >

While our circadian body clock dictates our preferred rhythm of sleep or wakefulness, a relatively new concept—the epigenetic clock—could inform us about how swiftly we age, and how prone we are to diseases of old age.

People age at different rates, with some individuals developing both characteristics and diseases related to aging earlier in life than others. Understanding more about this so-called ‘biological age’ could help us learn more about how we can prevent diseases associated with age, such as . Epigenetic markers control the extent to which genes are switched on and off across the different cell-types and tissues that make up a . Unlike our , these epigenetic marks change over time, and these changes can be used to accurately predict biological age from a DNA .

Now, scientists at the University of Exeter have developed a new specifically for the . As a result of using human tissue samples, the new clock is far more accurate than previous versions, that were based on blood samples or other tissues. The researchers hope that their new clock, published in Brain and funded by Alzheimer’s Society, will provide insight into how accelerated aging in the brain might be associated with brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

Read more | >

A team headed by Prof. Massimiliano Mazzone (VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology), in collaboration with Dr. Emanuele Berardi and Dr. Min Shang, revealed a new metabolic dialogue between inflammatory cells and muscle stem cells. The researchers show that strengthening this metabolic crosstalk with an inhibitor of the enzyme GLUD1 fosters the release of glutamine, and improves muscle regeneration and physical performance in experimental models of muscle degeneration such as trauma, ischemia, and aging. Besides its translational potential, this work also provides key advances in several fields of research including muscle biology, immunometabolism, and stem cell biology.

The role of glutamine

Skeletal muscle is instrumental to move our body, but it is also a large reservoir of amino acids stored as proteins and it influences energy and protein metabolism throughout the human body. The role of the amino acid glutamine has been considered central for muscle metabolism because of its abundance. However, its precise role after trauma or during chronic muscle degenerative conditions were largely neglected.

Read more | >

In 1831, the British explorer James Clark Ross determined the position of the magnetic North Pole to within a few miles for the first time. He found it on the Boothia Peninsula in Nunavut, northern Canada where he and his team camped in the “snow huts of a recently deserted Esquimaux village”.

Even then, the pole was known to move, albeit slowly. Some 70 years later, the Norwegian Amundsen rediscovered it nearby and over the next ninety years, it migrated slowly northwards at a rate of up to 15 kilometers (just over 9 miles) per year.

Then, in 1990, it suddenly began to accelerate northwards. In 2017, it passed the geographic North Pole and is now heading south towards Siberia.

Read more | >

DARPA’s effort to track undersea life’s behavior as a means to detect enemy submarines has just entered its second phase. In the first phase, DARPA’s Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) program sought to prove that sea life would respond to the presence of a submarine in a measurable way. With that seemingly confirmed, the second stage of the program will focus on developing sensors that can identify that behavior and relay a warning back to manned locations aboard a ship or onshore.

While the science is complex, the premise behind the PALS program is fairly simple. Undersea life tends to behave in a certain way when it senses the presence of a large and foreign object like a submarine. By broadly tracking the behavior of sea life, PALS aims to measure and interpret that behavior to make educated guesses about what must be causing it. In other words, by constantly tracking the behavior of nearby wildlife, PALS sensors can notice a significant change, compare it to a library of known behaviors, and predict a cause… like an enemy submarine, even if a submarine was stealthy enough to otherwise evade detection.

With enough data about how animals react to the presence of an enemy vessel as compared to how animals react to the presence of a large predator or more common undersea threat, PALS could serve as an early warning system when enemy subs approach.

Read more | >