Lifeboat Foundation

Two independent research teams recently published studies indicating they’ve successfully teleported a qutrit — possibly within days of each other. Now, both await the scientific process of peer review to see which will ultimately get credit for being the first humans to do so.

But what’s a qutrit? It’s a lot like a qubit, an entangled pair of particles used to carry information in a quantum computing system. Qubits are analogous to bits, the binary units of information used by classical computers like the one you’re reading this on. Where bits can be represented by the numbers zero and one, qubits can be zero, one, or both at the same time. Trits, used in classical ternary systems, add a two into the mix. And qutrits are the quantum version of trits, capable of carrying more information than their qubit counterparts.

This article appears in Weekly Health Page July 31.

Researchers found that more than four out of five Ohio women who had been physically abused by their partners had suffered a head injury. A study that found domestic violence survivors had sustained staggering rates of head trauma and violent choking incidents suggests that many are left with ongoing health problems from “invisible injuries” to the brain.

But the effects of such injuries often go unrecognized by advocates, health care providers, law enforcement — even the victims themselves, researchers said.

Take an asteroid, give it swinging arms and turn it into a rocky jellyfish swimming through space. Project RAMA from @MadeInSpace can solve most of the problems associated with asteroid mining all in one go. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/niac_20…tagged.pdf

Living healthier and longer can depend on probiotics more than we ever thought.

The bacteria in our gut make thousands of tiny, previously unidentified proteins that could shed light on human health and advance drug development, Stanford researchers have found.

NASA wants to send astronauts back to the moon by 2024. What if we stayed and settled on the Moon this time?

The total computing power now dedicated to securing the bitcoin blockchain has set yet another record.

According to data from mining services operator BTC.com, the average bitcoin mining hash rate over the last two weeks has reached71.43 quintillion hashes per second (EH/s), up from 64.49EH/s on July 23. The threshold was breached as bitcoin adjusted its mining difficultyat block height 586,672 on Monday 2:52 UTC – that is a 6.94EH/s, or10.78 percent jump since mid July.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards on bitcoin. Just how difficult the bitcoin software makes it to generate new blocks adjusts every 2,016 blocks – approximately every 14 days – to ensure the block production time remains about 10 minutes at the next cycle.

The pursuit of longevity has been the goal of humanity since ancient times. Genetic alterations have been demonstrated to affect lifespan. As increasing numbers of pro-longevity genes and anti-longevity genes have been discovered in Drosophila, screening for functionally important genes among the large number of genes has become difficult. The aim of the present study was to explore critical genes and pathways affecting longevity in Drosophila melanogaster. In this study, 168 genes associated with longevity in D. melanogaster were collected from the Human Ageing Genomic Resources (HAGR) database. Network clustering analysis, network topological analysis, and pathway analysis were integrated to identify key genes and pathways. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was applied to verify the expression of genes in representative pathways and of predicted genes derived from the gene–gene sub-network. Our results revealed that six key pathways might be associated with longevity, including the longevity-regulating pathway, the peroxisome pathway, the mTOR-signalling pathway, the FOXO-signalling pathway, the AGE-RAGE-signalling pathway in diabetic complications, and the TGF-beta-signalling pathway. Moreover, the results revealed that six key genes in representative pathways, including Cat, Ry, S6k, Sod, Tor, and Tsc1, and the predicted genes Jra, Kay, and Rheb exhibited significant expression changes in ageing D. melanogaster strain w¹¹¹⁸ compared to young ones. Overall, our results revealed that six pathways and six key genes might play pivotal roles in regulating longevity, and three interacting genes might be implicated in longevity. The results will not only provide new insight into the mechanisms of longevity, but also provide novel ideas for network-based approaches for longevity-related research.

Researchers have been able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice.

To achieve this feat, the team exploited a weird pathway that metastasising cancer cells have; their results are just a first step, but it’s a truly promising approach.

When you cut your finger, or when a foetus grows organs, the epithelium cells begin to look less like themselves, and more ‘fluid’ – changing into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then reforming into whatever cells the body needs.

Our observable Universe is an enormous place, with some two trillion galaxies strewn across the abyss of space for tens of billions of light-years in all directions. Ever since the 1920s, when we first unambiguously demonstrated that those galaxies were well beyond the extent of the Milky Way by accurately measuring the distances to them, one fact leaped out at us: the farther away a galaxy is, on average, the more severely shifted towards the red, long-wavelength part of the spectrum its light will be.

This relationship, between redshift and distance, looks like a straight line when we first plot it out: the farther away you look, the greater the distant object’s redshift is, in direct proportion to one another. If you measure the slope of that line, you get a value, colloquially known as the Hubble constant. But it isn’t actually a constant at all, as it changes over time. Here’s the science behind why.

In our Universe, light doesn’t simply propagate through a fixed and unchanging space, arriving at its destination with the same properties it possessed when it was emitted by the source. Instead, it must contend with an additional factor: the expansion of the Universe. This expansion of space, as you can see, above, affects the properties of the light itself. In particular, as the Universe expands, the wavelength of the light passing through that space gets stretched.