Lifeboat Foundation

A team of scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the Francis Crick Institute, and EMBL-EBI has created a comprehensive structural variation atlas for a geographically diverse set of human genomes and recovered sequences missing from the human reference sequence. Among the 126,018 structural variations discovered by the team were medically-important genes in Oceanian populations that were inherited from Denisovans, a sister group to Neanderthals.

The world’s largest atom smasher has “given birth” to a set of four ultraheavy particles — called top quarks.

The formation of these chubby-but-tiny quadruplets, at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, has long been predicted by the Standard Model, the prevailing physics theory that governs subatomic interactions. But new physics theories suggest they could be created much more often than the Standard Model predicts. Finding more of such foursomes is the first step in testing those theories. The new findings were announced at the LHCP 2020 Conference.

Driverless cars are coming, and they’re likely to make life on the road easier and more convenient — for some of us. But will they create new ethical problems?

Researchers have discovered a new set of signals that cells send and receive to prompt one type of fat cell to convert fat into heat. The signaling pathway, discovered in mice, has potential implications for activating this same type of thermogenic fat in humans.

Thermogenic fat cells, also called beige fat or beige adipocytes, have gained attention in recent years for their potential to curb obesity and other metabolic disorders, due to their ability to burn energy stored as fat. But scientists have yet to translate this potential into effective therapies.

The challenge of activating beige fat in humans arises, in part, because this process is regulated through so-called adrenergic signaling, which uses the hormone catecholamine to instruct beige fat cells to start burning energy. But adrenergic signaling also controls other important biological functions, including blood pressure and heartbeat regulation, so activating it in humans with agonists has potentially dangerous side effects.

Despite pigheaded intransigence at the highest levels of its national government, the renewable energy revolution is coming to Australia in a big way. And why not? Enough sunlight hits what Bill Bryson calls “a sunburned country” every day to meet all of humanity’s energy needs for a year. All it has to do is figure out how to harvest and distribute all that energy. (It could begin by replacing its national leaders with people who possess actual functioning brains, but the same can be said for many nations around the world.)

SpaceX updated the website for its Starlink satellite internet project on Friday, as the company continues to move closer to its goal of offering direct-to-consumer broadband from space later this year.

“Get updates on Starlink news and service availability in your area,” the website reads, with a submission form for an email address and zip code. The form allows prospective customers to apply for updates and access to a public beta test of the Starlink service.

Today, stars fill the night sky. But when the universe was in its infancy, it contained no stars at all. And an international team of scientists is closer than ever to detecting, measuring and studying a signal from this era that has been traveling through the cosmos ever since that starless era ended some 13 billion years ago.

That team—led by researchers at the University of Washington, the University of Melbourne, Curtin University and Brown University—reported last year in the Astrophysical Journal that it had achieved an almost 10-fold improvement of radio emission data collected by the Murchison Widefield Array. Team members are currently scouring the data from this radio telescope in remote Western Australia for a telltale signal from this poorly understood “dark age” of our universe.

Learning about this period will help address major questions about the universe today.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=t8t94MG2Row

The ability to restore sight to the blind is one of the most profound acts of healing medicine can achieve, in terms of the impact on the affected patient’s life — and one of the most difficult for modern medicine to achieve. We can restore vision in a limited number of scenarios and there are some early bionic eyes on the market that can restore limited vision in very specific scenarios. Researchers may have taken a dramatic step towards changing that in the future, with the results of a new experiment to design a bionic retina.

The research team in question has published a paper in Nature detailing the construction of a hemispherical retina built out of high-density nanowires. The spherical shape of the retina has historically been a major challenge for biomimetic devices.