Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A team of chemists at Southern University of Science and Technology, working with a colleague from Zhejiang University, both in China, has engineered a metal–ligand complex that incorporates a reactive pocket to pre-organize prochiral substrates. Their paper is published in the journal Science.

Carbon radicals are being used as an intermediate in a variety of synthetic transformations. Because they have just one electron, they tend to be highly reactive, allowing for speedy reactions with little energy release.

Unfortunately, when working with prochiral substrates, where three different groups are attached to a single radical center, the ability to control the reaction becomes untenable. Prior research has shown that the underlying cause of these difficulties lies with the differences inherent in the alkyl group, where non-stereoselective reactions tend to dominate.

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Over the past decades, many countries worldwide have been trying to gradually transform their energy systems, with the aim of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change. Hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2) transport networks, infrastructures designed to transport hydrogen gas and captured CO2, could support the shift towards climate-neutral energy systems.

Researchers at Technical University Berlin carried out a study aimed at better understanding the extent to which hydrogen and CO2 could contribute to the future de-carbonization of the European energy system. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, suggests that both these types of networks could play a key role in establishing a sustainable and clean European energy system.

“In our view, we are envisioning a climate-friendly economy which relies as little as possible on and respects socio-economic considerations,” Fabian Hofmann, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

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Aluminum alloys are well-known for their low weight and corrosion resistance, making them ideal candidates for applications in a low-carbon economy—from lightweight automobiles to tanks for storing green hydrogen. However, their widespread application is limited by a key challenge: they suffer from embrittlement leading to cracking and failure when exposed to hydrogen. Until now, alloys resistant to hydrogen embrittlement were rather soft, limiting their application in hydrogen-related technologies that require high strength.

Now, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials (MPI-SusMat) in Germany, together with partners from China and Japan, have developed a new alloy design strategy that overcomes this dilemma. Their approach enables both exceptional strength and superior resistance to hydrogen embrittlement (HE), paving the way for safer and more efficient aluminum components in the hydrogen economy. They have published their results in the journal Nature.

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To combat climate change and achieve a climate-neutral industry, carbon emissions must be drastically reduced. A key part of this transition is replacing carbon-based energy carriers with electricity, particularly in transport and industrial applications. However, this shift heavily depends on nickel, a critical material used in batteries and stainless steel.

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Sir Joseph John Thomson (18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940) was an English physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 “in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases.” [ 1 ]

In 1897, Thomson showed that cathode rays were composed of previously unknown negatively charged particles (now called electrons), which he calculated must have bodies much smaller than atoms and a very large charge-to-mass ratio. [ 2 ] Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays (positive ions). His experiments to determine the nature of positively charged particles, with Francis William Aston, were the first use of mass spectrometry and led to the development of the mass spectrograph. [ 2 ] [ 3 ]

Thomson was awarded the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the conduction of electricity in gases. [ 4 ] Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford (Chemistry 1908), Lawrence Bragg (Physics 1915), Charles Barkla (Physics 1917), Francis Aston (Chemistry 1922), Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (Physics 1927), Owen Richardson (Physics 1928) and Edward Victor Appleton (Physics 1947). [ 5 ] Only Arnold Sommerfeld’s record of mentorship offers a comparable list of high-achieving students.

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A new study led by researchers at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Institute of Science, Tokyo, has uncovered a surprising role for calcium in shaping life’s earliest molecular structures. Their findings suggest that calcium ions can selectively influence how primitive polymers form, shedding light on a long-standing mystery: how life’s molecules came to prefer a single “handedness” (chirality).

The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Like our left and right hands, many molecules exist in two mirror-image forms. Yet life on Earth has a striking preference: DNA’s sugars are right-handed, while proteins are built from left-handed . This phenomenon, called homochirality, is essential for life as we know it—but how it first emerged remains a major puzzle in origins of life research.

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About 20% to 35% of the population suffers from chronic sleep disorders—and up to half of all people in older age. Moreover, almost every teenager or adult has experienced short-term sleep deprivation at some point. There are many reasons for not getting enough sleep, whether it be partying, a long day at work, caring for relatives, or simply whiling away time on smartphones.

In a recent meta-study, Jülich researchers have now been able to show that the involved in the short-term and long-term conditions differ significantly. The results of the study were published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

“Poor sleep is one of the most important—but changeable—risk factors for in adolescents and ,” says Jülich researcher and Privatdozent Dr. Masoud Tahmasian, who coordinated the study. In contrast, long-term pathological sleep disorders, such as insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy, and short-term sleep deprivation, are located in different parts of the brain.

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Researchers at Indiana University have shown that an artificial intelligence framework that employs sequential decision-making could reduce healthcare costs by over 50 percent while also improving patient outcomes by over 40 percent. New research from Indiana University has found that machine lea

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University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists are one step closer to developing a brain-computer interface, or BCI, that allows people with tetraplegia to restore their lost sense of touch.

While exploring a digitally represented object through their artificially created sense of touch, users described the warm fur of a purring cat, the smooth rigid surface of a door key and the cool roundness of an apple. This research, a collaboration between Pitt and the University of Chicago, is published in Nature Communications.

In contrast to earlier experiments where artificial touch often felt like indistinct buzzing or tingling and didn’t vary from object to object, scientists gave BCI users control over the details of the electrical stimulation that creates tactile sensations, rather than making those decisions themselves. This key innovation allowed participants to recreate a sense of touch that felt intuitive to them.

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