Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 997

Scientists are designing simplified biological systems, aiming to construct synthetic cells and better understand life’s mechanisms.

One of the most fundamental questions in science is how lifeless molecules can come together to form a living cell. Bert Poolman, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Groningen, has been working to solve this problem for two decades. He aims to understand life by trying to reconstruct it; he is building simplified artificial versions of biological systems that can be used as components for a synthetic cell.

His work was detailed in two new papers published in Nature Nanotechnology and Nature Communications. In the first paper, he describes a system for energy conversion and cross-feeding of products of this reaction between synthetic cells, while he describes a system for concentrating and converting nutrients in cells in the second paper.

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He has frequently voiced concerns over the Biden administration’s approach to immigration and the economy, and claimed free speech would be at risk with another Democrat presidency.

As one of the president-elect’s most important backers, the tech billionaire donated more than $119m (£92m) to fund a Super PAC aimed at re-electing Trump.

He also spent the last weeks before election day running a get-out-the-vote effort in the battleground states, which included a daily giveaway of $1m to voters in those states.

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According to Banerjee and colleagues, that could drive enough volcanism to blanket the planet in sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

But other planetary scientists aren’t so sure, and that underscores how difficult it is to understand what we’re seeing when we look at an exoplanet’s atmosphere from 35 light years away, even with a powerful and sensitive telescope like JWST.

“The era of detection and characterization of atmospheres around rocky exoplanets is now here,” write Banerjee and colleagues in their recent paper. And that’s true, but it’s not always as straightforward as astronomers might hope.

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Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

China on Monday released its third report on the “Volt Typhoon” investigation. The report not only provides critical new information but also delivers a clearer message to responsible stakeholders concerned with global cyberspace security and governance: A previously underappreciated threat must be taken seriously. This threat originates from US intelligence agencies and security bodies, which, possessing superior technological capabilities, engage in “false flag” operations — activities carried out to deliberately conceal the true origin of cyberattacks while falsely attributing responsibility to someone else, particularly an opponent. To serve their own interests, these organizations openly or tacitly collaborate with high-tech companies.

The Marble Framework mentioned in the latest investigative report was first exposed in 2017 when WikiLeaks claimed to have obtained information from inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. Developed by the CIA as an anti-forensics tool, the primary function of the Marble Framework is to obscure and disguise the true origins of cyberattacks, making it difficult to trace these attacks back to the actual perpetrators. The Marble Framework employs string obfuscation to hide textual information within the malware, as this text often provides forensic experts with clues to identify the developer or country of origin behind the malicious software.

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New model suggests the universe could be a staggering 26.7 billion years old.

Rethinking the Age of the Universe

A recent study led by Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the University of Ottawa, proposes that the universe might be twice as old as current estimates suggest. This study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenges established cosmological models, proposing that the universe could be 26.7 billion years old instead of the widely accepted 13.8 billion years. Gupta’s findings offer a potential solution to various unresolved astronomical mysteries, such as the existence of mature galaxies seen shortly after the Big Bang and stars that seem older than the universe itself.

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In a groundbreaking study published in Nature, scientists from JILA—a partnership between the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado Boulder—have managed to measure time dilation at an unprecedentedly small scale. This breakthrough involved detecting time differences between two clocks spaced only a millimeter apart, a distance as small as the width of a pencil tip. The experiment marks a major step forward in the precision of atomic clocks and sheds new light on the effects of gravity on time as outlined in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Clocks that Measure the Effects of Gravity at the Millimeter Scale

Time dilation, a phenomenon where time moves more slowly in strong gravitational fields or at high speeds, was first predicted by Einstein’s relativity theory. JILA researchers, led by physicist Jun Ye, used highly precise atomic clocks in this experiment to measure these differences in gravitational time dilation over millimeter distances. By tracking frequency shifts among a sample of 100,000 ultra-cold strontium atoms held in a lattice, the team achieved a remarkable level of control, detecting how the gravitational pull from Earth slightly altered the passage of time over even this small distance.

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