Lifeboat Foundation

A balance of infection and harmony called endosymbiosis helps shape evolution. For the first time, biologists have reproduced this arrangement between microbes in a lab.

So much of life relies on endosymbiotic relationships, but scientists have struggled to understand how they happen. How does an internalized cell evade digestion? How does it learn to reproduce inside its host? What makes a random merger of two independent organisms into a stable, lasting partnership?

Now, for the first time, researchers have watched the opening choreography of this microscopic dance by inducing endosymbiosis in the lab(opens a new tab). After injecting bacteria into a fungus — a process that required creative problem-solving (and a bicycle pump) — the researchers managed to spark cooperation without killing the bacteria or the host. Their observations offer a glimpse into the conditions that make it possible for the same thing to happen in the microbial wild.

Continue reading “Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life” »

Today the World Health Organization (WHO) says no region in the world has successfully eliminated measles, and cases have surged in the past year, with 10.3 million people infected in 2023.

The WHO published its findings in a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Over a decade after its discovery, the Higgs boson, often referred to as the “God particle,” continues to captivate physicists and deepen our understanding of the universe. Recent findings from the Max Planck Institute promise to unravel even more about this enigmatic particle, potentially opening doors to uncharted realms of particle physics.

The Higgs boson is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics, responsible for answering one of the universe’s most fundamental questions: how do particles gain mass? This phenomenon hinges on the Higgs field, an invisible energy field that permeates the cosmos. To visualize this, imagine wading through a pool filled with water versus thick foam. While water might let you glide, the foam slows you down—this interaction mirrors how particles gain mass as they traverse the Higgs field. Without it, the building blocks of matter as we know them couldn’t exist.

Why Understanding Higgs Interactions Matters?

This article examines Microsoft and Atom Computing in driving quantum computing to logical practicality, focusing on applications.

Displays of aurora are being predicted once again after a string of powerful solar flares on the sun.

AUSTIN, Texas — An Austin entrepreneur is making waves in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by setting his sights on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI is a type of AI that aims to create machines with human-like learning and reasoning abilities.

“In 2002, together with two other people, I coined the term Artificial General Intelligence.” Founder and CEO of Aigo.ai said.

Voss says that was always the original goal of AI to build thinking machines.

Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman who was the world’s oldest person according to Guinness World Records, has died, an Ashiya city official said Saturday. She was 116.

Yoshitsugu Nagata, an official in charge of elderly policies, said Itooka died on December 29 at a care home in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, central Japan.

Itooka, who loved bananas and a yogurt-flavored Japanese drink called Calpis, was born on May 23, 1908. She became the oldest person last year following the death of 117-year-old Maria Branyas, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

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The work, published today in Nature, marks a significant step forward in our ability to study how the human body takes shape during early development.

The notochord, a rod-shaped tissue, is a crucial part of the scaffold of the developing body. It is a defining feature of all animals with backbones and plays a critical role in organising the tissue in the developing embryo.

Continue reading “Timely TGFβ signalling inhibition induces notochord” »

There might not be a mysterious ‘dark’ force accelerating the expansion of the Universe after all. The truth could be much stranger – bubbles of space where time passes at drastically different rates.

The passage of time isn’t as constant as our experience with it suggests. Areas of higher gravity experience a slower pace of time compared with areas where gravity is weaker, a fact that could have some pretty major implications on how we compare rates of cosmic expansion according to a recently developed model called timescape cosmology.

Discrepancies in how fast time passes in different regions of the Universe could add up to billions of years, giving some places more time to expand than others. When we look at distant objects through these time-warping bubbles, it could create the illusion that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating.