Lifeboat Foundation

Structures could have applications in future electronic devices.

The search for the origin of life on earth goes on.

Simulations of the crust of early Earth show that cycles of pressure caused by geysers or tidal forces could have generated cell-like structures and even very simple proteins.

By Michael Le Page

Continue reading “Protocells on early Earth may have been formed by squeezing geysers” »

Most alcohol enters the bloodstream via the mucous membrane layer of the stomach and the intestines. These days, the consequences of this are undisputed: even small amounts of alcohol impair people’s ability to concentrate and to react, increasing the risk of accidents.

New research is challenging the scientific status quo on the limits of the nuclear chart in hot stellar environments where temperatures reach billions of degrees Celsius.

The nuclear chart is a way to map out different kinds of atomic nuclei based on their number of protons and neutrons, and the “drip lines” can be viewed as the boundaries or edges of this map. Researchers from the University of Surrey and the University of Zagreb have found that these drip lines, which define the maximum number of protons and neutrons within a nucleus, change dynamically with temperature.

The findings challenge the view that drip lines and the number of bound nuclei are not sensitive to the temperature.

The headline-grabbing release here is Gemma 2, the next generation of Google’s open-weights Gemma models, which will launch with a 27 billion parameter model in June.

Already available is PaliGemma, a pre-trained Gemma variant that Google describes as “the first vision language model in the Gemma family” for image captioning, image labeling and visual Q&A use cases.

So far, the standard Gemma models, which launched earlier this year, were only available in 2-billion-parameter and 7-billion-parameter versions, making this new 27-billion model quite a step up.

Wind energy is becoming an important strategic resource. Energy and supply chain shocks spurred countries around the world to boost their wind investments.

Dr. Arti Garg, Ph.D. is Head of Technology Strategy & Evaluation, Office of the CTO and HPE Sr. Distinguished Technologist, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (h…

Key specs and name of BYD’s upcoming powerful electric hatchback have been revealed, including a faster top speed than the Seal.

Sperm whales rattle off a series of rapid-fire clicks that researchers have named “codas.” Each coda consists of between three and 40 clicks. In addition to changing the number of clicks they make in quick succession, whales often speed up or slow down the tempo of each coda—researchers call this “rubato.” Sometimes, they add an extra “click” at the end of a coda, which scientists call “ornamentation.”

In the end, the team identified 156 distinct codas, each with its own rubato, ornamentation, tempo and rhythm. On their own, these codas may simply be meaningless sounds. But when combined, they could add up to something akin to syllables, words or even sentences.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover a ‘Phonetic Alphabet’ Used by Sperm Whales, Moving One Step Closer to Decoding Their Chatter” »