Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: evolution

Meet the universe’s earliest confirmed black hole: A monster at the dawn of time

An international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It and the galaxy it calls home, CAPERS-LRD-z9, are present 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was just 3% of its current age. As such, it provides a unique opportunity to study the structure and evolution of this enigmatic period.

“When looking for , this is about as far back as you can practically go. We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,” said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center and lead on the team that made the discovery.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Deep-sky survey detects an X-ray emitting pair of galaxies

By conducting multiwavelength observations with various telescopes and space observatories, astronomers from Tsinghua University and Steward Observatory have detected a galaxy pair exhibiting significant X-ray emission. The finding was reported in a research paper published July 31 on the pre-print server arXiv.

The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is a deep-sky survey conducted by multiple observatories to study the formation and evolution of galaxies. It combines multiwavelength data from space observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer spacecraft, XMM-Newton satellite, and the largest ground-based facilities, such as the Very Large Telescope (VLT), Keck telescopes, Gemini Observatory or the Very Large Array (VLA).

Recently, a team of astronomers led by Tsinghua University’s Sijia Cai conducted a search for Chandra X-ray detected star-forming galaxies in the Southern field of the GOODS survey (GOODS-S). For this purpose, they combined observations from VLA and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), spectroscopic data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and VLT, as well as photometry from HST and JWST.

It Shouldn’t Exist: Astronomers Discover a Planet Orbiting the “Wrong Way”

Most stars throughout the Universe are part of binary or multiple star systems. In these systems, a nearby companion star can make it difficult for planets to form and remain in stable orbits around just one of the stars.

A research team made up of international astrophysicists, led by Professor Man Hoi Lee from the University of Hong Kong’s Department of Earth Sciences and Department of Physics, along with MPhil student Ho Wan Cheng, has confirmed a highly unusual planetary discovery.

They identified a planet orbiting in the opposite direction of its binary stars’ movement, known as a retrograde orbit, within the nu Octantis (nu Octantis) binary system. Their work also sheds light on how the evolution of binary stars may have influenced the planet’s origin. These results have been published in the journal Nature.

Mysterious object found dancing with Neptune

Astronomers have discovered a bizarre object in the outer solar system, 2020 VN40, that dances to Neptune’s gravitational beat in a never-before-seen rhythm. It’s the first of its kind, orbiting the Sun once for every ten orbits of Neptune, and could reshape how we understand the movement and evolution of distant cosmic bodies.

Direct electrolysis systems turns waste alkaline water into clean hydrogen

Dr. Sung Mook Choi and his research team at the Energy & Environmental Materials Research Division of the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) have successfully developed a highly durable non-precious metal-based hydrogen evolution catalyst for use in a direct electrolysis system employing waste alkaline water and anion exchange membranes (AEM). This breakthrough enables the production of clean hydrogen by directly utilizing alkaline wastewater generated from industrial processes.

Scientists create an artificial cell capable of navigating its environment using chemistry alone

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have created the world’s simplest artificial cell capable of chemical navigation, migrating toward specific substances like living cells do.

This breakthrough, published in Science Advances, demonstrates how microscopic bubbles can be programmed to follow chemical trails. The study describes the development of a “minimal cell” in the form of a lipid encapsulating enzymes that can propel itself through chemotaxis.

Cellular transport is a vital aspect of many biological processes and a key milestone in evolution. Among all types of movement, chemotaxis is an essential strategy used by many living systems to move towards beneficial signals, such as nutrients, or away from harmful ones.

Advances in the treatment of systemic lupus erythematosus

Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a complex autoimmune disease with diverse clinical manifestations. This Review discusses advances in understanding its immunopathogenesis, the evolution of targeted therapeutic strategies, and emerging approaches to restore immune tolerance. Challenges and opportunities in achieving durable remission or cure in SLE are also explored.

Finding Human Brain Genes in Duplicated DNA

“Historically, this has been a very challenging problem. People don’t know where to start,” said senior author Megan Dennis, associate director of genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center and associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis.

In 2022, Dennis was a co-author on a paper describing the first sequence of a complete human genome, known as the ‘telomere to telomere’ reference genome. This reference genome includes the difficult regions that had been left out of the first draft published in 2001 and is now being used to make new discoveries.

Dennis and colleagues used the telomere-to-telomere human genome to identify duplicated genes. Then, they sorted those for genes that are: expressed in the brain; found in all humans, based on sequences from the 1,000 Genomes Project; and conserved, meaning that they did not show much variation among individuals.

They came out with about 250 candidate gene families. Of these, they picked some for further study in an animal model, the zebrafish. By both deleting genes and introducing human-duplicated genes into zebrafish, they showed that at least two of these genes might contribute to features of the human brain: one called GPR89B led to slightly bigger brain size, and another, FRMPD2B, led to altered synapse signaling.

“It’s pretty cool to think that you can use fish to test a human brain trait,” Dennis said.

The dataset in the Cell paper is intended to be a resource for the scientific community, Dennis said. It should make it easier to screen duplicated regions for mutations, for example related to language deficits or autism, that have been missed in previous genome-wide screening.

“It opens up new areas,” Dennis said.

Continue reading “Finding Human Brain Genes in Duplicated DNA” | >

How pH impacts the immune system

Extrachromosomal DNA in cancer.

This review discusses open questions on the evolutionary role of extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) in tumor development, including tumorigenesis and metastatic seeding.

The author discuss the mutational landscape on ecDNA, the dynamic ecDNA genotype– phenotype map, the structural evolution of ecDNA, and how knowledge of tissue-specific ecDNA evolutionary paths can be leveraged to deliver more effective clinical treatment.

They also describe how evolutionary theoretical modeling will be instrumental in advancing new research in the field, and we explore how modeling has contributed to our understanding of the evolutionary principles governing ecDNA dynamics.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cancer/fulltext/S2405-8033(25)00146-3 https://sciencemission.com/Extrachromosomal-DNA

Cancers are complex, diverse, and elusive, with extrachromosomal DNA (ecDNA) recently emerging as a crucial player in driving the evolution of about 20% of all tumors. In this review we discuss open questions concerning the evolutionary role of ecDNA in tumor development, including tumorigenesis and metastatic seeding, the mutational landscape on ecDNA, the dynamic ecDNA genotype–phenotype map, the structural evolution of ecDNA, and how knowledge of tissue-specific ecDNA evolutionary paths can be leveraged to deliver more effective clinical treatment. Looking forward, evolutionary theoretical modeling will be instrumental in advancing new research in the field, and we explore how modeling has contributed to our understanding of the evolutionary principles governing ecDNA dynamics.

Continue reading “How pH impacts the immune system” | >

/* */