Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers have identified the earliest pair of quasars, shining 900 million years post-Big Bang, revealing insights into galaxy mergers and the reionization era of the Universe.

An international team of astronomers, including members from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU, WPI), has discovered the earliest known pair of quasars using the Subaru Telescope and Gemini North telescope, both situated on Maunakea in Hawai’i. These quasars, powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes, emit intense radiation. This significant discovery will provide insights into the early evolution of the Universe.

About 400 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, something, possibly a combination of sources, unleashed enough radiation to strip the electrons from most of the hydrogen atoms, completely altering the nature of the Universe. Quasars are one potential source of the radiation that caused this “reionization” of the Universe. When matter falls into the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, the matter heats up and releases radiation in a phenomenon known as a quasar.

The Earth’s rotation has been decelerating throughout its history due to tidal dissipation, but the variation of the rate of this deceleration through time has not been established. We present a detailed analysis of eight geological datasets to constrain the Earth’s rotational history from 650 to 240 Mya. The results allow us to test physical tidal models and point to a staircase pattern in the Earth’s deceleration from 650 to 280 Mya. During this time interval, the Earth–Moon distance increased by approximately 20,000 km and the length of day increased by approximately 2.2 h. Specifically, there are two intervals with high Earth rotation deceleration, 650 to 500 Mya and 350 to 280 Mya, separated by an interval of stalled deceleration from 500 to 350 Mya. The interval with stalled deceleration is attributed mainly to reduced tidal dissipation due to the continent-ocean configuration at the time, not to changes in Earth’s dynamical ellipticity from continental assembly or glaciation. Modeling indicates that, except for the very recent time, tidal dissipation is the main driver for decelerating Earth rotation. One potential implication of our findings is that the Earth’s tidal dissipation, along with Earth’s rotation deceleration, may play a role in the evolving Earth.

A new open-access RNA sequencing dataset, MAGE, of 731 individuals across geographically diverse human populations provides a valuable resource to study genetic diversity and evolution and expands the capacity to identify new genetic associations.

It’s an unprecedented look into prehistoric anatomy.

Organoids of mammary glands can help researchers more efficiently study lactation, with findings that could apply to fields ranging from agriculture to medicine.

This explores how the human brain forms abstract concepts and adapts to changing environments, specifically looking at how neurons in certain brain regions contribute to complex thinking.

It takes brains to infer how any two things in the world relate to each other, whether it’s the way bad weather links to commuting delays or how environmental conditions lead to the evolution of species. A new study based on recordings in the brains of people has yielded a pathbreaking trove of data that researchers now have used to reveal, with more clarity than ever, the neural incarnations of inferential reasoning.

“Asteroids are leftovers from the planetary formation process, so their compositions vary depending on where they formed in the solar nebula,” said Dr. Anicia Arredondo. “Hydration that is endogenous could suggest that Psyche is not the remnant core of a protoplanet.”

Could a metallic asteroid contain water and what can this teach us about the asteroid’s formation and evolution? This is what a recent study due for publication in the Planetary Science Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) investigated whether the metallic asteroid Psyche —which is one of the largest objects in the main asteroid belt—could contain evidence of water and hydration.

This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of asteroids and what this can teach us about the history of the solar system. This study also comes as NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is currently en route to the Psyche asteroid and is scheduled to arrive in August 2029.

Continue reading “Webb Telescope Unveils Evidence of Water and Hydration on Asteroid Psyche” »

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new study has rewritten the conventionally understood evolutionary history of certain proteins critical for electrical signaling in the nervous system. The study, led by Penn State researchers, shows that the well-studied family of proteins — potassium ion channels in the Shaker family — were present in microscopic single cell organisms well before the common ancestor of all animals. This suggests that, rather than evolving alongside the nervous system as previously thought, these ion channels were present before the origin of the nervous system.

The study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We tend to think of evolution as a one-way march toward greater and greater complexity, but that often isn’t what occurs in the natural world,” said Timothy Jegla, associate professor of biology in the Penn State Eberly College of Science and leader of the research team. “For example, it was thought that as different kinds of animals evolved and the nervous system became more complex, ion channels arose and diversified to match that complexity. But our research suggests that this is not the case. We have previously shown that the oldest living animals, those with simple nerve nets, have the highest ion channel diversity. This new finding adds to growing evidence that many of the building blocks for the nervous system were already in place in our protozoan ancestors — before the nervous system even existed.”

Researchers from the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (Japan) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (Germany) have published new findings on how social norms evolve over time. They simulated how norms promote different social behavior, and how the norms themselves come and go. Because of the enormous number of possible norms, these simulations were run on RIKEN’s Fugaku, one of the fastest supercomputers worldwide.