Lifeboat Foundation

How did life on Earth begin, and were the ingredients for life already on Earth or were they brought here from space? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge investigated how ancient meteorites could have deposited large amounts of zinc on Earth, resulting in the development of volatile elements to form the building blocks of life. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the conditions for life to have emerged on the Earth long ago, and potentially worlds throughout the solar system and beyond.

“One of the most fundamental questions on the origin of life is where the materials we need for life to evolve came from,” said Dr. Rayssa Martins, who is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. “If we can understand how these materials came to be on Earth, it might give us clues to how life originated here, and how it might emerge elsewhere.”

For the study, the researchers analyzed zinc obtained from several meteorites to ascertain how the Earth got its zinc during its formation, which is estimated to have lasted tens of millions of years. In the end, the researchers estimate that while “melted” planetesimals contributed to approximately 70 percent of the Earth’s overall mass, they only contributed approximately 10 percent of the Earth’s zinc, which came from “unmelted” planetesimals. As noted, zinc contains volatile elements, which include oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, or the essential building blocks of life as we know it. Along with helping researchers better understand how life formed and evolved on Earth, this could also lead to greater insight into how life might form and evolve on other worlds, as well.

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While new reports don’t specify which demonstrated capabilities needed human assistance, some did note that the robots “were able to walk without external control using artificial intelligence.”

But the prototypes used “artificial intelligence” to control their walking.

Link :

Millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson has shared his anti-aging lunch that can apparently help you live until the age of 120.

CAMBRIDGE, England, Oct. 15, 2024 — Nu Quantum has announced a proof-of-principle prototype that advances the development of modular, distributed quantum computers by enabling connections across different qubit modalities and providers. The technology, known as the Qubit-Photon Interface, functions similarly to Network Interface Cards (NICs) in classical computing, facilitating communication between quantum computers over a network and supporting the potential growth of quantum infrastructure akin to the impact NICs have had on the Cloud and AI markets.

For quantum computers to achieve practical applications—such as accurately simulating atomic-level interactions—they must scale to 1,000 times their current size. This will require a shift from single quantum processing units (QPUs) to distributed quantum systems composed of hundreds of interconnected QPUs, operating at data center scale, similar to cloud and AI supercomputers.

The efficient transfer of quantum information between matter and light at the quantum level is the biggest challenge to scaling quantum computers, and this is the specific issue that the QPI addresses.

Combining expansion microscopy with super-resolution radial fluctuations captures the morphology of single proteins.

A nice study by Hoffmann et al. where nanobodies were inserted into various locations on adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsids. The authors also ablated hepatocyte tropism by mutating the heparan binding domain of the AAVs. These strategies greatly enhanced cell type specific targeting (in vitro).

Abstract. Adeno-associated virus (AAV) has been remarkably successful in the clinic, but its broad tropism is a practical limitation of precision gene therapy. A promising path to engineer AAV tropism is the addition of binding domains to the AAV capsid that recognize cell surface markers present on a targeted cell type. We have recently identified two previously unexplored capsid regions near the 2/5-fold wall and 5-fold pore of the AAV capsid that are amenable to insertion of larger protein domains, including nanobodies. Here, we demonstrate that these hotspots facilitate AAV tropism switching through simple nanobody replacement without extensive optimization in both VP1 and VP2. Our data suggest that engineering VP2 is the preferred path for maintaining both virus production yield and infectivity. We demonstrate highly specific targeting of human cancer cells expressing fibroblast activating protein (FAP). Furthermore, we found that the combination of FAP nanobody insertion plus ablation of the heparin binding domain can reduce off-target infection to a minimum, while maintaining a strong infection of FAP receptor-positive cells. Taken together, our study shows that nanobody swapping at multiple capsid locations is a viable strategy for nanobody-directed cell-specific AAV targeting.

Dr. Jim Burch: “With these precise measurements, the composition of the gases will reveal the story of the interior and whether the conditions for life exist beneath the icy surface of Europa.”

Will we find the building blocks of life, and potentially signs of life, on Jupiter’s moon, Europa? This is what the nine instruments onboard the recently launched NASA Europa Clipper mission hopes to address, with two being developed by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (MASPEX) and Ultraviolet Spectrograph (Europa-UVS). These two instruments hold the potential to help researchers determine the habitability of Europa and whether the small moon could support life as we know it.

The goal of MASPEX is to investigate the molecules that leave Europa’s surface, which occur either from Jupiter’s intense radiation interacting with the surface or emanating from Europa’s subsurface ocean that lies beneath its icy crust. MASPEX will accomplish this by collecting gases and stripping the ions to determine the types and sizes of the molecules present in the gases. Through this, MASPEX will help scientists better understand the chemical composition of Europa’s atmosphere, icy surface, and subsurface ocean.

Continue reading “Searching for Life: The Role of MASPEX and Europa-UVS in NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission” »

The atomic nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons, particles that exist through the interaction of quarks bonded by gluons. It would seem, therefore, that it should not be difficult to reproduce all the properties of atomic nuclei hitherto observed in nuclear experiments using only quarks and gluons. However, it is only now that physicists, including those from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, have succeeded in doing this.