Lifeboat Foundation

Similar to Interstellar, Oppenheimer (now in theaters) finds Christopher Nolan at his most abstract, with the director working overtime to ascribe a visual language to concepts just beyond our comprehension.

It wasn’t enough to simply make a biopic about the father of the atomic bomb — he needed to take us inside the extraordinary theoretical mind of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played in the film by Cillian Murphy) and show us the Big Bang-like birth of quantum physics and how it directly led to the creation of the atomic bomb.

RELATED: Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bombs Marked a New Geologic Age of Humans.

“The other thing we might find is actually this long flow, [this] drip of pharmaceuticals: caffeine, lidocaine, cocaine, amphetamine, antidepressants, birth control — this long slow drift of them from cities into the [ocean] is… starting to hit these animals,” Hird said.

Shark Week show delves into whether sharks off the coast of Florida are coming into contact with the huge quantities of cocaine that get dumped in these waters.

Elon Musk announced plans on Saturday to ditch Twitter’s bird logo for an “X” — a reference to the CEO’s vision to create an all-encompassing “everything app” that may incorporate shopping and banking services, among other features.

The domain X.com now redirects users to Twitter. Musk said a new “interim” X logo will go live Sunday. He did not respond to a request for comment.

There’s an old joke among astronomy students about a question on the final exam for a cosmology class. It goes like this: “Describe the Universe and give three examples.” Well, a team of researchers in Germany, the U.S., and the UK took a giant leap toward giving at least one accurate example of the Universe.

To do it, they used a set of simulations called “MillenniumTNG”. It traces the buildup of galaxies and cosmic structure across time. It also provides new insight into the standard cosmological model of the Universe. It’s the latest in cosmological simulations, joining such ambitious efforts as the AbacusSummit project of a couple of years ago.

This simulation project takes into account as many aspects of cosmic evolution as possible. It uses simulations of regular (baryonic) matter (which is what we see in the Universe). It also includes dark matter, neutrinos, and the still-mysterious dark energy on the formation mechanisms of the Universe. That’s a tall order.

Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company combining synthetic biology and machine learning to target aging, in collaboration with researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara, today announced a drug discovery platform that enables precise control of the integrated stress response (ISR), a biological pathway that is activated by cells in response to a wide variety of pathological and aging-associated conditions.

A new publication, “Optogenetic control of the integrated stress response reveals proportional encoding and the stress memory landscape,” authored by company founders and featured on the cover of Cell Systems describes a technique that triggers the ISR virtually using light and demonstrates how the accumulation of stress over time shifts a cell’s reaction from adaptation to apoptosis (programmed cell death).

“In a very real way, our platform puts cells into a virtual reality, making them experience stress in the absence of physical stressors,” said Maxwell Wilson, Ph.D., a co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at the University of California Santa Barbara.

For over a hundred years, scientists have held the belief that our thoughts, feelings, and dreams are shaped by the way various brain regions interact via a vast network of trillions of cellular connections.

However, a recent study led by the team at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health has examined more than 10,000 distinct maps of human brain activity and discovered that the overall shape of an individual’s brain has a much more substantial impact on our cognitive processes, emotions, and behavior than its intricate neuronal connectivity.

The study, recently published in the prestigious journal, Nature draws together approaches from physics, neuroscience, and psychology to overturn the century-old paradigm emphasizing the importance of complex brain connectivity, instead identifying a previously unappreciated relationship between brain shape and activity.

A team of researchers just got a $600,000 grant from Australia’s Office of National Intelligence to study ways of merging human brain cells with artificial intelligence.

In collaboration with Melbourne-based startup Cortical Labs, the team has already successfully demonstrated how a cluster of roughly 800,000 brain cells in a Petri dish is capable of playing a game of “Pong.”

The basic idea is to merge biology with AI, something that could forge new frontiers for machine learning tech for self-driving cars, autonomous drones, or delivery robots — or at least that’s what the government is hoping to accomplish with its investment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nXM2AibIpA

China’s state media Xinhua claims that at least 300,000 people have worked on China’s space projects, almost 18 times the number of employees NASA has. Yes, the space race between the United States and China is set for a new and exciting turn, as the latter is geared to challenge the James Webb Space telescope with its fleet of tiny satellites, as they dive into deep space.#nasa #china #space Join Lab360 to get access to some amazing perks:

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Scientists specializing in chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside have discovered two types of bacteria in the soil capable of breaking down a class of stubborn “forever chemicals,” giving hope for low-cost biological cleanup of industrial pollutants.

Assistant Professor Yujie Men and her team at the Bourns College of Engineering have found that these bacteria are able to eradicate a specific subgroup of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, known as PFAS, particularly those that contain one or more chlorine atoms within their chemical structure. Their findings were published in the scientific journal, Nature Water.

Unhealthful forever chemicals persist in the environment for decades or much longer because of their unusually strong carbon-to-fluorine bonds. Remarkably, the UCR team found that the bacteria cleave the pollutant’s chlorine-carbon bonds, which starts a chain of reactions that destroy the forever chemical structures, rendering them harmless.