Lifeboat Foundation

A new statistical analysis by researchers at the University of Arizona suggests that color vision evolved in animals around 500 million years ago, long before the evolution of colorful fruits and flowers, which started sprouting 200 to 350 million years ago. The researchers focused on what they term “conspicuous colors”—basically, the ones kids are likeliest to select in a 16 pack of Crayolas—red, orange, yellow, blue and purple.

Around 150 million years ago, presumably to capitalize on the well-established prevalence of color vision, species began evolving warning coloration. And 50 million years later, there was an evolutionary explosion of both warning and sexual coloration. Although the reasons behind this evolutionary burst are still unclear, the researchers identified three warning signal animal vectors behind it: ray-finned fishes, birds and lizards.

Additionally, warning coloration is much more widespread among species than sexual coloration, likely because colorful animals do not themselves need to have color vision to signal the danger they pose to other, color-sensitive species. Sexual color signals, on the other hand, are confined to vertebrate and arthropod species that have well-developed color vision.

When light hits the surface of some materials, namely those exhibiting a property known as photoresistance, it can induce changes in their electrical conductivity. Graphene is among these materials, as incident light can excite electrons within it, affecting its photoconductivity.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore report a deviation from standard photoresistive behaviors in doped metallic graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Nanotechnology, shows that when exposed to continuous-wave terahertz (THz) radiation, Dirac electrons in this material can be thermally decoupled from the lattice, prompting their hydrodynamic transport.

“Our research has emerged from the growing recognition that traditional models of electron behavior don’t fully capture the properties of certain advanced materials, particularly in the quantum world,” Denis Bandurin, Assistant Professor at NUS, lead of the experimental condensed matter physics lab and senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

The authors demonstrate optical tweezing of microparticles and cells using an integrated optical phased array for the first time, increasing the standoff distance of integrated optical tweezers by over two orders of magnitude compared to prior work.

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation offers rapid depression relief for patients unresponsive to conventional treatments.

Accelerated over just five days, this therapy targets key brain areas to adjust imbalances linked to depression, demonstrating significant effectiveness.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat depression.

How did human culture become ecologically dominant? Morgan and Feldman re-examine existing theoretical accounts and propose that, contrary to previous belief, cumulative change and high transmission fidelity are not unique to human culture.

As quantum computing grows, researchers are urgently preparing for its impact on cybersecurity by developing quantum-resistant cryptographic protocols.

This research, led by experts at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, focuses on safeguarding supercomputing infrastructures against quantum threats.

Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity.

A 2023 epidemiological study revealed that 56% of a large Caspian tern breeding colony at Rat Island, Washington, succumbed to an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza. Following this event, no birds have successfully bred on the island, heightening concerns about the outbreak’s potential impact on an already declining Pacific coast population.

As part of the study, a team including Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) as well as Washington State University researchers also documented that the avian flu virus H5N1was transmitted to harbor seals for the first time in the northeastern Pacific.

While there has not been another large coastal wildlife outbreak of H5N1 since, researchers estimated that about 10–14% of the Caspian tern population in the Pacific flyway have been lost to H5N1 infections.

A new technique enables data storage in synthetic polymers, allowing direct bit access without full sequence decoding, significantly increasing storage density and stability, demonstrated by encoding a university address in ASCII within a polymer.

The need for data storage is growing, with many types of data requiring long-term preservation. Synthetic polymers present an efficient alternative to traditional storage media, as they can store information using less space and energy. However, conventional retrieval methods, like mass spectrometry, limit the length—and therefore the storage capacity—of individual polymer chains. Now, as reported in Angewandte Chemie, researchers have developed a new approach that overcomes this limitation, enabling direct access to specific data bits without having to read the entire chain.

Advantages of polymer storage over DNA.

A trio of research papers from Stanford Medicine researchers and their international collaborators transforms scientists’ understanding of how small DNA circles — until recently dismissed as inconsequential — are major drivers of many types of human cancers.

The papers, published simultaneously in Nature on Nov. 6, detail the prevalence and prognostic impact of the circles, called ecDNA for extrachromosomal DNA, in nearly 15,000 human cancers; highlight a novel mode of inheritance that overthrows a fundamental law of genetics; and describe an anti-cancer therapy targeting the circles that is already in clinical trials.

The team, jointly known as eDyNAmiC, are a group of international experts led by professor of pathology Paul Mischel, MD. In 2022, Mischel and the eDyNAmiC team were awarded a $25 million grant from the Cancer Grand Challenges initiative to learn more about the circles. Cancer Grand Challenges, a research initiative co-founded by Cancer Research UK and the National Cancer Institute in the United States, supports a global community of interdisciplinary, world-class research teams to take on cancer’s toughest challenges.