Lifeboat Foundation

An analysis of drywood termite DNA shows the wood-dwelling insects have crossed the oceans at least 40 times in their history, probably rafting inside driftwood.

Researchers from Japan design a tunable physical reservoir device based on dielectric relaxation at an electrode-ionic liquid interface.

In the near future, more and more artificial intelligence processing will need to take place on the edge — close to the user and where the data is collected rather than on a distant computer server. This will require high-speed data processing with low power consumption. Physical reservoir computing is an attractive platform for this purpose, and a new breakthrough from scientists in Japan just made this much more flexible and practical.

Physical reservoir computing (PRC), which relies on the transient response of physical systems, is an attractive machine learning framework that can perform high-speed processing of time-series signals at low power. However, PRC systems have low tunability, limiting the signals it can process. Now, researchers from Japan present ionic liquids as an easily tunable physical reservoir device that can be optimized to process signals over a broad range of timescales by simply changing their viscosity.

New findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday that found all rectal cancer patients given a certain bill were cancer-free.

The New York Times reported the findings, noting that the sample size was incredibly small, with just 18 people but the results were unbelievable.

“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” said Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

We won’t give up on the search for life on Mars.

The situation developed in the next days and weeks, leading to a series of emergency meetings. On March 17, the European Space Agency (ESA)’s council and member states decided to suspend our mission. We won’t know for sure what happens next until a study by ESA and industry partners reports back in July — but there are causes for optimism.

The search for subterranean life on Mars

Continue reading “Life on Mars: A critical tool in the search for aliens is delayed” »

CNN — A rocket built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin carried its fifth group of passengers to the edge of space, including the first-ever Mexican-born woman to make such a trek.

The 60-foot-tall suborbital rocket took off from Blue Origin’s facilities in West Texas at 9:26 A.M ET, launching a group of six people to more than 62 miles above the Earth’s surface — which is widely deemed to make the boundary of outer space — and giving them a few minutes of weightlessness before parachuting to landing.

Most of the passengers paid an undisclosed sum for their seats. But Katya Echazarreta, an engineer and science communicator from Guadalajara, Mexico, was selected by a nonprofit called Space for Humanity to join this mission from a group of thousands of applicants.

This week, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon spacecraft will travel to the International Space Station carrying supplies and research. Here’s how to watch.

Scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution announced today that ribonucleic acid (RNA), an analog of DNA that was likely the first genetic material for life, spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass. Such glass was abundant on Earth 4.35 billion years ago. Similar basalts of this antiquity survive on Mars today.

More information:

Craig A. Jerome et al, Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses, Astrobiology (2022). DOI: 10.1089/ast.2022.

Continue reading “Scientists announce a breakthrough in determining life’s origin on Earth—and maybe Mars” »

😳! Circa 2019

A long-ridiculed theory about humankind’s early leap of consciousness is revived.

Scientists have produced the first genetic map of chimpanzees in the wild, offering a detailed reconstruction of the endangered species’ past migrations, and a new tool to combat illegal trafficking.

The genomic catalogue, which includes 828 individuals from across their vast African range, can now be used to link kidnapped chimpanzees—or their meat and body parts —to their place of origin within 100 kilometers.

The results of the years-long research project was published Wednesday in the journal Cell Genomics.