Lifeboat Foundation

Earth’s interior is a far from quiet place. Deep below our surface activities, the planet rumbles with activity, from plate tectonics to convection currents that circulate through the hot magmatic fluids far underneath the crust.

Now scientists studying satellite data of Earth have identified something inside Earth we’ve never seen before: a new type of magnetic wave that sweeps around the surface of our planet’s core, every seven years.

Continue reading “Giant Magnetic Waves Have Been Discovered Oscillating Around Earth’s Core” »

In a paper appearing in Nature today, an international group of scientists report a new way to kill hard-to-treat cancers. These tumors resist current immunotherapies, including those using Nobel Prize-winning checkpoint-blocking antibodies.

The approach exploits Z-DNA. Rather than twisting to the right like B-DNA, Z-DNA has a left-handed twist. One role for Z-DNA is to regulate the immune response to viruses. The response involves AADR1 and ZBP1, two proteins that specifically recognize Z-DNA. They do so through a Zα domain that binds to the Z-DNA structure with high affinity.

The Zα domain was originally discovered by Dr. Alan Herbert of InsideOutBio, a communicating author on the paper. The ADAR1 Zα domain turns off the autoimmune response, while the other ZBP1 Zα turns on pathways that kill virally infected cells, as previously shown by Dr. Sid Balachandran, the other communicating author on the paper. The interactions between ADAR1 and ZBP1 determine whether a tumor cell lives or dies.

When we look out into space, all of the astrophysical objects that we see are embedded in magnetic fields. This is true not only in the neighborhood of stars and planets, but also in the deep space between galaxies and galactic clusters. These fields are weak—typically much weaker than those of a refrigerator magnet—but they are dynamically significant in the sense that they have profound effects on the dynamics of the universe. Despite decades of intense interest and research, the origin of these cosmic magnetic fields remains one of the most profound mysteries in cosmology.

In previous research, scientists came to understand how turbulence, the churning motion common to fluids of all types, could amplify preexisting magnetic fields through the so-called dynamo process. But this remarkable discovery just pushed the mystery one step deeper. If a turbulent dynamo could only amplify an existing field, where did the “seed” magnetic field come from in the first place?

We wouldn’t have a complete and self-consistent answer to the origin of astrophysical magnetic fields until we understood how the seed fields arose. New work carried out by MIT graduate student Muni Zhou, her advisor Nuno Loureiro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, and colleagues at Princeton University and the University of Colorado at Boulder provides an answer that shows the basic processes that generate a field from a completely unmagnetized state to the point where it is strong enough for the dynamo mechanism to take over and amplify the field to the magnitudes that we observe.

Summary: Increasing synchronization of neurons in the upstream brain region that transmits information leads to a significant improvement in the transmission of information and information processing in the downstream region.

Source: Bar-Ilan University.

In the early 20th century scientists began to record brain activity using electrodes attached to the scalp. To their surprise, they saw that brain activity is characterized by slow and rapid ascending and descending signals which were subsequently called “brain waves”.

Scientists realize quantum teleportation between remote, non-neighboring nodes in a quantum network. The network employs three optically connected nodes based on solid-state spin qubits. The teleporter is prepared by establishing remote entanglement on the two links, followed by entanglement swapping on the middle node and storage in a memory qubit.

They demonstrate that once successful preparation of the teleporter is heralded, arbitrary qubit states can be teleported with fidelity above the classical bound, even with unit efficiency. These results are enabled by key innovations in the qubit readout procedure, active memory qubit protection during entanglement generation and tailored heralding that reduces remote entanglement infidelities.

Continue reading “Dutch researchers teleport quantum information across rudimentary quantum network” »

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙣 𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙚𝙘𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣, 𝙙𝙖𝙢𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙡𝙤𝙤𝙙 𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙨 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙤𝙠𝙚𝙨. 𝘽𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙣𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙬𝙚𝙚𝙣 𝙫𝙖𝙨𝙘𝙪𝙡𝙖𝙧 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝘼𝙡𝙯𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙧’𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙨 𝙧𝙚𝙢𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙪𝙣𝙚𝙭𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙞𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙨𝙚 𝙚𝙛𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙨 𝙤𝙛 … See more.

The Neuro-Network.

𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐀𝐥𝐳𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐯𝐚𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐫 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞

Continue reading “Researchers may have found the missing link between Alzheimer’s and vascular disease” »

Men like Zuckerberg and Musk are the subject of fascination. Their character, their genius, their flaws — all are treated to feverish scrutiny. Since Musk’s bid for Twitter, there has been a predictable flurry of speculation: does he know what he’s doing? Is he a troll or a revolutionary? Will he improve conditions of free speech? What, if anything, will he do about online harassment and extremism?

Though valuable and interesting, it is possible that these kinds of questions obscure the deeper issue, or at least the longer-term one. At root, the big question for the future of powerful technologies is this: whether they are ultimately economic entities which should be governed according to market principles, or whether they are in fact political in nature, and so should be governed by democratic norms and principles. In the long run, the answer we provide to this question will significantly affect the course of democracy around the world — more, in any event, than whether Musk himself understands the concept of “free speech absolutism.”

Many other advanced democracies are tacking toward the political/democratic option. The UK is considering a landmark Online Safety Bill, which will place strict duties on social media platforms. Off the back of the General Data Protection Regulation, the EU is readying a swathe of new measures — an Artificial Intelligence Act, a Digital Services Act, a Digital Markets Act — all of which will curb the power of tech firms.

Webb going through the paces!

NASA’s next-generation space observatory successfully watched a moving asteroid as the telescope inches towards the end of its six-month commissioning period.

The successful tracking of a nearby object shows that the James Webb Space Telescope can keep a watch on solar system objects as well as the distant galaxies, stars and other faraway objects it is expected to observe in its perhaps 20-year lifespan.

Not Kidding! A Sugar Mountain has been discovered deep within the ocean.

Scientists have found that seagrass meadows on the ocean floor can keep humongous amounts of sugar beneath their swaying fronds. The sugar is in the shape of sucrose (the primary ingredient in sugar used in cooking), and it is released from the seagrasses into soil beneath, recognised as the rhizosphere.