Lifeboat Foundation

We all know the feeling of a mobile phone vibrating in our hands when announcing an incoming call. If we perceive these vibrations so clearly, it is due to specialized receptors that transduce them into neural signals sent to our brain. But how does the latter encode their physical characteristics? To understand this, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have observed what happens in the brains of mice whose forepaws perceive vibrations. They discovered that neurons in the somatosensory cortex are activated in a manner similar to those in the sound-reactive auditory cortex. These results, published in the journal Nature, suggest that feeling a phone vibrate or hearing it ring is ultimately based on the same brain codes.

If you place a glass of water on your desk, you can probably see on its surface the concentric oscillatory motions created by the small movements that occur nearby. These oscillations are caused by vibrations that propagate through the floor, desk, glass and all other solid surfaces. These vibrations are also important sensory stimuli that we use to detect, for example, an approaching train or to identify the familiar step of our office neighbor. «We live surrounded by vibrations that are extremely important in how we perceive the world,» explains Daniel Huber at the Department of Basic Neurosciences at the UNIGE Faculty of Medicine, who led this work. «So we wanted to know how the brain perceives and represents them.».

People left blind by retinal degeneration have one option: electronic eye implants. Neuroscientists have now developed an alternative: gene therapy that, in tests, restored vision in blind mice. A gene for green opsin delivered via virus gave blind mice enough sight to discern patterns on an iPad at a resolution sufficient for humans to read. Given existing AAV eye therapies already approved, this new therapy could be ready for clinical trials in three years.

As the World Wide Web marks its 30th birthday on Tuesday, public discourse is dominated by alarm about Big Tech, data privacy and viral disinformation. Tech executives have been called to testify before Congress, a popular campaign dissuaded Amazon from opening a second headquarters in New York and the United Kingdom is going after social media companies that it calls “digital gangsters.” Implicit in this tech-lash is nostalgia for a more innocent online era.

Let’s not let artificial intelligence put society on autopilot.

Researchers are hijacking the cell’s protein-disposal system in the fight against Alzheimer’s and intractable cancers.

The realization of so-called topological materials—which exhibit exotic, defect-resistant properties and are expected to have applications in electronics, optics, quantum computing, and other fields—has opened up a new realm in materials discovery.

Several of the hotly studied topological materials to date are known as topological insulators. Their surfaces are expected to conduct electricity with very little resistance, somewhat akin to superconductors but without the need for incredibly chilly temperatures, while their interiors—the so-called “bulk” of the material—do not conduct current.

Now, a team of researchers working at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has discovered the strongest topological conductor yet, in the form of thin crystal samples that have a spiral-staircase structure. The team’s study of crystals, dubbed topological chiral crystals, is reported in the March 20 edition of the journal Nature.

Continue reading “The best topological conductor yet: Spiraling crystal is the key to exotic discovery” »

Just so long as people making the food don’t leave any foreign DNA in it.

Astronomers found a pulsar hurtling through space at nearly 2.5 million miles an hour — so fast it could travel the distance between Earth and the Moon in just 6 minutes. The discovery was made using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA).

“Thanks to its narrow dart-like tail and a fortuitous viewing angle, we can trace this pulsar straight back to its birthplace,” said Frank Schinzel, a scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Socorro, New Mexico. “Further study of this object will help us better understand how these explosions are able to ‘kick’ neutron stars to such high speed.” Schinzel, together with his colleagues Matthew Kerr at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, and NRAO scientists Dale Frail, Urvashi Rau and Sanjay Bhatnagar presented the discovery at the High Energy Astrophysics Division meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Monterey, California. A paper describing the team’s results has been submitted for publication in a future edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In February, the CMS and MoEDAL collaborations at CERN signed an agreement to hand over to MoEDAL a section of the LHC beam pipe that was located inside CMS between 2008 and 2013. The delicate object, 6 metres long and made of beryllium, will now be sliced and fed into a highly precise magnetic sensors in order to allow MoEDAL to look for magnetic monopoles: hypothetical particles with only a single magnetic pole – north or south – unlike north-south dipoles we are familiar with.

Paul Dirac posited the existence of magnetic monopoles in 1931, and, although never observed, they could be produced in collisions within the LHC. They would not travel very far after being produced, binding with the beryllium nuclei of the beam pipe and remaining there awaiting discovery.

The MoEDAL collaboration will cut the beam pipe at a special facility at the Centre for Particle Physics at the University of Alberta in Canada and ship the pieces back across the Atlantic to ETH Zurich in Switzerland to look for electromagnetic anomalies in them. Many theories attempting to unify all of the known forces into a single force (so-called “Grand Unified Theories”) require the existence of monopoles and finding them could open the door to all-new physics.