Lifeboat Foundation

Mammals run the gamut of social organization systems, ranging from loose, ephemeral interactions like aggregations of jaguars in the South American wetlands to the antlike subterranean societies of naked mole-rats (SN: 10/13/21; SN: 10/20/20).

But marsupials — a subgroup of mammals that give birth to relatively underdeveloped young reared in pouches — have traditionally been considered largely solitary. Some kangaroo species were known to form transient or permanent groups of dozens of individuals. But among marsupials, long-term bonds between males and females were thought rare and there were no known examples of group members cooperating to raise young. Previous work on patterns of mammalian social evolution regarded about 90 percent of examined marsupial species to be solitary.

“If you look at other [studies] about some specific species, you will see [the researchers] tend to assume that the marsupials are solitary,” says Jingyu Qiu, a behavioral ecologist at CNRS in Strasbourg, France.

Accelerating particles to relativistic speeds typically requires particle accelerators that are many kilometers in length. Miniature particle accelerators a few tens of centimeters long or smaller also exist. These so-called laser-plasma accelerators are being tested in research facilities for future use in hospitals, where scientists hope the accelerators could generate x rays for cancer diagnostics and treatment. In these devices, particles are accelerated by short laser pulses, so scientists have only a few femtoseconds to track the particles’ evolving properties. Now Simon Bohlen of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) and colleagues experimentally demonstrate a technique to measure the energy evolution of an electron bunch inside a laser-plasma accelerator [1]. The team hopes that the technique could be used to improve laser-plasma accelerators and ready them to generate x rays for medical applications.

For their demonstration Bohlen and colleagues used a phenomenon called Thomson scattering, which is the scattering of photons by electrons. They split in two the laser beam used to accelerate the electrons, using one part for normal electron acceleration and the other part to create a Thomson laser—a beam of photons the accelerated electrons could scatter. They then overlapped the Thomson laser and the accelerated electrons such that the two interacted at 20 locations over a 400- m distance. The team measured the energy of the photons scattered during these interactions using an x-ray detector. From these measurements, the team reconstructed the energy evolution of the electrons over most of the accelerator length without destroying the electron beam.

Recently, I learned about the World Nobel Peace Summit — fascinating. Young people can go there, mingle with Nobel Peace Laureates, network and share ideas.

Amma introduces the concept of two types of education: one that allows you to earn a living and another to attain a happy, fulfilled life. Modern education should focus on not just academic skills but a culture of human rights and peaceful coexistence of peoples, the ethics of non-violence. Too often, education is propelled by vanity and the desire for individual success. Over and over, it is just competition, pressure, and a vast amount of information pumped into one’s head without instilling the habit of exploring the future consequences of one’s actions. Imagine a good physics student who becomes a scientist just to invent a bomb that could destroy the whole world. We want a child to fulfill their potential — but stay aware of the outcomes of their choices at individual and societal levels. Ethics allows one to maintain this balance. As a society, we may want to establish ethical think tanks that simulate the future and guide us as we develop new technologies and community practices.

JB: Should the ways of peaceful coexistence be taught starting from pre-school age and reinforced over the years?

Continue reading “How Nobel Peace Laureates Inspire Youth To Believe In Themselves” »

Imaging deep tissues with light is challenging. Visible light is often quickly absorbed and scattered by structures and molecules in the body, preventing researchers from seeing deeper than a millimeter within a tissue. If they do manage to probe further, substances like collagen or melanin often muddy the image, creating the equivalent of background noise through their natural fluorescence. As the authors explained, “Biological tissues have strong optical attenuation in the visible wavelength range (350–700 nm), due to the absorption of hemoglobin and melanin, as well as the tissue scattering, which fundamentally limits the imaging depth of high-resolution optical technologies.”

To wade out from these muddied waters, Yao and collaborator Vladislav Verkhusha, PhD, professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, developed a protein that absorbs and emits longer wavelengths of light in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. “Tissue is the most transparent in the 700‑1300 nm window of NIR light,” said Yao. “At those wavelengths, light can penetrate deeper into a tissue, and because there is less natural background fluorescence to filter out, we can take longer exposures and capture clearer images.”

Verkhusha and his lab used a process called directed molecular evolution to engineer their proteins, using photoreceptors normally found in bacteria as the basis for the structure. “The state-of-the-art NIR FPs were engineered from bacterial phytochrome photoreceptors (BphPs),” the team noted. “Applying rational design, we developed 17 kDa cyanobacteriochrome-based near-infrared (NIR-I) fluorescent protein, miRFP718nano.”

Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity — Dr. Seemay Chou Ph.D., CEO, Arcadia Science

Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Board Member of Arcadia Science (https://www.arcadia.science/), a research and development company focusing on under researched areas in biology, with a specific focus on novel model organisms that haven’t been traditionally studied in the lab.

Continue reading “Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. — CEO, Arcadia Science — Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity” »

“What this new result does is provide a clearer picture of how our local universe has come together — it is telling us that at least in one of the large galaxies, there has been this sporadic feeding of small galaxies,” Lewis said in a press release.

Globular clusters are at the center of this research. They’re older associations of stars that have lower metallicity. There are at least 150 in the Milky Way, likely more. They play a role in the galactic evolution, but the role isn’t clearly understood. Globulars, as they’re known, are more prevalent in a galaxy’s halo, while their counterparts, open clusters, are found in the galactic disks.

The researchers behind this work identified a population of globulars in Andromeda’s inner halo that all have the same metallicity. Metallicity refers to the elemental makeup of stars, with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium referred to as metals in astronomy. The globulars have lower metallicity than most stars in the same region, meaning they came from elsewhere, not from Andromeda itself. It also means they’re older since there were fewer heavy elements in the early Universe than there are now. Lewis named the collection of globulars the Dulai Structure, which means black stream in Welsh.

In a breakthrough study, Japanese researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have engineered the smallest motile life form ever. They introduced seven bacterial proteins into a synthetic bacterium, allowing it to move independently.

The rise of synthetic biology.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest life form can now move, thanks to genetic engineering” »

A specimen retrieved from a cupboard in the Natural History Museum in London has shown that modern lizards originated in the Late Triassic and not the Middle Jurassic as previously thought.

This fossilized relative of living lizards such as monitor lizards, gila monsters and slow worms was identified in a stored museum collection from the 1950s, including specimens from a quarry near Tortworth in Gloucestershire, South West England. The technology didn’t exist then to expose its contemporary features.

As a modern-type lizard, the new fossil impacts all estimates of the origin of lizards and snakes, together called the Squamata, and affects assumptions about their rates of evolution, and even the key trigger for the origin of the group.

Axions that decay into photons could account for visible light that exceeds what’s expected to come from all known galaxies.

If you could switch off the Milky Way’s stars and gaze at the sky with a powerful telescope, you’d see the cosmic optical background (COB)—visible-wavelength light emitted by everything outside our Galaxy. Recent studies by the New Horizons spacecraft—which, after its Pluto flyby, has been looking further afield—have returned the most precise measurements of the COB yet, showing it to be brighter than expected by a factor of 2. José Bernal and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland propose that this excess could be caused by decaying dark matter particles called axions [1]. They say that their model could be falsified or supported by future observations.

Comparing COB measurements to predictions provides a tool for testing hypotheses about the structure of the Universe. But measuring the COB is very difficult due to contamination by diffuse light from much nearer sources, especially sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust. Observing from the edge of our Solar System, New Horizons should be unaffected by most of this contamination, making the measured excess brightness a tool for improving our understanding of galaxy evolution.