Lifeboat Foundation

In 2006, just a few years after the fruit fly genome had been sequenced, geneticists at the University of California, Davis, made a startling discovery: Several new genes had cropped up, seemingly out of nowhere.

These “de novo genes” weren’t simply new variants of existing ones; they had sprung forth from the supposedly inert spaces in between the coding sections of DNA—regions long dismissed as the junkyards of the double helix. Since the days of Darwin, such sprightly biological change agents had never before been seen.

A young graduate student at the time, Li Zhao was so intrigued that upon graduating in 2011, she set out to join the lab of David Begun, where the discovery was first made. She soon revealed that these little genetic big bangs happen all the time­­—over the past decade, she and her team have identified more than 500 de novo genes in the Drosophila lineage alone.

“Of all currently known temperate exoplanets, LHS 1,140 b could well be our best bet to one day indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our Solar System,” said Charles Cadieux.

The search for Earth’s twin just got a little closer as astronomers recently presented findings regarding a potential icy or watery “super-Earth” called LHS 1,140 b, which is located approximately 49 light-years from Earth and whose radius is approximately 1.7 times our planet, along with orbiting within its star’s habitable zone. What makes this finding unique is LHS 1,140 b was previously hypothesized to be a mini-Neptune and astronomers speculate could be completely covered in either ice or water.

The findings were recently accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters and hold the potential to help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets, and specifically Earth-sized exoplanets within their star’s habitable zone.

Continue reading “LHS 1140 b: From Mini-Neptune to Potential Water World” »

The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains — with humans bucking this trend — a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500…

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Continue reading “Brain size riddle solved as humans exceed evolution trend” »

The largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains—with humans bucking this trend—a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution has revealed.

Researchers at the University of Reading and Durham University collected an enormous dataset of brain and body sizes from around 1,500 species to clarify centuries of controversy surrounding brain size evolution.

Bigger brains relative to body size are linked to intelligence, sociality, and behavioral complexity—with humans having evolved exceptionally large brains. The new research reveals the largest animals do not have proportionally bigger brains, challenging long-held beliefs about brain evolution.

A research team has constructed a coherent superposition of quantum evolution with two opposite directions in a photonic system and confirmed its advantage in characterizing input-output indefiniteness. The study was published in Physical Review Letters.

The notion that time flows inexorably from the past to the future is deeply rooted in people’s mind. However, the laws of physics that govern the motion of objects in the microscopic world do not deliberately distinguish the direction of time.

To be more specific, the basic equations of motion of both classical and quantum mechanics are reversible, and changing the direction of the time coordinate system of a dynamical process (possibly along with the direction of some other parameters) still constitutes a valid evolution process.

Stern, R.J., Gerya, T.V. Sci Rep 14, 8,552 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54700-x.

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Treating cancer can sometimes feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. The disease can become resistant to treatment, and clinicians never know when, where and what resistance might emerge, leaving them one step behind. But a team led by Penn State researchers has found a way to reprogram disease evolution and design tumors that are easier to treat.

They created a modular genetic circuit that turns cancer cells into a “Trojan horse,” causing them to self-destruct and kill nearby drug-resistant cancer cells. Tested in human cell lines and in mice as proof of concept, the circuit outsmarted a wide range of resistance.

The findings were published today, July 4, in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The researchers also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in the paper.

This research highlights that both early melting-volatilization and late accretion of volatile-rich materials are integral to understanding the distribution of nitrogen in silicate Earth. These insights open new avenues for understanding the origins of volatiles on Earth.

A team of researchers led by Professor Wang Wenzhong from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School of Earth and Space Sciences, in partnership with international experts, examined how nitrogen isotopes fractionate during the formation and evolution of terrestrial planets. Their findings were published in Nature Communications.

Currently, the academic community primarily holds two models regarding the accretion of volatiles on Earth: the “Late Veneer” model and the “Early Evolution” model.