Lifeboat Foundation

The study notes, “Our study shows that the environmental resilience of S. caninervis is superior to that of some of highly stress-tolerant microorganisms and tardigrades.”

What plants would be most suitable for a future Mars settlement? This is what a recent study published in The Innovation hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated how the desert moss known as Syntrichia caninervis (S. caninervis) can survive extremely harsh conditions, specifically conditions on the planet Mars. This study holds the potential to help researchers, engineers, and future Mars astronauts better understand the types of plants they can grow, and even eat, while living on the Red Planet.

For the study, the researchers subjected S. caninervis to a series of brutal tests, including severe dryness, freezing temperatures, and large doses of gamma radiation, all of which are the environmental conditions on Mars and far harsher than humans and plants can manage. However, the researchers discovered that S. caninervis was able to recover 98 percent of its water loss within seconds after being severely dried out. The moss also achieved full recovery after being subjected to-80 degrees Celsius-112 degrees Fahrenheit) for 3 to 5 years along with-196 degrees Celsius (−320 degrees Fahrenheit) for 15 to 30 days.

Continue reading “Pioneer Plant for Potential Future Mars Settlement” »

A theoretical model for the illumination of photosynthesizing algae in giant clams suggests principles for high efficiency collection of sunlight.

Crops on a farm capture only about 3% of the available solar energy, much less than the 20%–25% captured by large solar arrays. Now a research team has used a theoretical model to explain efficiencies as high as 67% for photosynthesizing algae hosted by giant clams [1]. The researchers argue that clams achieve this performance with an optimized geometry. The mollusks may also adjust the algae clusters’ spacing according to changing light conditions. The researchers hope that an understanding of clams’ solar efficiency might help other scientists improve the efficiency of solar technology and explain aspects of the photosynthetic behavior of other ecosystems such as forests.

A photosynthetic cell can convert nearly every incoming photon to usable energy, says biophysicist Alison Sweeney of Yale University. But efficiency is much lower in larger systems such as agricultural fields. “Can we achieve near-perfect efficiencies over large land areas? This is an urgent question” as researchers try to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Sweeney says.

Scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School have identified how the first domino falls after a person encounters an allergen, such as peanuts, shellfish, pollen or dustmites. Their discovery, published in the April issue of Nature Immunology, could herald the development of drugs to prevent these severe reactions.

It is well established that when mast cells, a type of immune cell, mistake a harmless substance, such as peanuts or dust mites, as a threat, they release an immediate first wave of bioactive chemicals against the perceived threat. When mast cells, which reside under the skin, around blood vessels and in the linings of the airways and the gastrointestinal tract, simultaneously release their pre-stored load of bioactive chemicals into the blood, instant and systemic shock can result, which can be lethal without quick intervention.

More than 10 per cent of the global population suffers from food allergies, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). As allergy rates continue to climb, so does the incidence of food-triggered anaphylaxis and asthma worldwide. In Singapore, asthma affects one in five children while food allergies are already the leading cause of anaphylactic shock.

Recent research on isoporous membranes, which feature uniformly sized pores, show potential for improving the precision and efficiency of industrial separation processes by allowing solutes multiple attempts to pass through the pores.

Imagine a close basketball game that comes down to the final shot. The probability of the ball going through the hoop might be fairly low, but it would dramatically increase if the player were afforded the opportunity to shoot it over and over.

A similar idea is at play in the scientific field of membrane separations, a key process central to industries that include everything from biotechnology to petrochemicals to water treatment to food and beverage.

Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars had a term for the world as it appears, the “manifest image.” This is the world as we perceive it. In it, an apple is an apple, something red or green with a certain shape, a range of sizes, a thing that we can eat, or throw.

The manifest image can be contrasted with the scientific image of the world. Where the manifest image has colors, the scientific one has electromagnetic radiation of certain wavelengths. Where the manifest image has solid objects, like apples, the scientific image has mostly empty space, with clusters of elementary particles, held together in configurations due to a small number of fundamental interactions.

The scientific image is often radically different from the manifest image, although how different it is depends on what level of organization is being examined. For many purposes, including scientific ones, the manifest image, which is itself a predictive theory of the world at a certain level or organization, works just fine. For example, an ethologist, someone who studies animal behavior, can generally do so without having to concern themselves about quantum fields and their interactions.

Our cells and the machinery inside them are engaged in a constant dance. This dance involves some surprisingly complicated choreography within the lipid bilayers that comprise cell membranes and vesicles — structures that transport waste or food within cells.

In a recent ACS Nano paper (“The Secret Ballet Inside Multivesicular Bodies”), Luis Mayorga and Diego Masone shed some light on how these vesicles self-assemble, knowledge that could help scientists design bio-inspired vesicles for drug-delivery or inspire them to create life-like synthetic materials.

A representation of multilayer lipid vesicles inspired by “Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles,” by the artist Wassily Kandinsky. (Image: ACS Nano 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.4c01590)

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging say their study of 40 older adults with obesity and insulin resistance who were randomly assigned to either an intermittent fasting diet or a standard healthy diet approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers important clues about the potential benefits of both eating plans on brain health.

Chinese scientists have engineered a solution by which they could bypass natural plant gene inheritance. They aim to deploy a CRISPR-based gene editing system to help the transmission of preferred genes even when they aren’t suitable for a plant.

The scientists devised a system that would use both a toxin and an antidote which would directly affect the male plant germline. Through this process, the researchers could overcome the natural Mendelian transmission rate. This can help increase the gene transmission rates up to 99% over two generations.

Plus, Turing also showed that achieving universality doesn’t require anything fancy. The basic equipment of a universal machine is just not more advanced than a kid’s abacus — operations like incrementing, decrementing, and conditional jumping are all it takes to create software of any complexity: be it a calculator, Minecraft, or an AI chatbot.

Likewise, consciousness might just be an emergent property of the software running AGI, much like how the hardware of a universal machine gives rise to its capabilities. Personally, I don’t buy into the idea of something sitting on top of the physical human brain — no immortal soul or astral “I” floating around in higher dimensions. It’s all just flesh and bone. Think of it like an anthill: this incredibly complex system doesn’t need some divine spirit to explain its organized society, impressive architecture, or mushroom farms. The anthill’s intricate behaviour, often referred to as a superorganism, emerges from the interactions of its individual ants without needing to be reduced to them. Similarly, a single ant wandering around in a terrarium won’t tell you much about the anthill as a whole. Brain neurons are like those ants — pretty dumb on their own, but get around 86 billion of them together, and suddenly you’ve got “I” with all its experiences, dreams, and… consciousness.

So basically, if something can think, it can also think about itself. That means consciousness is a natural part of thinking — it just comes with the territory. And if you think about it, this also means you can’t really have thinking without consciousness, which brings us back to the whole Skynet thing.