Lifeboat Foundation

An exciting Focused Research Organization (FRO): is systematically developing tools for working with non-model microorganisms.

As we walked, Lee told me that’s efforts to make “extraordinary” organisms accessible almost always follow the same basic steps. First, the team orders a microbe from ATCC, a non-profit group that has been storing and mailing microbes to researchers since 1925. The ATCC catalog includes more than 14,000 bacterial strains, the vast majority of which gather dust and are rarely ordered by researchers.

After receiving a microbe in the mail, sequences it. Mutations can creep into strains over time, and even a seemingly minor alteration—a single base swapped here or there—can change how cells grow and respond to their environment.

Continue reading “Inside the Laboratory for Extraordinary Microbes” »

Bluesky has apparently become such a successful X-formerly-Twitter alternative that even Mark Zuckerberg is anxiously taking notice. At this rate, the social site could potentially outpace Threads — and Meta clearly isn’t happy.

“The race to replace Twitter has accelerated,” Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst at the market research company eMarketer, told The Washington Post. “Threads has been the de facto home for many displaced [X-formerly-Twitter] users, but the surge of new users to Bluesky after the election has upped the competition.”

X-formerly-Twitter, the giant in the space, has something like 300 million active monthly users — a number that’s been plummeting ever since Elon Musk acquired the site in 2022, opening up room for a proliferation of new challengers.

The “MANIFEST-17K” international study is the first to show important…

Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is safe for treating patients with common types of atrial fibrillation (AF), according to the largest study of its kind on this new technology, led by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Continue reading “Pulsed Field Ablation Procedures Found Safe and Effective for Atrial Fibrillation Patients” »

Professor Huantian Cao, are finding ways to interrupt that environmentally harmful process and turn the shreds into something new and usable.

“The scale of waste in the apparel industry is huge,” said Cobb, associate professor of fashion and apparel studies.

Research at UD explores ways to transform, reuse textile waste.

Continue reading “From trash to treasure” »

Challenging physics beliefs: Oxford study shows like-charged particles can attract each other over long distances in certain solvents.

Learn all about the difference between regular pneumonia and walking pneumonia in kids and when to take your child to the doctor.

Researchers in Lithuania present the molecular structure of a new, more-versatile CRISPR system for gene editing.

Cooling systems are an integral part of many modern technologies, as heat tends to wear down materials and decrease performance in several ways. In many cases, however, cooling can be an inconvenient and energy-intensive process. Accordingly, scientists have been seeking innovative and efficient methods to cool substances down.

Solid-state optical cooling is a prominent example that leverages a very unique phenomenon called anti-Stokes (AS) emission. Usually, when materials absorb photons from incoming light, their electrons transition into an “excited” state.

Under ideal conditions, as electrons return to their original state, part of this excess energy is released as light, while the rest is converted into heat.

On a cool morning this summer, I visited a former shopping mall in Mountain View, California, that is now a Google office building. On my way inside, I passed a small museum of the company’s past “moonshots,” including Waymo’s first self-driving cars. Upstairs, Jonathan Tompson and Danny Driess, research scientists in Google DeepMind’s robotics division, stood in the center of what looked like a factory floor, with wires everywhere.

At a couple of dozen stations, operators leaned over tabletops, engaged in various kinds of handicraft. They were not using their own hands—instead, they were puppeteering pairs of metallic robotic arms. The setup, known as ALOHA, “a low-cost open-source hardware system for bimanual teleoperation,” was once Zhao’s Ph.D. project at Stanford. At the end of each arm was a claw that rotated on a wrist joint; it moved like the head of a velociraptor, with a slightly stiff grace. One woman was using her robotic arms to carefully lower a necklace into the open drawer of a jewelry case. Behind her, another woman prized apart the seal on a ziplock bag, and nearby a young man swooped his hands forward as his robotic arms folded a child’s shirt. It was close, careful work, and the room was quiet except for the wheeze of mechanical joints opening and closing. “It’s quite surprising what you can and can’t do with parallel jaw grippers,” Tompson said, as he offered me a seat at an empty station. “I’ll show you how to get started.”