Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2014 😗

Vultures’ faces and large intestines are covered with bacteria that is toxic to most other creatures, but these birds of prey have evolved a strong gut that helps them not get sick from feasting on rotting flesh, according to a new study.

In the first analysis of bacteria living on vultures, the study’s researchers found that these scavengers are laden with flesh-degrading Fusobacteria and poisonous Clostridia. As bacteria decompose a dead body, they excrete toxic chemicals that make the carcass a perilous meal for most animals. But vultures often wait for decay to set in, giving them easy access to dead animals with tough skins.

Darwin has clearly been a guiding presence in Calvo’s attempt to open up a new frontier in science: “He learned to think differently and clearly outside the frameworks in which most of his contemporaries happily confined themselves.” The result of his confinement with the cucumbers was a 118-page monograph on The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants. Darwin realised before anyone else that these movements were in fact “behaviour”, comparable to that of animals. And observing behaviour is the route to understanding intelligence. In plants, it reveals a range of faculties “from learning and memory to competitive, risk-sensitive behaviours, and even numerical abilities”.

In the course of his book, Calvo describes many experiments that reveal plants’ remarkable range, including the way they communicate with others nearby using “chemical talk”, a language encoded in about 1,700 volatile organic compounds. He also shows how, like animals, they can be anaesthetised. In lectures, he places a Venus flytrap under a glass bell jar with a cotton pad soaked in anaesthetic. After an hour the plant no longer responds to touch by closing its traps. Tests show the plant’s electrical activity has stopped. It is effectively asleep, just as a cat would be. He also notes that the process of germination in seeds can be halted under anaesthetic. If plants can be put to sleep, does that imply they also have a waking state? Calvo thinks it does, for he argues that plants are not just “photosynthetic machines” and that it’s quite possible that they have an individual experience of the world: “They may be aware.”

Other studies show that some plants retain a memory of where the sun will rise, in order to turn their leaves towards the first rays. They store this knowledge – an internal model of what the sun is going to do – for several days, even when kept in total darkness. The conclusion must be that they constantly collect information, processing and retaining it in order to “make predictions, learn, and even plan ahead”.

New technology could divert problem plastics from landfills and convert them into fuel sources.

A plastics recycling innovation that does more with less simultaneously increases conversion to useful products while using less of the precious metal ruthenium. It will be presented today (August 22, 2022) at the American Chemical Society fall meeting in Chicago.

“The key discovery we report is the very low metal load,” said Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) chemist Janos Szanyi, who led the research team. “This makes the catalyst much cheaper.”

Wooden objects are usually made by sawing, carving, bending or pressing. That’s so old school! Today, scientists will describe how flat wooden shapes extruded by a 3D printer can be programmed to self-morph into complex 3D shapes. In the future, this technique could be used to make furniture or other wooden products that could be shipped flat to a destination and then dried to form the desired final shape.

The researchers will present their results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Continue reading “Your next wooden chair could arrive flat, then dry into a 3D shape” »

In a significant development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have developed a new category of wireless wearable skin-like sensors for health monitoring that doesn’t require batteries or an internal processor.

The team’s sensor design is a form of electronic skin, or “e-skin” — a flexible, semiconducting film that conforms to the skin like electronic Scotch tape, according to a press release published by MIT.

“If there is any change in the pulse, or chemicals in sweat, or even ultraviolet exposure to skin, all of this activity can change the pattern of surface acoustic waves on the gallium nitride film,” said Yeongin Kim, study’s first author, and a former MIT postdoc scholar.

Near-term quantum computers, quantum computers developed today or in the near future, could help to tackle some problems more effectively than classical computers. One potential application for these computers could be in physics, chemistry and materials science, to perform quantum simulations and determine the ground states of quantum systems.

Some quantum computers developed over the past few years have proved to be fairly effective at running quantum simulations. However, near-term quantum computing approaches are still limited by existing hardware components and by the adverse effects of background noise.

Researchers at 1QB Information Technologies (1QBit), University of Waterloo and the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics have recently developed neural error mitigation, a new strategy that could improve ground state estimates attained using quantum simulations. This strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, is based on machine-learning algorithms.

I believe that these microbes are not just simple organisms but are some sorta biological singularity seeds that activate over millions of years developing life slowly and may be exterrestial in origin.

Researchers from Hokkaido University in Japan have found new evidence that the chemical components necessary to build DNA may have been carried to Earth by carbonaceous meteorites, some of the earliest matter in the solar system, as they report in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Although these kinds of materials make up about 75 percent of all asteroids, they rarely fall to Earth, limiting how often scientists can study them. Yet they are troves of information: Scrutinizing these space rocks can tell stories about unique cosmic locations. Their contents may also help reveal the ancient chemical reactions that made our world a living planet.

Specifically, several meteorites have been found to contain nucleobases. These chemicals, called the building blocks of life, make up the nucleic acids inside DNA and RNA. Of the five major nucleobases, previous meteorite studies detected only three of them, named adenine, guanine, and uracil. But the present research proves for the first time that two more—cytosine and thymine—can exist within space rocks.

Continue reading “Meteorites older than the solar system contain key ingredients for life” »

The use of AN electrical current as a weed-destroying mode of action continues to gain traction globally.

An electrical current, like the broad-spectrum herbicides it is being developed to replace, affects only the treated plants and kills the affected plant to the root — without chemical toxicity, residues or the development of weed resistance.

Crop. Zone.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QfBG3AbW6QA

A novel method for measuring nanoparticle size could have applications in industry and basic materials science research.

Nanoparticles are present in everything from paints to pharmaceutical products. While nanoparticles have many important characteristics, such as molecular composition and shape, it is their size that determines many chemical and physical properties. A new technique relying on an optical vortex—a laser beam whose wave fronts twist around a dark central region—allows researchers to characterize nanoparticle size rapidly and continuously [1]. This light-based size probe might one day find applications in numerous industrial settings and aid fundamental materials science research.

Continue reading “Optical Vortex Sizes Up Nanoparticles” »