Lifeboat Foundation

With over 350,000 new malware samples emerging every day, it’s difficult for any one strain of malware to make a name for itself. Any single malware sample whose name you know — be it Mirai, WannaCry, or NotPetya — speaks to a trail of devastation.

In 2019, people are also hearing another name: Emotet.

But Emotet has been around in one form or another since 2014, and its first major resurgence was in 2017. In the beginning, Emotet was just one trojan among many — a particularly run-of-the-mill banking trojan that did some damage before being researched, understood, and dismissed in a flurry of signature updates.

Scientists recently found one billion-year-old fungi in Canada, changing the way we view evolution and the timing of plants and animals here on Earth.

The fossilized specimen was collected in Canada’s Arctic by an international team and later identified to be the oldest fungi ever found, sitting somewhere between 900 million and 1 billion years old. The research, published recently in Nature, changes how we view eukaryotes colonizing the land.

The fossilized fungi were analyzed and researchers found the presence of chitin, a unique substance that is found on the cell walls of fungi. The specimen was then age dated using precise measurements of radioactive isotope ratios within the sample.

The journal club hosted by Dr. Oliver Medvedik returns for July and takes a look at the new SIRT6 evolutionary biology paper by Dr. Vera Gorbunova and collaborators, showing a relationship between enhanced SIRT6 function and longevity.

Abstract DNA repair has been hypothesized to be a longevity determinant, but the evidence for it is based largely on accelerated aging phenotypes of DNA repair mutants. Here, using a panel of 18 rodent species with diverse lifespans, we show that more robust DNA double-strand break (DSB) repair, but not nucleotide excision repair (NER), coevolves with longevity. Evolution of NER, unlike DSB, is shaped primarily by sunlight exposure. We further show that the capacity of the SIRT6 protein to promote DSB repair accounts for a major part of the variation in DSB repair efficacy between short- and long-lived species. We dissected the molecular differences between a weak (mouse) and a strong (beaver) SIRT6 protein and identified five amino acid residues that are fully responsible for their differential activities. Our findings demonstrate that DSB repair and SIRT6 have been optimized during the evolution of longevity, which provides new targets for anti-aging interventions.

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Longevity investor and visionary Sergey Young, founder of Longevity Vision Fund and Innovation Board Member of XPRIZE Foundation, delivers “7 Signs of Longevity Revolution” keynote at Barclay’s recent “Accelerating Evolution” conference, discussing recent developments in the longevity industry.

Watch to find out the forecasts for the industry’s trajectory of growth in the coming years, the increasing emergence of practical, real-world applications in the longevity sphere and how Longevity Vision Fund striving to be on the very forefront of the ongoing Longevity Revolution that is already happening around us today.

#longevity #lvf #longevityvisionfund #lifeextension #longevityrevolution #sergeyyoung #barclays

A few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was so dense and hot that the quarks and gluons that make up protons, neutrons and other hadrons existed freely in what is known as the quark–gluon plasma. The ALICE experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can recreate this plasma in high-energy collisions of beams of heavy ions of lead. However, ALICE, as well as any other collision experiments that can recreate the plasma, cannot observe this state of matter directly. The presence and properties of the plasma can only be deduced from the signatures it leaves on the particles that are produced in the collisions.

In a new article, presented at the ongoing European Physical Society conference on High-Energy Physics, the ALICE collaboration reports the first measurement of one such signature—the elliptic flow—for upsilon particles produced in lead–lead LHC collisions.

The upsilon is a bottomonium particle, consisting of a bottom (often also called beauty) quark and its antiquark. Bottomonia and their charm-quark counterparts, charmonium particles, are excellent probes of the quark–gluon plasma. They are created in the initial stages of a heavy-ion collision and therefore experience the entire evolution of the plasma, from the moment it is produced to the moment it cools down and gives way to a state in which hadrons can form.

Hybrids, once treated as biological misfits, have been the secret saviors of many animal species in trouble. Reconciling that truth with conservation policies poses a challenge for science.

It would be the first-ever map of the universe in high-energy X-rays, Nature magazine noted.

Such a map “will be essential to solve the core questions of modern cosmology,” Roscosmos said in a press release. “How do dark energy and dark matter affect formation of the large-scale structure of the Universe? What is [the] cosmological evolution of supermassive black holes?”

The agency added that the telescope, which has reportedly taken decades to develop, is expected to find about “100,000 massive clusters of galaxies” and millions of supermassive black holes ― many of them new to science ― over a four-year survey period.

Evolution is one of nature’s most impressive forces, allowing organisms to adapt to changing environments to survive. By harnessing and guiding that process scientists have managed to manipulate micro-organisms into producing useful new drugs and materials, but it’s still a time-consuming process. Now, researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) have developed a new tool that speeds up the process in mammalian cells, creating new therapeutics in a matter of days.

LMU chemists have discovered an efficient mechanism for the prebiotic synthesis of a vital class of such compounds.