Lifeboat Foundation

Future pets!

A new study finds surprising evidence of the self-evolution of urban foxes.

NASA’s Discover supercomputer simulated the extreme conditions of the distant cosmos.

A team of scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used the U.S. space agency’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) Discover supercomputer to run 100 simulations of jets emerging from supermassive black holes.

Continue reading “NASA uses a climate simulation supercomputer to better understand black hole jets” »

Recently, a team led by Prof. Guo Guangcan achieved long-lived storage of high-dimensional orbital angular momentum (OAM) quantum states of photons based on cold atomic ensembles, using a guiding magnetic field combined with clock state preparation. Their work was published in Physical Review Letters.

Previous work has shown that integrating multimode memory into quantum networks can greatly improve channel capacity, which is crucial for long distance quantum communication. The collective enhancement effect of the cold atomic ensemble makes it an efficient medium for storing photonic information. Although important progress has been made, many problems remain to be solved in long-lived spatial multimode memory based on cold atomic ensembles, one of which is how to achieve high fidelity for multimode memory after a long storage time since multiple spatial modes are more easily affected by the surrounding environment.

Based on the degrees of freedom of OAM, the team carried out research on the long-lived storage of high-dimensional multimode quantum states using the cold 85Rb system. In this work, to overcome the effect of inhomogeneous evolution due to the spatial complexity of stored OAM, the team used a guiding magnetic field to dominate atomic evolution and then employed a pair of magnetically insensitive states to suppress the decoherence in the transverse direction. After the clock states were employed, the destructive interference between different Zeeman sublevels was eliminated, which consequently extended the lifetime of faithful storage.

Summary: The fossil of a 525-million-year-old tiny sea creature with a preserved nervous system may solve a century-long debate about how the brains of arthropods evolved.

Source: University of Arizona.

Fossils of a tiny sea creature that died more than half a billion years ago may compel a science textbook rewrite of how brains evolved.

We review the salient evidence consistent with or predicted by the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe (H-W) thesis of Cometary (Cosmic) Biology. Much of this physical and biological evidence is multifactorial. One particular focus are the recent studies which date the emergence of the complex retroviruses of vertebrate lines at or just before the Cambrian Explosion of ∼500 Ma. Such viruses are known to be plausibly associated with major evolutionary genomic processes. We believe this coincidence is not fortuitous but is consistent with a key prediction of H-W theory whereby major extinction-diversification evolutionary boundaries coincide with virus-bearing cometary-bolide bombardment events. A second focus is the remarkable evolution of intelligent complexity (Cephalopods) culminating in the emergence of the Octopus. A third focus concerns the micro-organism fossil evidence contained within meteorites as well as the detection in the upper atmosphere of apparent incoming life-bearing particles from space. In our view the totality of the multifactorial data and critical analyses assembled by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe and their many colleagues since the 1960s leads to a very plausible conclusion – life may have been seeded here on Earth by life-bearing comets as soon as conditions on Earth allowed it to flourish (about or just before 4.1 Billion years ago); and living organisms such as space-resistant and space-hardy bacteria, viruses, more complex eukaryotic cells, fertilised ova and seeds have been continuously delivered ever since to Earth so being one important driver of further terrestrial evolution which has resulted in considerable genetic diversity and which has led to the emergence of mankind.

The study’s findings could play a crucial role in developing a complex brain.

A common feature that connects humans and octopuses has only recently been revealed. It may sound a little bit quirky to you, but not to scientists.

Published very recently in Science Advances today, a team led by Nikolaus Rajewsky of the Max Delbrück Center has now shown that their evolution is linked to a dramatic expansion of their microRNA repertoire.

Continue reading “Breakthrough study reveals that human and octopus brains have common features” »

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The gradualism of evolution has explained and dissolved life’s mysteries—life’s seemingly irreducible complexity and the illusion that living things possess some sort of mysterious vitalizing essence. So, too, evolution is likely to be key to demystifying the seemingly inexplicable, ethereal nature of consciousness.

First, what does it even mean to say that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”? If the chosen topic is human consciousness, Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa come quickly to mind. But then what does the term “evolution” contribute to the discussion of the origin of human consciousness? Is it something useful or something theorists are stuck with, come what may?

Science theories should make predictions. Who predicted either King or Mother Teresa?

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Mathematics and sex are deeply intertwined. From using mathematics to reveal patterns in our sex lives, to using sex to prime our brain for certain types of problems, to understanding them both in terms of the evolutionary roots of our brain, Dr Clio Cresswell shares her insight into it all.

Continue reading “Mathematics and sex | Clio Cresswell | TEDxSydney” »

About 600 seemingly disparate fungi that never quite found a fit along the fungal family tree have been shown to have a common ancestor, according to a University of Alberta-led research team that used genome sequencing to give these peculiar creatures their own classification home.

“They don’t have any particular feature that you can see with the naked eye where you can say they belong to the same group. But when you go to the genome, suddenly this emerges,” says Toby Spribille, principal investigator on the project and associate professor in the Department of Biological Sciences.

“I like to think of these as the platypus and echidna of the fungal world.”