Lifeboat Foundation

New research in mice illuminates how pain neurons shield the gut from damage.

Pain is one of evolution’s most effective mechanisms for detecting injury and letting us know that something is wrong. It acts as a warning system, telling us to stop and pay attention to our body.

But what if pain is more than just a mere alarm signal? What if pain is in itself a form of protection?

What is limb regeneration and what species possess it? How is it achieved? What does this tell us about intelligence in biological systems and how could this information be exploited to develop human therapeutics? Well, in this video, we discuss many of these topics with Dr Michael Levin, Principal Investigator at Tufts University, whose lab studies anatomical and behavioural decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems.

Find Michael on Twitter — https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.

Continue reading “Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory — Dr Michael Levin” »

So at this year’s Connect, which kicks off at 10 AM PT tomorrow with a keynote from Zuckerberg, the stakes feel even higher. And we still have a lot of questions about what it really means to be a “metaverse company.”

It’s perhaps the most obvious issue, but in the nearly a year since Zuckerberg first attempted to articulate what a metaverse is, it’s still not very clear. Last year, Zuckerberg described it as “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” The company’s website currently says the metaverse is “the next evolution in social connection and the successor to the mobile internet.”

But what those words mean to most people is fuzzy at best. “Outside of early adopters and tech-savvy people, there’s still confusion as to what is the metaverse and what we’re going to be doing with it,” says Carolina Milanesi, a consumer analyst with Creative Strategies.

A team of researchers condensed one billion years of Earth’s evolution and tectonic plate movements into a short forty-second video.

In a study involving marmosets, a primate genetically similar to humans, researchers have come closer to understanding brain evolution.

A scientist resurfaces a psychedelic retelling of human evolution.

#Evolution #History Of Earth#Nature Communications#Gravitational Forces#Stony Brook University#Columbia University

Neutron scattering is considered the method of choice for investigating magnetic structures and excitations in quantum materials. Now, for the first time, the evaluation of measurement data from the 2000s with new methods has provided much deeper insights into a model system—the 1D Heisenberg spin chains. A new toolbox for elucidating future quantum materials has been achieved.

Potassium copper fluoride (KCuF₃ ) is considered the simplest model material for realizing the so-called Heisenberg quantum spin chain: The spins interact with their neighbors antiferromagnetically along a single direction (one-dimensional), governed by the laws of quantum physics.

“We carried out the measurements on this simple model material at the ISIS spallation neutron source some time ago when I was a postdoc, and we published our results in 2005, 2013 and again in 2021, comparing to new theories each time they became available,” says Prof. Bella Lake, who heads the HZB-Institute Quantum Phenomena in Novel Materials. Now with new and extended methods, a team led by Prof. Alan Tennant and Dr. Allen Scheie has succeeded in gaining significantly deeper insights into the interactions between the spins and their spatial and temporal evolution.

The accident at reactor four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 generated the largest release of radioactive material into the environment in human history. The impact of the acute exposure to high doses of radiation was severe for the environment and the human population. But more than three decades after the accident, Chernobyl has become one of the largest nature reserves in Europe. A diverse range of endangered species finds refuge there today, including bears, wolves, and lynxes.

Radiation can damage the genetic material of living organisms and generate undesirable mutations. However, one of the most interesting research topics in Chernobyl is trying to detect if some species are actually adapting to live with radiation. As with other pollutants, radiation could be a very strong selective factor, favoring organisms with mechanisms that increase their survival in areas contaminated with radioactive substances.