Lifeboat Foundation

For several decades, although studies of rat physiology and behavior have abounded, research on rat emotions has been limited in scope to fear, anxiety, and pain. Converging evidence for the capacity of many species to share others’ affective states has emerged, sparking interest in the empathic capacities of rats. Recent research has demonstrated that rats are a highly cooperative species and are motivated by others’ distress to prosocial actions, such as opening a door or pulling a chain to release trapped conspecifics. Studies of rat affect, cognition, and neural function provide compelling evidence that rats have some capacity to represent others’ needs, to instrumentally act to improve their well-being, and are thus capable of forms of targeted helping. Rats’ complex abilities raise the importance of integrating new measures of rat well-being into scientific research.

Explore the theory that some black holes might be hidden wormholes, offering shortcuts through space-time. Discover how scientists aim to detect them.

A Milan-based deep tech startup, Ephos, raised $8.5M in a seed round led by Starlight Ventures to accelerate the development of its glass-based quantum photonic chips. The company aims to transform not just quantum computing and AI but also the broader computational infrastructure of the future.

Other participants included Collaborative Fund, Exor Ventures, 2100 Ventures, and Unruly Capital. The round also attracted angel investors such as Joe Zadeh, former Vice President at Airbnb; Diego Piacentini, former Senior Vice President at Amazon; and Simone Severini, General Manager of Quantum Technologies at Amazon Web Services.

In addition to private investment, Ephos received funding from the European Innovation Council (EIC) and €450,000 in non-dilutive financing from NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator (DIANA).

AI memory management startup Letta just emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed led by Felicis and a bunch of big-name angels.

New study suggests that black holes may not be the featureless, structureless entities that Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts them to be.

The frozen star is a recent proposal for a nonsingular solution of Einstein’s equations that describes an ultracompact object which closely resembles a black hole from an external perspective. The frozen star is also meant to be an alternative, classical description of an earlier proposal, the highly quantum polymer model. Here, we show that the thermodynamic properties of frozen stars closely resemble those of black holes: frozen stars radiate thermally, with a temperature and an entropy that are perturbatively close to those of black holes of the same mass. Their entropy is calculated using the Euclidean-action method of Gibbons and Hawking. We then discuss their dynamical formation by estimating the probability for a collapsing shell of “normal’’ matter to transition, quantum mechanically, into a frozen star.

In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.

This phenomenon is not new, but it will be newly accelerated. People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed to be impossible.

We are more capable not because of genetic change, but because we benefit from the infrastructure of society being way smarter and more capable than any one of us; in an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence. Our grandparents – and the generations that came before them – built and achieved great things. They contributed to the scaffolding of human progress that we all benefit from. AI will give people tools to solve hard problems and help us add new struts to that scaffolding that we couldn’t have figured out on our own. The story of progress will continue, and our children will be able to do things we can’t.

Summary: The largest and most diverse study on recessive genetic changes in developmental disorders reveals that over 80% of cases caused by recessive variants are linked to known genes. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 30,000 families and found that a shift in focus from gene discovery to interpreting changes in known genes could double diagnosis rates.

The study highlights the importance of genetic background in diagnosis and suggests that some patients may have multiple contributing genetic factors. These findings could lead to more personalized and accurate diagnoses for families affected by developmental disorders.

The future of technology has an age-old problem: rust. When iron-containing metal reacts with oxygen and moisture, the resulting corrosion greatly impedes the longevity and use of parts in the automotive industry. While it’s not called “rust” in the semiconductor industry, oxidation is especially problematic in two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor materials, which control the flow of electricity in electronic devices, because any corrosion can render the atomic-thin material useless. Now, a team of academic and enterprise researchers has developed a synthesis process to produce a “rust-resistant” coating with additional properties ideal for creating faster, more durable electronics.

The team, co-led by researchers at Penn State, published their work in Nature Communications (“Tailoring amorphous boron nitride for high-performance two-dimensional electronics”).

These materials are made from molybdenum disulfide, a two-dimensional semiconductor, grown on a sapphire surface. The triangular shapes seen are aligned because of a special process called epitaxy, where the material follows the pattern of the surface it’s grown on. Insulating layers, like amorphous boron nitride, are added during the process of making these ultra-thin materials, which are used to build next-generation electronic devices. (Image: J.A. Robinson Research Group/Penn State)

Could slight wobbles in the orbit of Mars be caused by microscopic black holes that have existed since the Big Bang? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review D hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and UC Santa Cruz investigated how these miniscule black holes could be comprised of dark matter, which was first hypothesized in the 1970s, resulting in miniscule wobbles in the orbit of Mars. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the characteristics of dark matter, which remains one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe.

“Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimeters,” said Dr. David Kaiser, who is a professor of physics and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT, and a co-author on the study. “We’re taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect. If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years.”

For the study, the researchers began with handwritten calculations produced by Tung X. Tran, who eventually became the study’s lead author and is a graduate student at Stanford University, which calculated the results if a primordial black hole passed through a human body, which he calculated would push the person approximately 20 feet.