Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists are designing simplified biological systems, aiming to construct synthetic cells and better understand life’s mechanisms.

One of the most fundamental questions in science is how lifeless molecules can come together to form a living cell. Bert Poolman, Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Groningen, has been working to solve this problem for two decades. He aims to understand life by trying to reconstruct it; he is building simplified artificial versions of biological systems that can be used as components for a synthetic cell.

His work was detailed in two new papers published in Nature Nanotechnology and Nature Communications. In the first paper, he describes a system for energy conversion and cross-feeding of products of this reaction between synthetic cells, while he describes a system for concentrating and converting nutrients in cells in the second paper.

The Elon Musk-led spaceflight company will attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster for a second time as it returns to Earth.

Swiss scientists set a record with the longest hyperloop journey testing, simulating high-speed travel in a low-pressure tube.

He has frequently voiced concerns over the Biden administration’s approach to immigration and the economy, and claimed free speech would be at risk with another Democrat presidency.

As one of the president-elect’s most important backers, the tech billionaire donated more than $119m (£92m) to fund a Super PAC aimed at re-electing Trump.

He also spent the last weeks before election day running a get-out-the-vote effort in the battleground states, which included a daily giveaway of $1m to voters in those states.

According to Banerjee and colleagues, that could drive enough volcanism to blanket the planet in sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.

But other planetary scientists aren’t so sure, and that underscores how difficult it is to understand what we’re seeing when we look at an exoplanet’s atmosphere from 35 light years away, even with a powerful and sensitive telescope like JWST.

“The era of detection and characterization of atmospheres around rocky exoplanets is now here,” write Banerjee and colleagues in their recent paper. And that’s true, but it’s not always as straightforward as astronomers might hope.

A judge found that two media outlets alleging copyright violations hadn’t demonstrated that they’d been harmed by OpenAI removing “copyright management information” from its training data.

Francois Chollet, a prominent AI expert and creator of ARC-AGI, discusses intelligence, consciousness, and artificial intelligence.

Chollet explains that real intelligence isn’t about memorizing information or having lots of knowledge — it’s about being able to handle new situations effectively. This is why he believes current large language models (LLMs) have \.

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

China on Monday released its third report on the “Volt Typhoon” investigation. The report not only provides critical new information but also delivers a clearer message to responsible stakeholders concerned with global cyberspace security and governance: A previously underappreciated threat must be taken seriously. This threat originates from US intelligence agencies and security bodies, which, possessing superior technological capabilities, engage in “false flag” operations — activities carried out to deliberately conceal the true origin of cyberattacks while falsely attributing responsibility to someone else, particularly an opponent. To serve their own interests, these organizations openly or tacitly collaborate with high-tech companies.

The Marble Framework mentioned in the latest investigative report was first exposed in 2017 when WikiLeaks claimed to have obtained information from inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence. Developed by the CIA as an anti-forensics tool, the primary function of the Marble Framework is to obscure and disguise the true origins of cyberattacks, making it difficult to trace these attacks back to the actual perpetrators. The Marble Framework employs string obfuscation to hide textual information within the malware, as this text often provides forensic experts with clues to identify the developer or country of origin behind the malicious software.

New model suggests the universe could be a staggering 26.7 billion years old.

Rethinking the Age of the Universe

A recent study led by Rajendra Gupta, a physics professor at the University of Ottawa, proposes that the universe might be twice as old as current estimates suggest. This study, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, challenges established cosmological models, proposing that the universe could be 26.7 billion years old instead of the widely accepted 13.8 billion years. Gupta’s findings offer a potential solution to various unresolved astronomical mysteries, such as the existence of mature galaxies seen shortly after the Big Bang and stars that seem older than the universe itself.