Lifeboat Foundation

How do plants and fungi communicate with each other? This is what a recent study published in Molecular Cell hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the “language” conducted between plants and fungi that enables fungi growth. This study holds the potential to help scientists and farmers better understand how to fight disease-causing fungi by growing crops with greater resilience and adversity.

“As we begin to understand how plants and fungi communicate, we will better understand the complexities of the soil ecosystem, leading to healthier crops and improving our approach to biodiversity,” said Dr. Shelley Lumba, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto and a co-author on the study.

For the study, the researchers examined strigolactone (SL), which is a class of plant hormones and signaling molecules responsible for plant development, with the team focusing on how SL influences fungi growth and development by testing SL with yeast. In the end, the researchers found that SL triggered certain genes called “PHO” that are responsible for phosphate metabolism, along with finding that plants release SL when they are low on phosphate, forcing the yeast to alter the amount of phosphate consumes by triggering the protein, Pho84.

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Scientists have detected unusual seismic activity around Mount Adams in southern Washington, but say it’s no cause for alarm.

Nestled in the Cascades about 50 miles from Yakima, Mount Adams typically only experiences about 1 earthquake every 2–3 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But the agency registered six small quakes just in September alone, ranging in magnitude from 0.9 to 2.0.

The USGS said they were the most earthquakes detected at Mount Adams in a month since 1982, when monitoring began.

Australian, American and British researchers conducted a prospective analysis of light levels in almost 89 thousand people and concluded that more light exposure at night and less during the day are associated with an increased risk of death from all causes.

Light enhances or disrupts circadian rhythms, depending on the timing of exposure. Circadian disruption contributes to poor health outcomes that increase mortality risk. Whether personal light exposure predicts mortality risk has not been established. We therefore investigated whether personal day and night light, and light patterns that disrupt circadian rhythms, predicted mortality risk. UK Biobank participants (N = 88,905, 62.4 ± 7.8 y, 57% female) wore light sensors for 1 wk. Day and night light exposures were defined by factor analysis of 24-h light profiles. A computational model of the human circadian pacemaker was applied to model circadian amplitude and phase from light data. Cause-specific mortality was recorded in 3,750 participants across a mean (±SD) follow-up period of 8.0 ± 1.0 y.

It’s easy to marvel at the technical wizardry behind breakthroughs such as AlphaFold.

Pioneering crystallographer Helen Berman helped to set up the massive collection of protein structures that underpins the Nobel-prize-winning tool’s success.

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute (TRI) Wednesday revealed plans to bring AI-based robotic intelligence to the electric Atlas humanoid robot. The collaboration will leverage the work that TRI has done around large behavior models (LBMs), which operate along similar lines as the more familiar large language models (LLMs) behind platforms like ChatGPT.

Last September, TechCrunch paid a visit to TRI’s Bay Area campus for a closer look at the institute’s work on robot learning. In research revealed at last year’s Disrupt conference, institute head Gill Pratt explained how the lab has been able to get robots to 90% accuracy when performing household tasks like flipping pancakes through overnight training.

“In machine learning, up until quite recently there was a tradeoff, where it works, but you need millions of training cases,” Pratt explained at the time. “When you’re doing physical things, you don’t have time for that many, and the machine will break down before you get to 10,000. Now it seems that we need dozens. The reason for the dozens is that we need to have some diversity in the training cases. But in some cases, it’s less.”

Boohoo Group Plc Chief Executive Officer John Lyttle is stepping down as the struggling online retailer begins a strategic review that could potentially lead to a breakup of the company.

Would you like to see more applications for Neuralink in the future? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Elon Musk’s brain technology startup, Neuralink, reported that its implant is functioning well in a second trial patient, identified as Alex. This implant is designed to help paralyzed patients control digital devices through thought alone. Unlike the first patient, Noland Arbaugh, who experienced thread retraction issues post-surgery, Alex has not faced similar problems. Neuralink implemented new measures to prevent such complications, including reducing brain motion during surgery. Both patients have been able to use the implant to perform tasks like playing video games, browsing the internet, and even designing 3D objects.

A team of physicists from the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton and Oxford have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for—and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

The head of Singapore’s biggest lender said only about half of the banking industry has made sufficient progress in transforming their businesses to embrace digitalization and artificial intelligence.