Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers, led by experts at Imperial College London, have developed a new method that allows gene expression to be precisely altered by supplying and removing electrons.

This could help control biomedical implants in the body or reactions in large ‘bioreactors’ that produce drugs and other useful compounds. Current stimuli used to initiate such reactions are often unable to penetrate materials or pose risk of toxicity—electricity holds the solution.

Gene expression is the process by which genes are ‘activated’ to produce new molecules and other downstream effects in cells. In organisms, it is regulated by regions of the DNA called promoters. Some promoters, called inducible promoters, can respond to different stimuli, such as light, chemicals and temperature.

A cellphone-sized device automatically adjusts a home’s power use up or down to save the consumer money and increase the resiliency of the electric grid.

The effects of climate change are pushing electrical grids around the world to their limits. Last year, unprecedented cold weather caused people in Texas to turn up their thermostats, which overwhelmed the power grid and caused days-long power outages. And in California, the power is turned off before there is a high possibility of a fire.

To combat the electric grid’s vulnerabilities and cut down on the use of non-renewable sources of energy, researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have developed technology that automatically adjusts a home’s power use up or down in response to fluctuating prices that are established by real-time market demand.

Bill Rhoads

Yemoja researchers combined Porphyridium algae derivatives after developing a groundbreaking system for the biological culture of pure and standardized components from micro-algae intended for the food and cosmetics industries.

Continue reading “Israeli start-up produces artificial vegetarian blood from micro-algae” »

Communicate and find patterns with sound as your guide. “Sonification — When You Go Beyond the Visual Representation Of Data” is published by Pavle Marinkovic in Towards Data Science.

Many researchers believe that liquid water is a key to understanding the behavior of the frozen form found in glaciers. Meltwater is known to lubricate their gravelly bases and speed up their march toward the sea. In recent years, scientists in Antarctica have discovered hundreds of interconnected liquid lakes and rivers cradled within the ice itself. And, they have imaged thick basins of sediments under the ice, potentially containing the biggest water reservoirs of all. But so far, no one has confirmed the presence of large amounts of liquid water in below-ice sediments, nor investigated how it might interact with the ice.

Now, a research team has for the first time mapped a huge, actively circulating groundwater system in deep sediments in West Antarctica. They say such systems, probably common in Antarctica, may have as-yet unknown implications for how the frozen continent reacts to, or possibly even contributes to, climate change. The research was published in the journal Science on May 5, 2022.

A new malicious campaign has been spotted taking advantage of Windows event logs to stash chunks of shellcode for the first time in the wild.

“It allows the ‘fileless’ last stage trojan to be hidden from plain sight in the file system,” Kaspersky researcher Denis Legezo said in a technical write-up published this week.

The stealthy infection process, not attributed to a known actor, is believed to have commenced in September 2021 when the intended targets were lured into downloading compressed. RAR files containing Cobalt Strike and Silent Break.

Google releases monthly security patches for Android with fixes for 37 vulnerabilities in various components.

For the past several years, scientists have been creating supersolids at very tiny scales in the lab. Now, a group of physicists have made the most sophisticated supersolid yet: one that exists in two-dimensions, like a sheet of paper. They published their results in Nature last Wednesday.

“It’s always been a sort of outstanding goal to bring [supersolids] into two dimensions,” says Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University in Austria, and lead author of the Nature paper.

So what exactly is a supersolid? At its base, it contains properties of two different states of matter, one mundane and another quite esoteric.