Lifeboat Foundation

Like so much in chronic disease, Alzheimer’s is complicated: “once you have seen one person with Alzheimer’s, you have seen one person with Alzheimer’s. In other words, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a heterogeneous disease which may present and progress differently depending on the person and the factors contributing to the disease pathology. As such, there is no paint-by-numbers approach to targeted treatment. Researchers in the field are thus motivated to figure out a way to categorize AD in order to guide more individualized approaches to patient care and help anticipate disease trajectory.”

A proposal for 4 subtypes of Alzheimer’s disease.

The mysterious dimming of a famous, bright star may have been solved.

Betelgeuse has intrigued astronomers with its “Great Dimming,” but the most famous star in Orion may have generated the event in a massive cosmic burp.

Universal law always works perfectly well.

Wherever there is sand and an atmosphere, prevailing winds may whip the grains into undulating shapes, pleasing to the eye with their calming repetition.

Certain sand waves, with wavelengths between 30 centimeters (almost 12 inches) and several meters (around 30 feet), are known as megaripples: they’re between ordinary beach ripples and full dunes in size, and we’ve seen them not just on Earth, but even on other planets such as Mars, well known for its all-encompassing dust storms.

Continue reading “There’s a Hidden Mathematical ‘Law’ in The Sand Megaripples Found All Over Earth” »

Cardiff University study is ‘major step forward’ in hunt for developmental origins of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

Scientists from Cardiff University have discovered new links between the breakdown in brain cell development and the risk of schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

Genetic risk factors are known to disrupt brain development in a number of these disorders, but little is known about which aspects of this process are affected.

Neuroscientist David J. Linden is dying.

But the impending end of his life doesn’t mean he’s done learning about the human mind just yet. Linden was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. In a piece in The Atlantic, he writes: “I may be dying, but I’m still a science nerd.”

During a routine echocardiogram, doctors noticed something sticking up next to Linden’s heart that they thought was a hiatal hernia or a benign growth called a teratoma, he says. After the tumor was removed, a biopsy found it was a form of malignant cancer called synovial sarcoma that had grown into the wall of his heart — making it impossible to remove.

A million years ago, the soundtrack of the “sky island” mountains of East Africa may have been very similar to what it is today. That’s because a group of tiny, colorful birds has been singing the exact same tunes for more than 500,000 years — and maybe as long as 1 million years, according to a new study.

Sunbirds in the family Nectariniidae are colorful, tiny, nectar-feeding birds that resemble hummingbirds and are common throughout Africa and Asia. They are the “little jewels that appear before you,” senior author Rauri Bowie, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a curator in the school’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, said in a statement.

A rare volcano-triggered tsunami sparked by the eruption of Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai in Tonga could have been caused by shock waves or shifting underwater land, experts said Monday.

“A volcanic-source tsunami event is rare but not unprecedented,” a post on the website for New Zealand’s geological hazard monitoring system GNS said Monday.

GNS Tsunami Duty Officer Jonathan Hanson said it probably occurred in part thanks to a previous eruption of the same volcano one day earlier.

A University of Melbourne-led team has perfected a technique for embedding single atoms in a silicon wafer one-by-one. Their technology offers the potential to make quantum computers using the same methods that have given us cheap and reliable conventional devices containing billions of transistors.

“We could ‘hear’ the electronic click as each atom dropped into one of 10,000 sites in our prototype device. Our vision is to use this technique to build a very, very large-scale quantum device,” says Professor David Jamieson of The University of Melbourne, lead author of the Advanced Materials paper describing the process.

Continue reading “Building a silicon quantum computer chip atom” »

From the discovery of microorganisms in the field of biology to imaging atoms in the field of physics, microscopic imaging has improved our understanding of the world and has been responsible for many scientific advances. Now, with the advent of spintronics and miniature magnetic devices, there is a growing need for imaging at nanometer scales to detect quantum properties of matter, such as electron spins, magnetic domain structure in ferromagnets, and magnetic vortices in superconductors.

Typically, this is done by complementing standard microscopy techniques, such as scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM), with magnetic sensors to create “scanning magnetometry probes” that can achieve nanoscale imaging and sensing. However, these probes often require ultrahigh vacuum conditions, extremely low temperatures, and are limited in spatial resolution by the probe size.

In this regard, nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond (defects in diamond structure formed by nitrogen atoms adjacent to “vacancies” created by missing atoms) have gained significant interest. The NV pair, it turns out, can be combined with AFM to accomplish local magnetic imaging and can operate at room temperature and pressures. However, fabricating these probes involve complex techniques that do not allow for much control over the probe shape and size.