Lifeboat Foundation

The complex computer model takes into account weather and climate systems as well as our impact on the planet.

The Expedition 71 crew at the International Space Station is gearing up for a spacewalk focused on scientific and maintenance tasks, including the installation of a spare pump and the retrieval of faulty communications hardware. Additionally, Commercial Crew astronauts have extended their stay to facilitate further systems checks on the Starliner spacecraft. Amidst these preparations, the crew continues to engage in routine health checks and scientific experiments across various modules of the station.

Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Expedition 71 crew is getting ready for a spacewalk this week while two Commercial Crew astronauts will spend a few extra days. In addition, the orbital residents continued their advanced space research and conducted eye and ear exams on Monday.

As some entities identify new (or at least overlooked) sources to meet the growing demand for rare earth materials, others are looking toward new tools. UK deep-tech company Materials Nexus announced on Tuesday that it has designed a new rare-earth-free permanent magnet with the help of its AI platform. It says the AI-driven discovery and development process was 200 times faster than the resource-intensive manual route, bringing new hope to an electrifying world with a growing appetite for powerful magnets.

With the world moving away from internal combustion engines and gradually embracing electric mobility, the demand for compact, high-power motors is rapidly rising. By far the most popular option in the automotive industry right now is the permanent magnet motor, which powers upward of 80% of modern electric vehicles.

Materials Nexus estimates that demand for permanent magnets will grow tenfold by 2030, in the EV industry alone. And it’s not just electric cars and trucks, either. Permanent magnet motors are in demand for many applications, including robotics, drones, wind turbines and HVAC equipment.

The Boring Company, which is owned by Elon Musk, announced that it finished digging a multi-million-dollar tunnel for Tesla underneath Gigafactory Texas.

University of Copenhagen astrophysicists help explain a mysterious phenomenon, whereby stars suddenly vanish from the night sky. Their study of an unusual binary star system has resulted in convincing evidence that massive stars can completely collapse and become black holes without a supernova explosion.

One day, the star at the center of our own solar system, the Sun, will begin to expand until it engulfs Earth. It will then become increasingly unstable until it eventually contracts into a small and dense object known as a white dwarf.

However, if the Sun were of a weight class roughly eight times greater or more, it would probably go out with a huge bang — as a supernova. Its collapse would culminate into an explosion, ejecting energy and mass into space with enormous force, prior to leaving behind a neutron star or a black hole in its wake.

Currently available flu medications only target the virus after it has already established an infection, but what if a drug could prevent infection in the first place? Now, scientists at Scripps Research and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have designed drug-like molecules to do just that, by thwarting the first stage of influenza infection.

The drug-like inhibitors block the virus from entering the body’s respiratory cells — specifically, they target hemagglutinin, a protein on the surface of type A influenza viruses. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16, 2024, represent an important step forward in developing a drug that can prevent influenza infection.

“We’re trying to target the very first stage of influenza infection since it would be better to prevent infection in the first place, but these molecules could also be used to inhibit the spread of the virus after one’s infected,” says corresponding author Ian Wilson, DPhil, the Hansen Professor of Structural Biology at Scripps Research.

In recent years, my lab — or perhaps it’s just me — has developed an obsession with evolutionary transitions. The view that every gene originates from an ancestral state and undergoes impactful changes through its evolutionary journey, whether it’s the gain or loss of an activity or function. The challenge lies in meticulously mapping out these key evolutionary innovations that have significantly influenced function. Addressing this challenge is not merely interesting but absolutely essential in biology. Our aim as biologists transcends understanding how biological systems operate; we seek to unravel how they came to be. And the two questions are more connected than many think.

This post stems from my observation that molecular biologists sometimes appear indifferent to evolution, questioning its relevance to mechanistic research. It baffles me why the centrality of evolution in biology isn’t apparent to some. Maybe they’ve never taken a course on the subject, or perhaps they’ve never fully appreciated the profound concept that every organism and every gene is connected through an unbroken chain of descent to countless ancestors. This perspective holds profound implications for mechanistic molecular biology.

If you already appreciate the link between evolutionary biology and molecular mechanisms, you might find this post to be music to your ears. However, if you’re among those who question the value of evolutionary biology, I encourage you to stay with me; you might discover its significance in ways you hadn’t considered before.

May 2024 was the hottest May on record, marking a full annual cycle of monthly records, the longest ever recorded.

In research published earlier this year, physicists from the University of Hyderabad in India say they’re on the path to solving one of the universe’s biggest outstanding problems. Since Edwin Hubble realized the universe is always expanding nearly 100 years ago, scientists have used the “Hubble constant” in calculations on virtually every scale in the universe. But today, estimates for the Hubble constant don’t always align, with a difference of up to 10 percent between calculations made using different methods. (When someone at NASA mixes up meters and yards and loses an entire spacecraft, that’s not even a full 10 percent deviation.)

The paper appears in the peer reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. The journal has an ongoing, periodically updated “focus issue” specifically about this measurement tension, and the editors explain the problem there—scientists can’t say for sure that the different Hubble constants measured are actually different, rather than just observation or calibration issues.