Lifeboat News: The Blog

A genetic thread stretches across five centuries, connecting living descendants to the Renaissance master through his prolific father—and newly excavated remains could prove it.

A new superconducting circuit from imec reaches record density, while its 30nm NbTiN wiring targets more scalable computing systems.

Physicists have directly observed a long-predicted quantum effect of gravity, putting one of Einstein’s foundational ideas to a striking new test. Using ultracold atoms, researchers split an atom’s quantum wave so that one part was held in place while the other fell freely under gravity, then reunited the two to measure the tiny difference that […]

Spaceflight can reproduce some changes associated with later life within weeks, offering clues about muscle loss, frailty and recovery.

Both the deterioration of the Florida Keys reef and the response to it took time. Staghorn and elkhorn corals grew so numerous throughout the Florida Reef Tract for decades that divers reported swimming through underwater thickets.

Neurodegeneration is a pathological condition in which nervous system or neuron losses its structure, function, or both leading to progressive neural degeneration. Growing evidence strongly suggests that reduction of plasmalogens (Pls), one of the key brain lipids, might be associated with multiple neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Plasmalogens are abundant members o…

Read our manuscript In the theory of partial differential equations (PDEs), an important problem is analyzing whether there is loss of regularity in finite time, even when there is smooth initial data. This is known as singularity formation, or blowups. A famous one is whether fluid dynamics represented by Navier-Stokes equations experiences such blowups, and […]

The human genome is about two meters (6.6 feet) long, yet it is folded inside a cell nucleus only about 10 micrometers in diameter. To fit into this tiny space, DNA is wrapped around histone proteins to form nucleosomes, which are further organized into chromatin. For decades, chromatin has often been described in two simple […]

Studies of visual discrimination in rodents can confound the effects of cue salience with reward value making it difficult to determine which factor guides choice behavior. We examined this issue by testing how changes in relative salience affect decision dynamics in rats (nine females and five males) performing a two-alternative forced-choice task with visual cues […]

A surprising immune system signal may help explain why zebrafish can regenerate damaged spinal cords so effectively. Researchers found that certain neutrophils release Il-4, which calms harmful inflammation and allows injured nerve fibers to grow again. Without these cells, healing stalled, but adding Il-4 restored regeneration. Scientists now want to know whether the same mechanism […]

A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 […]

See the most popular car colors in America in 2025 and how preferences have shifted since 1996.

🛰️ Kinéis + Netmore Make Hybrid Satellite Connectivity Plug-and-Play. Netmore has integrated Kinéis’ European satellite constellation into its LPWAN platform, delivering seamless hybrid terrestrial-satellite IoT connectivity. The key advantage: No custom hardware engineering required. Customers can deploy hybrid connectivity immediately through the existing platform, with automatic switching betw…

It’s dangerous because it makes the left look unrealistic and out-of-touch, whereas the future of AGI badly needs the left’s focus on compassion and inclusion

CRISPR/Cas9 has revolutionized genome-editing techniques in various biological fields including human cancer research. Cancer is a multi-step process that encompasses the accumulation of mutations that result in the hallmark of the malignant state. The goal of cancer research is to identify these mutations and correlate them with the underlying tumorigenic process. Using CRISPR/Cas9 tool, specifi…

Breast tissue regeneration is driven by cell-matrix interactions coordinating multi-lineage stem cell differentiation through DDR1. Mammary morphogenesis is a complex process. Here the authors describe how stem cells build a three-dimensional self-organizing multi-lineage tissue by showing that positional signals from the extracellular matrix through the collagen receptor DDR1 lead stem cells to …

Erectile dysfunction affects over 40% of men over 40, yet our understanding of the condition remains limited. Research on this issue has mostly relied on real organs, making it difficult to study the detailed interaction between blood flow and tissue during an erection. In a recent study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team of […]

3D-printed models of the penis can facilitate the study of penile physiology and the repair of penile defects, as shown via a reconstructed and implanted corpus cavernosum that restored erectile function and mating capacity in rabbits and pigs.