Lifeboat Foundation

From “Star Trek” replicators to Richie Rich’s wishing machine, popular culture has a long history of parading flashy machines that can instantly output any item. While 3D printers have now made it possible to produce a range of objects that include product models, jewelry, and novelty toys, we still lack the ability to fabricate more complex devices that are essentially ready-to-go right out of the printer.

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The UAE’s orbiter reaches Mars on Tuesday, followed less than 24 hours later by China’s orbiter-rover combo. NASA’s Perseverance rover is due to land on February 18.

Continue reading “Next stop Mars: Three spacecraft arriving at Red Planet from tomorrow” »

Very promising, machines like this one will help in the desert or in drought condions, even in Mars.

GE Research’s atmospheric water extraction device could supply up to 150 soldiers with water.

A Chinese startup on Monday launched the country’s first homegrown operating system (OS) for quantum computers in Hefei, capital of eastern China’s Anhui Province, according to a local media report.

Placed quite down in the periodic table with the atomic number 99, Einsteinium is the seventh transuranic element.

SARS-CoV-2 mutations similar to those in the B1.1.7 UK variant could arise in cases of chronic infection, where treatment over an extended period can provide the virus multiple opportunities to evolve, say scientists.

Writing in Nature, a team led by Cambridge researchers report how they were able to observe SARS-CoV-2 mutating in the case of an immunocompromised patient treated with convalescent plasma. In particular, they saw the emergence of a key mutation also seen in the new variant that led to the UK being forced once again into strict lockdown, though there is no suggestion that the variant originated from this patient.

Using a synthetic version of the virus Spike protein created in the lab, the team showed that specific changes to its genetic code — the mutation seen in the B1.1.7 variant — made the virus twice as infectious on cells as the more common strain.

Continue reading “New Research Highlights Risk of New COVID Mutations Emerging During Chronic Infection” »

New enzyme catalysts are usually engineered by repurposing the active sites of natural proteins. Here we show that design and directed evolution can be used to transform a non-natural, functionally naive zinc-binding protein into a highly active catalyst for an abiological hetero-Diels–Alder reaction. The artificial metalloenzyme achieves 10⁴ turnovers per active site, exerts absolute control over reaction pathway and product stereochemistry, and displays a catalytic proficiency (1/K_TS = 2.9 × 10¹⁰ M⁻¹) that exceeds all previously characterized Diels–Alderases. These properties capitalize on effective Lewis acid catalysis, a chemical strategy for accelerating Diels–Alder reactions common in the laboratory but so far unknown in nature. Extension of this approach to other metal ions and other de novo scaffolds may propel the design field in exciting new directions.

Reactions at the interface between water and other phases play important roles in various chemical settings. Now, ultrafast phase-sensitive interface-selective vibrational spectroscopy has revealed that the photoionization of phenol can occur four orders of magnitude faster at the water surface than in the bulk aqueous phase.

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, scientists in the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work characterizing its properties and hunting down the diverse ways in which this ephemeral particle can decay. From the copious but experimentally challenging decay to b-quarks, to the exquisitely rare but low-background decay into four leptons, each offers a different avenue to study the properties of this new particle. Now, ATLAS has found first evidence of the Higgs boson decaying to two leptons (either an electron or a muon pair with opposite charge) and a photon. Known as “Dalitz decay,” this is one of the rarest Higgs boson decays yet seen at the LHC.