Lifeboat Foundation

Evolutionary genomics approach identifies genes that enable plants to live in the Atacama Desert, offering clues for engineering more resilient crops to face climate change.

An international team of researchers has identified genes associated with plant survival in one of the harshest environments on Earth: the Atacama Desert in Chile. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), may help scientists breed resilient crops that can thrive in increasingly drier climates.

“In an era of accelerated climate change, it is critical to uncover the genetic basis to improve crop production and resilience under dry and nutrient-poor conditions,” said Gloria Coruzzi, Carroll & Milton Petrie Professor in the New York University (NYU) Department of Biology and Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, who co-led the study with Rodrigo Gutiérrez.

If you had told college-aged Anne, “22 years from now, you’re going to be leading a research group focused on AI,” I would have said you’re insane. It would not have been possible to make this shift into machine learning without having made friends with machine learning experts — particularly Jones.

After he and I finished our training at MIT, we started a lab together at the Broad Institute in 2,007 and we brainstormed a lot about how machine learning could help biologists. What allowed these ideas to percolate and develop was both of us hopping over the fence and getting familiar with the terminology and power of both sides, biology and computer science. It’s really a productive partnership.

And it’s not just Jones anymore. My group is about 50–50 in terms of people coming from the biology side versus the computational side.

Coacervate droplets (CDs) are a model for protocells formed by liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS), but protocell models able to proliferate remain undeveloped. Here, the authors report a proliferating peptide-based CD using synthesised amino acid thioesters as monomers, which could concentrate RNA and lipids, enabling RNA to protect the droplet from dissolution by lipids.

Visible light is extremely important in nature. Seen by the human eye, it is the most intense light emitted by the sun to reach the earth’s surface and is an essential element for fundamental biological processes underlying life. However, it is difficult to generate coherent visible light, like the light of a laser, that is intense for a short amount of time, in the order of the femtosecond.

A research team, directed by Professor Luca Razzari of the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), has successfully achieved this goal without using a complicated system. The results of their work were recently published in Nature Photonics.

What if aliens have passed beyond the biological stage and resemble artificial intelligence more than they resemble any expected living thing.

Anders Sandberg, University of Oxford.

One of the deepest realizations of the scientific understanding of the world that emerged in the 18th and 19th century is that the world is changing, that it has been radically different in the past, that it can be radically different in the future, and that such changes could spell the end of humanity as we know it. An added twist arrived in the 20th century: we could ourselves be the cause of our demise. In the late 20th century an interdisciplinary field studying global catastrophic and existential risks emerged, driven by philosophical concern about the moral weight of such risks and the realization that many such risks show important commonalities that may allow us as a species to mitigate them. For example, much of the total harm from nuclear wars, supervolcanic eruptions, meteor impacts and some biological risks comes from global agricultural collapse. This talk is going to be an overview of the world of low-probability, high-impact risks and their overlap with questions of complexity in the systems generating or responding to them. Understanding their complex dynamics may be a way of mitigating them and ensuring a happier future.

Continue reading “Global catastrophic and existential risks: the weightiest complex phenomena?” »

Georgia Tech scientists believe that microbes could be the key to producing the rocket fuel needed to take humans from Mars back to Earth.

Scientists at Rice University have created a material that will protect steel from corrosion. In fact, it will also be flexible and heal itself when damaged.

This material will be used as a coating and is made from a lightweight sulfur-selenium alloy. It will be able to block moisture and chlorine-like zinc-and chromium-based coatings, protect steel under seawater-like conditions like polymer-based coatings, keep it from microbe-induced corrosion.

The experiments carried out before the results comprised putting small slabs of common mild steel coated with sulfur-selenium alloy in seawater for a month, along with an uncoated slab of steel as a control. The coated steel did not oxidize.

Title: A data analysis of the first hermetic seal of SAM–a hi-fidelity, hybrid physicochemical and bioregenerative human habitat analog at the Biosphere 2

Track Code: AM-8

Continue reading “First Seal of Historic SAM Analog at Biosphere 2 — Kai Staats — 2021 Mars Society Virtual Convention” »