Lifeboat Foundation

Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than was previously thought. What does this reveal about our night-time brain?

Recently, astronomers observing the sky received a shocking discovery. They found a large galaxy in a hitherto unexplored part of our galaxy. It materialized suddenly out of thin air.

So, how did the galaxy known as Crater 2 accomplish this, similar to a deer springing from cosmic bushes to look into our collective headlights? Although Crater 2 may appear to have suddenly appeared, he has been around the entire time. We just disregarded it.

However, now that we are aware of its existence, astronomers have uncovered a number of embarrassing characteristics. We cannot ascribe the galaxy’s relative obscurity to its size to begin with. Crater 2 is so enormous that it has already been identified as the fourth biggest galaxy inside the orbit of our galaxy. We also cannot blame its remoteness. Crater 2’s orbit around the Milky Way brings it directly overhead.

Stargazers across Wales were able to witness Venus, Jupiter and the Moon aligned in the night sky on Thursday.

Researchers have discovered a new, innermost layer nestled inside our planet’s inner core, a 400-miles solid metallic ball that responds to the reverberating shockwaves of earthquakes in an unexpected way.

As detailed in a new paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications, a team of two seismologists from the Australian National University found that the Earth has an “innermost inner core,” which may have been formed following a “significant global event from the past.”

“Clearly, the innermost inner core has something different from the outer layer,” lead author Thanh-Son Pham, a seismologist at the Australian National University, told The Washington Post. “We think that the way the atoms are [packed] in these two regions are slightly different.”

Geoengineering gone awry a partial solution to the fermi paradox.

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The human fingertip is an exquisitely sensitive instrument for perceiving objects in our environment via the sense of touch. A team of Chinese scientists has mimicked the underlying perceptual mechanism to create a bionic finger with an integrated tactile feedback system capable of poking at complex objects to map out details below the surface layer, according to a recent paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“We were inspired by human fingers, which have the most sensitive tactile perception that we know of,” said co-author Jianyi Luo of Wuyi University. “For example, when we touch our own bodies with our fingers, we can sense not only the texture of our skin, but also the outline of the bone beneath it. This tactile technology opens up a non-optical way for the nondestructive testing of the human body and flexible electronics.”

According to the authors, previously developed artificial tactile sensors could only recognize and discriminate between external shapes, surface textures, and hardness. But they aren’t capable of sensing subsurface information about those materials. This usually requires optical technologies, such as CT scanning, PET scans, ultrasonic tomography (which scans the exterior of a material to reconstruct an image of its internal structure), or MRIs, for example. But all of these methods also have drawbacks. Similarly, optical profilometry is often used to measure the surface’s profile and finish, but it only works on transparent materials.

It hasn’t existed since the beginning of time itself, but now scientists have managed to create what they call quark soup. This substance is believed to be the smallest, hottest, and densest state of our universe and the very “soup” that allowed the universe to grow and expand into what we know it as today.

The feat was made possible thanks to a powerful yet very complicated particle accelerator. According to research featured in a video by Scientific American, the universe began as a quark soup — the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of our atoms. Scientists say these quarks floated in a fluid-like force that held them all together inside their proton and neutrons.

Continue reading “Particle accelerator creates substance that hasn’t existed for 13 billion years” »

M92 is a globular cluster full of stars.

Substance use disorder (SUD) is an extremely difficult disorder to overcome, and many individuals with SUD return to regular use after repeated attempts to quit.

A return to regular drug use can be caused by the body’s physical dependence on the drug as well as experiences associated with prior drug use. Exactly how these drug associations are formed in the brain and how they trigger a return to drug use remain unclear.

“Individuals make long-lasting associations between the euphoric experience of the drug and the people, places and things associated with drug use,” said Christopher Cowan, Ph.D. professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and member of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation Scientific Council.