Lifeboat Foundation

The new groundbreaking Language Velocity Field (LVF) method is helping researchers trace dispersion patterns of languages, including Greek, across the world.

The spatial evolution of languages can help deepen our understanding of people diffusion and cultural spread. The language velocity field estimation is different from the frequently used phylogeographic approach which cannot fully explain the language evolution induced by the horizontal contact among languages, such as borrowing and areal diffusion.

Continue reading “New Study Sheds Light on Dispersion of Languages, Ancient DNA” »

The newly discovered Youti yuanshi larva fossil is so well-preserved that it provides a road map for arthropod evolution during the Cambrian period.

How do giant planets form and is this process slow or fast based on the amount of available dust used to build those planets? This is what a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany investigated how sub-micron-sized dust kicks off the planetary formation process within a protoplanetary disc. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of planets throughout our solar system and exoplanetary systems, as well.

For the study, the researchers developed first-of-its-kind model to involve all constituents responsible for the physical processes that from planets. Focusing on sub-micron-sized dust, they included factors such as pebble accumulation, planetary gas buildup, planetary migration, and dust buildup, among others. In the end, they found that ring-shaped disturbances in the protoplanetary disk, which they refer to as substructures, can result in multiple gas giants’ formation in rapid sequence.

Dr. Til Birnstiel, who is a professor of theoretical astrophysics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a co-author on the study, said: “When a planet gets large enough to influence the gas disk, this leads to renewed dust enrichment farther out in the disk. In the process, the planet drives the dust – like a sheepdog chasing its herd – into the area outside its own orbit.”

Analyzed the global trends in this area of neuroscience. To identify and further facilitate the development of cerebral organoids, we utilized bibliometrics and visualization methods to analyze the global trends and evolution of brain organoids in the last 10 years. First, annual publications, countries/regions, organizations, journals, authors, co-citations, and keywords relating to brain organoids were identified. The hotspots in this field were also systematically identified. Subsequently, current applications for brain organoids in neuroscience, including human neural development, neural disorders, infectious diseases, regenerative medicine, drug discovery, and toxicity assessment studies, are comprehensively discussed.

Sexual size dimorphism in mammals, often linked to sexual selection, can impacts genome evolution. This study finds sexual dimorphism in body size is associated with expanded gene families for olfactory functions and contracted gene families for brain development.

The Cartesian model of mind-body dualism concurs with religious traditions. However, science has supplanted this idea with an energy-matter theory of consciousness, where matter is equivalent to the body and energy replaces the mind or soul. This equivalency is analogous to the concept of the interchange of mass and energy as expressed by Einstein’s famous equation [Formula: see text]. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, provided the intellectual and theoretical framework for a theory of mind or consciousness. Any theory of consciousness must include the fact that a conscious entity, as far as is known, is a wet biological medium (the brain), of stupendously high entropy. This organ or entity generates a field that must account for the “binding problem”, which we will define. This proposed field, the conscious electro-magnetic information (CEMI) field, also has physical properties, which we will outline. We will also demonstrate the seamless transition of the Kantian philosophy of the a priori conception of space and time, the organs of perception and conception, into the CEMI field of consciousness. We will explore the concept of the CEMI field and its neurophysiological correlates, and in particular, synchronous and coherent gamma oscillations of various neuronal ensembles, as in William J Freeman’s experiments in the early 1970s with olfactory perception in rabbits. The expansion of the temporo-parietal-occipital (TPO) cortex in hominid evolution epitomizes metaphorical and abstract thinking. This area of the cortex, with synchronous thalamo-cortical oscillations has the best fit for a minimal neural correlate of consciousness. Our field theory shifts consciousness from an abstract idea to a tangible energy with defined properties and a mathematical framework. Even further, it is not a coincidence that the cerebral cortex is very thin with respect to the diameter of the brain. This is in keeping with its fantastically high entropy, as we see in the event horizon of a black hole and the conformal field theory/anti-de Sitter (CFT/ADS) holographic model of the universe. We adumbrate the uniqueness of consciousness of an advanced biological system such as the human brain and draw insight from Avicenna’s gendanken, floating man thought experiment. The multi-system high volume afferentation of a biological wet system honed after millions of years of evolution, its high entropy, and the CEMI field variation inducing currents in motor output pathways are proposed to spark the seeds of consciousness. We will also review Karl Friston’s free energy principle, the concept of belief-update in a Bayesian inference framework, the minimization of the divergence of prior and posterior probability distributions, and the entropy of the brain. We will streamline these highly technical papers, which view consciousness as a minimization principle akin to Hilbert’s action in deriving Einstein’s field equation or Feynman’s sum of histories in quantum mechanics. Consciousness here is interpreted as flow of probability densities on a Riemmanian manifold, where the gradient of ascent on this manifold across contour lines determines the magnitude of perception or the degree of update of the belief-system in a Bayesian inference model. Finally, the science of consciousness has transcended metaphysics and its study is now rooted in the latest advances of neurophysiology, neuro-radiology under the aegis of mathematics.

Keywords: anatomy & physiology; brain anatomy; disorders of consciousness; philosophy.

Copyright © 2020, Kesserwani et al.

“This discovery is exciting because the planet is quite similar to Jupiter — it is a little warmer and is more massive but is more similar to Jupiter than any other planet that has been imaged so far,” said Dr. Elisabeth Matthews.

How cold are exoplanets? This is what a recent study published in Nature hopes to address as a team of international scientists investigated Epsilon Indi Ab, which is located approximately 12 light-years from Earth and whose radius is slightly larger than Jupiter and just over three times as massive. What makes this study unique is this it was observed using the direct imaging method, which has only been conducted on approximately 25 exoplanets to date, and could help astronomers better understand the formation and evolution of not only Epsilon Indi Ab, but countless other exoplanets, as well.

Discovered in 2019, astronomers previously hypothesized the planetary properties of Epsilon Indi Ab based on data at the time. For this recent study, astronomers used JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and its coronagraph to directly image Epsilon Indi Ab, revealing much different properties while also identifying the planetary temperature of approximately 35 degrees Fahrenheit, making Epsilon Indi Ab the coldest exoplanet to date. Additionally, Epsilon Indi Ab was also found to have high metal contents within its atmosphere, specifically a high carbon-to-oxygen ratio.

Continue reading “Discovery of Epsilon Indi Ab: One of the Coldest Imaged Exoplanets” »

A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.

An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the RUBIES survey identified three mysterious objects in the early universe, about 600–800 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% of its current age. They announced the discovery today June 27 in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team studied spectral measurements, or intensity of different wavelengths of light emitted from the objects. Their analysis found signatures of “old” stars, hundreds of millions of years old, far older than expected in a young universe.

Selection rules play an important role in Darwinian evolution. Now, it has been shown that selective templation enables the purification of oligomer libraries in a coacervate model, and that the oligomer library can reversibly affect the coacervates’ fusion behaviour.