Julia and I are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of David Botstein, one of the first winners the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. A great scientist, whose pioneering work in genetics, genomics and the science of aging will be remembered.
“It’s like connecting AI scientists with human scientists.” A European team has developed an AI system that cannot only predict complex non-linear dynamics, but capture them in compact equations that scientists can understand.
https://t.co/uF449khzkr
Another potential key in the fight against aging: Japanese researchers have extended mouse lifespans by boosting a single mitochondrial protein that supports energy production.
https://t.co/1crvw6bqUt
It’s remarkable the reach that fundamental knowledge gives us. Astronomers have used gravitational microlensing to directly measure the mass of a free-floating planet with no host star, wandering alone through a galaxy nearly 10,000 light-years away.
https://t.co/2eK8nQ16n1
AI is driving discoveries across science. A machine learning pattern recognition system has discerned the oldest chemical signature of life on Earth – 3.33-billion-year-old carbon residues undetectable by human analysts alone.
https://t.co/tDjKwSVjD5
Survey biases may miss many stars hosting habitable planets. Andrew Siemion and his colleagues used simulations to identify optimal wavelength bands for detecting technosignatures from hidden star systems, and applied their method to data from Breakthrough Listen's Enriquez/Price survey.
https://t.co/kQZEb2rNU3
Could a single vaccine prevent multiple cancers? A nanoparticle vaccine kept mice cancer-free against both pancreatic cancer and melanoma, training immunity to destroy nascent tumors before they form.
https://t.co/IIcP18jdGK
The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics strikes again. Biologists are using mathematical tools from string theory to model natural networks — vascular, neural, ecological — revealing universal rules that may govern how nature organizes branching patterns.
https://t.co/5hEBWsxfNr
The MeerKAT telescope in South Africa has spotted the longest spinning structure ever observed – a filament of hundreds of galaxies stretching at least 49 million light-years long. A remarkable glimpse of the dynamics of the cosmic web.
https://t.co/rV3MZH5tzB
After two decades of distributed computing, SETI@home has released its final analysis. Researchers reduced 12 billion candidate signals to about 100 promising detections—now being re-observed with China's FAST telescope.
https://t.co/W8yrBEFAnl
The battle against pathogens pits their speed of evolution against our speed of thought. But our speed of thought is now getting amplified. For the first time, an AI has designed the genome of a functional bacteriophage virus which successfully killed antibiotic-resistant E. coli.
https://t.co/EraQ6eo8gm
How liveable is our local neighborhood? A new survey of over 2,000 nearby K dwarf stars has identified the best potential real estate for life within 130 light-years. These long-lived, stable stars form a foundational catalog for future habitability studies and direct imaging targets.
https://t.co/DBXMGEDp78
It’s exciting to see quantum systems scaling up. Caltech engineers have constructed a programmable quantum simulator with 6,100 trapped ions – the largest qubit array ever created – maintaining high-fidelity entanglement across thousands of particles.
https://t.co/0zltNh1Svz
Alberto Ascherio and Stephen Hauser won last year’s @brkthroughprize for showing that the Epstein-Barr virus is the primary cause of multiple sclerosis. Now researchers have shown it is also implicated in lupus.
https://t.co/rr4Xwzt1uv
The formation of entire planetary systems can now be simulated in seconds instead of weeks. Training an AI led to a system that works a million times faster than traditional supercomputers.
https://t.co/Xl0YxLpkH8
Pete Worden puts the Perseverance rover’s discovery of fossil-like structures on Mars in context in this summary of current thinking on the possibility that life originated beyond our planet – including Breakthrough Listen’s role in the search.
https://t.co/3YiYymMTsR
In biology fundamental systems are still coming to light. 3 years ago the @brkthroughprize recognized the discovery of liquid condensates, a new system of cellular organization. Now it turns out they enable a previously unknown mode of electrical transmission inside cells.
https://t.co/JOerM7nmM9
After nearly a century of searching, could physicists have detected dark matter? Subtracting the signals of known physics from the gamma rays emitted from the edge of the Milky Way leaves a residue matching the predicted signal of WIMP dark matter annihilation. It will be fascinating to see how this develops.
https://t.co/PioZBpVDwG
Ten years after its first detection, LIGO can now capture gravitational waves so clearly that scientists can hear both the collision and the "ringdown" of merging black holes – and confirm Stephen Hawking's prediction that black hole areas cannot shrink.
https://t.co/aOrMkHcI1h
It’s great to see private initiatives investing in fundamental science, like Schmidt Sciences with its ambitious new Lazuli space telescope. Exploration and understanding of our Universe is a mission all of humanity can be part of.
https://t.co/8hpPl6QbII