Lifeboat Foundation

Living things act with purpose. But where does purpose come from? How do humans make sense of their relation to the world and realize their ability to effect change? These fundamental questions of agency – acting with purpose – have perplexed some of the greatest minds in history including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Erwin Schrödinger, and Niels Bohr.

New research from Florida Atlantic University reveals groundbreaking insight into the origins of agency using an unusual and largely untapped source – human babies. Since goal-directed action appears in the first months of human life, the FAU research team used young infants as a test field to understand how spontaneous movement transforms into purposeful action.

For the study, infants began the experiment as disconnected observers. However, when researchers tethered one of the infants’ feet to a crib-mounted baby mobile, infants discovered they could make the mobile move. To catch this moment of realization like lightning in a bottle, researchers measured infant and mobile movement in 3D space using cutting-edge motion capture technology to uncover dynamic and coordinative features marking the “birth of agency.”

For the first time, a team from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has synthesized a thin film of a unique topological semimetal material that has the potential to generate more computing power and memory storage while using significantly less energy. Additionally, the team’s close examination of the material yielded crucial insights into the physics behind its unique properties.

The study was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

The universe naturally gravitates towards disorder, and only through the input of energy can we combat this inevitable chaos. This idea is encapsulated in the concept of entropy, evident in everyday phenomena like ice melting, fires burning, and water boiling. However, zentropy theory introduces an additional layer to this understanding.

This theory was developed by a team led by Zi-Kui Liu, the distinguished Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State. The “Z” in zentropy is derived from the German term “Zustandssumm,” which translates to the “sum over states” of entropy.

Alternatively, Liu said, zentropy may be considered as a play on the term “zen” from Buddhism and entropy to gain insight on the nature of a system. The idea, Liu said, is to consider how entropy can occur over multiple scales within a system to help predict potential outcomes of the system when influenced by its surroundings.

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), which store energy leveraging the reversible reduction of lithium ions, power most devices and electronics on the market today. Due to their wide range of operating temperatures, long lifespan, small size, fast charging times and compatibility with existing manufacturing processes, these rechargeable batteries can greatly contribute to the electronics industry, while also supporting ongoing efforts towards carbon neutrality.

The affordable and eco-friendly recycling of used LIBs is a long sought-after goal in the energy sector, as it would improve the sustainability of these batteries. Existing methods, however, are often ineffective, expensive or harmful to the environment.

Moreover, LIBs heavily rely on materials that are becoming less abundant on Earth, such as cobalt and lithium. Approaches that enable the reliable and cost-effective extraction of these materials from spent batteries would drastically reduce the need to source these materials elsewhere, thus helping to meet the growing LIB demand.

Researchers at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil have developed a strategy for removing glyphosate, one of the world’s most frequently used herbicides, from water. Inspired by the concept of the circular economy, the technique is based on sugarcane bagasse, a waste material produced by sugar and ethanol plants.

“Isolated and chemically functionalized sugarcane bagasse fibers can be used as adsorbent material. Glyphosate adheres to its surface and is removed as a water contaminant by filtration, decantation or centrifugation,” Maria Vitória Guimarães Leal, told Agência FAPESP.

She is the first author of an article on the research published in the journal Pure and Applied Chemistry. Adsorption is a process whereby molecules dispersed in a liquid or gaseous medium adhere to a solid insoluble surface, which is typically porous.

Insights into healing and aging were discovered by National Institutes of Health researchers and their collaborators, who studied how a tiny sea creature regenerates an entire new body from only its mouth. The researchers sequenced RNA from Hydractinia symbiolongicarpus, a small, tube-shaped animal that lives on the shells of hermit crabs. Just as the Hydractinia were beginning to regenerate new bodies, the researchers detected a molecular signature associated with the biological process of aging, also known as senescence. According to the study published in Cell Reports, Hydractinia demonstrates that the fundamental biological processes of healing and aging are intertwined, providing new perspective on how aging evolved.

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/scientists-dis…a-creature

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Here’s how to take some control of your data while using artificial intelligence tools and apps.

Using a metallic grating and infrared light, researchers have uncovered a light–matter coupling regime where the local coupling strength can be 3.5 times higher than the global average for the material.

Two or more linear defects can twist around one another to form an entity that may affect the properties of a material.

Systems made from ordered components, such as crystals, are often laced with defects, such as dislocations, where the ordering is disrupted. Researchers have now identified a new class of such flaws where two or more dislocations come together and become locked into complex geometrical arrangements, such as coils or knots, that can’t be smoothed away [1]. Using microscopy experiments backed up by theoretical arguments, they have identified such coiled “metadefects” in thin films of liquid crystals. The researchers believe that in crystalline materials, metadefects might influence mechanical properties such as plasticity. And since defects may feature in systems ranging from the structure of spacetime to magnets and bacterial colonies, the research team suspects that this new class may show up in other places.

Many liquid crystals are composed of rod-shaped molecules that can become oriented relative to one another while remaining free to move around. One of the phases that some of these materials can adopt is called cholesteric, a periodic pattern in which the orientation of the molecules twists like the steps in a spiral staircase. At each “step” of the staircase, all of the molecules are aligned. Defects in this organized structure typically show up as dark lines when thin films of cholesteric liquid crystals are examined under a microscope.