Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have created a method to produce 3D full-color holographic images using smartphone screens instead of lasers. This innovative technique, with additional advancements, holds the potential for augmented or virtual reality displays.

Whether augmented and virtual reality displays are being used for gaming, education, or other applications, incorporating 3D displays can create a more realistic and interactive user experience.

“Although holography techniques can create a very real-looking 3D representation of objects, traditional approaches aren’t practical because they rely on laser sources,” said research team leader Ryoichi Horisaki, from The University of Tokyo in Japan. “Lasers emit coherent light that is easy to control, but they make the system complex, expensive, and potentially harmful to the eyes.”

A UC San Diego team has uncovered a method to decipher neural networks’ learning process, using a statistical formula to clarify how features are learned, a breakthrough that promises more understandable and efficient AI systems. Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

Neural networks have been powering breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, including the large language models that are now being used in a wide range of applications, from finance, to human resources to healthcare. But these networks remain a black box whose inner workings engineers and scientists struggle to understand. Now, a team led by data and computer scientists at the University of California San Diego has given neural networks the equivalent of an X-ray to uncover how they actually learn.

The researchers found that a formula used in statistical analysis provides a streamlined mathematical description of how neural networks, such as GPT-2, a precursor to ChatGPT, learn relevant patterns in data, known as features. This formula also explains how neural networks use these relevant patterns to make predictions.

JAMA Network Open commentary focuses on the relationship of pain, depression, and anxiety.

Chronic pain is often accompanied by depression and anxiety. In an invited commentary published in JAMA Network Open, Kurt Kroenke, M.D., of Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, discusses the relationship between pain, the most common symptom for which individuals visit a physician, and depression and anxiety, the two most prevalent mental health conditions worldwide. He highlights the importance of not neglecting psychological symptoms in patients experiencing pain.

Understanding the Connection.

A collaborative research team has developed a method to connect lab-grown brain tissues, enhancing the understanding of brain development and functions, and paving the way for potential advancements in treating neurological conditions.

The idea of growing a functioning human brain-like tissues in a dish has always sounded pretty far-fetched, even to researchers in the field. Towards the future goal, a Japanese and French research team has developed a technique for connecting lab-grown brain-mimicking tissue in a way that resembles circuits in our brain.

Advancements in Neural Studies.

Astronomers detect long-sought compact object within the remnant of Supernova 1987A In February 1987, the closest supernova to Earth in almost 400 years exploded onto the scene. Designated Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), it resulted from the death of a massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy 160,000 light-years away. In the decades since, its remnant has been studied by telescopes at all wavelengths of light from X-rays to radio. Yet despite all the scrutiny, one mystery has remained.

A new study, published in the British Psychological Society’s British Journal of Psychology, reveals that regular gamers exhibit enhanced performance in tasks assessing cognitive functions, including attention and memory.

The study, which took place at the Lero Esports Science Research Lab at the University of Limerick, involved 88 young adults, half of whom regularly played more than seven hours of action-based video games each week.

Participants were tested with three tasks measuring different aspects of their cognitive performance – a simple reaction time test, a task that involved switching between responding to combinations of numbers and letters to evaluate executive function and working memory, and a maze-based activity to assess visuospatial memory.

Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know how to respond.

That’s the vision behind a new project from a team of engineers and chemists at the University of Colorado Boulder, California Institute of Technology, University of California Santa Barbara, and three companies. It’s funded by a new contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), part of the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The effort borrows its name, the Standoff Aerosol measUrement Remote Optical Network (SAURON), from the villain in “The Lord of the Rings” book series—a presence who often takes the form of a flaming eye and whose “gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth.”

We’ve all been there: staring at a math test with a problem that seems impossible to solve. What if finding the solution to a problem took almost a century? For mathematicians who dabble in Ramsey theory, this is very much the case. In fact, little progress had been made in solving Ramsey problems since the 1930s.

Now, University of California San Diego researchers Jacques Verstraete and Sam Mattheus have found the answer to r(4,t), a longstanding Ramsey problem that has perplexed the math world for decades.

Aalto University researchers are the first in the world to measure qubits with ultrasensitive thermal detectors—thus evading the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

Chasing ever-higher qubit counts in near-term quantum computers constantly demands new feats of engineering.

Among the troublesome hurdles of this scaling-up race is refining how qubits are measured. Devices called parametric amplifiers are traditionally used to do these measurements. But as the name suggests, the device amplifies weak signals picked up from the qubits to conduct the readout, which causes unwanted noise and can lead to decoherence of the qubits if not protected by additional large components. More importantly, the bulky size of the amplification chain becomes technically challenging to work around as qubit counts increase in size-limited refrigerators.