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Feb 21, 2024

Scientists unlock key to reversible, non-hormonal male birth control

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, sex

The team found that administering an HDAC inhibitor orally effectively halted sperm production and fertility in mice while preserving the sex drive.


Researchers are grappling with the challenge of developing effective male contraceptives as existing attempts to block sperm production, maturation, or fertilization have fallen short, either offering incomplete protection or leading to severe side effects.

Now, a team of researchers at the Salk Institute in the US has developed a novel approach to halting sperm production, which is both non-hormonal and reversible, marking a significant advancement in male contraception research.

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Feb 21, 2024

MIT unveils adaptive smart glove that makes touch the teacher

Posted by in categories: education, robotics/AI, virtual reality

MIT researchers unveil a revolutionary smart glove integrating tactile feedback for enhanced learning, robotics, and virtual reality interactions.


Discover how MIT’s new smart glove is transforming education, robotics, and virtual reality experiences with personalized tactile feedback.

Feb 21, 2024

New technology can reveal what’s hidden behind objects using algorithm

Posted by in categories: information science, law enforcement, mathematics, virtual reality

The technology can reconstruct a hidden scene in just minutes using advanced mathematical algorithms.


Potential use case scenarios

Law enforcement agencies could use the technology to gather critical information about a crime scene without disturbing the evidence. This could be especially useful in cases where the scene is dangerous or difficult to access. For example, the technology could be used to reconstruct the scene of a shooting or a hostage situation from a safe distance.

Continue reading “New technology can reveal what’s hidden behind objects using algorithm” »

Feb 21, 2024

Chinese scientists develop dry water extinguisher, tackle LIB fires

Posted by in category: innovation

The compound showed enhanced heat absorption due to quicker evaporation, superior cooling in suppressing TR propagation, and high water content with low conductivity.


Researchers propose ‘dry water’ as the breakthrough solution for extinguishing lithium-ion battery fires, easing global fire department concerns.

Feb 21, 2024

Let’s build the GPT Tokenizer

Posted by in categories: health, information science, robotics/AI

W/ Andrej Karpathy


The Tokenizer is a necessary and pervasive component of Large Language Models (LLMs), where it translates between strings and tokens (text chunks). Tokenizers are a completely separate stage of the LLM pipeline: they have their own training sets, training algorithms (Byte Pair Encoding), and after training implement two fundamental functions: encode() from strings to tokens, and decode() back from tokens to strings. In this lecture we build from scratch the Tokenizer used in the GPT series from OpenAI. In the process, we will see that a lot of weird behaviors and problems of LLMs actually trace back to tokenization. We’ll go through a number of these issues, discuss why tokenization is at fault, and why someone out there ideally finds a way to delete this stage entirely.

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Feb 21, 2024

Inexpensive device that can harvest energy from a light breeze and store it as electricity

Posted by in categories: computing, mobile phones

Researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (NTU Singapore) have created a low-cost tool that can capture power from wind energy as moderate as a light breeze.

The gadget can create a voltage of three volts and energy power of up to 290 microwatts when exposed to winds with speeds as low as 2 meters per second (m/s). This is enough to power a commercial sensor device and allow it to transfer data to a smartphone or computer.

Feb 21, 2024

Finding a food-cancer connection: How what you eat might affect your cancer risk

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

This study reveals a mechanism by which the environment, diet in this case, can influence cancer risk.

Feb 21, 2024

The Brain Of Colonel Barham

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space

“With the world growing more crowded, the great powers strive to conquer other planets. The race is on. The interplanetary sea has been charted; the first caravelle of space is being constructed. Who will get there first? Who will be the new Columbus?” A robot probe is being readied to explore the secrets of the red planet, Mars. The only component lacking: a human brain. No body. Just the brain. It is needed to deal with unexpected crises in the cold, dark depths of space. The perfect volunteer is found in Colonel Barham, a brilliant but hot-tempered astronaut dying of leukemia. But all goes awry as, stripped of his mortal flesh, Barham — or rather his disembodied brain — is consumed with a newly-found power to control…or destroy. Project psychiatrist Major McKinnon (Grant Williams) diagnoses the brain as having delusions of grandeur…but, just perhaps, Col. Barham has achieved grandeur.

Feb 21, 2024

New ‘supermolecule’ demonstrated for the first time at record-breaking ultracold temperature

Posted by in categories: chemistry, quantum physics

Largest polyatomic molecule created and stabilised at just above absolute zero provides new insights into quantum chemistry.

Feb 21, 2024

Self-propelling nanobots shrink bladder tumours in mice by 90%

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, nanotechnology

Imagine an army of self-propelling, radioisotope-covered particles 2,500 to 10,000 times smaller than a speck of dust that, upon injection into the body, search for and attach themselves to cancerous tumours, destroying them. Sounds like science fiction? Not so for mice with bladder cancer.

Researchers in Spain report that nanoparticles containing radioactive iodine and which propel themselves upon reaction with urea have the ability to distinguish cancerous bladder tumours from healthy tissue. These “nanobots” penetrate the tumour’s extracellular matrix and accumulate within it, enabling the radionuclide therapy to reach its precise target. In a study conducted at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) in Barcelona, mice receiving a single dose of this treatment had a 90% reduction in the size of bladder tumours compared with untreated animals.

This novel approach may one day revolutionize the treatment of bladder cancer. Bladder cancer is the tenth most common cancer in the world, with over 600,000 new cases diagnosed in 2022 and more than 220,000 deaths globally, according to the World Health Organization’s Global Cancer Observatory.

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