Lifeboat Foundation

These days, movies and video games render increasingly realistic 3D images on 2-D screens, giving viewers the illusion of gazing into another world. For many physicists, though, keeping things flat is far more interesting.

One reason is that flat landscapes can unlock new movement patterns in the quantum world of atoms and electrons. For instance, shedding the third dimension enables an entirely new class of particles to emerge—particles that that don’t fit neatly into the two classes, bosons and fermions, provided by nature. These new particles, known as anyons, change in novel ways when they swap places, a feat that could one day power a special breed of quantum computer.

But anyons and the conditions that produce them have been exceedingly hard to spot in experiments. In a pair of papers published this week in Physical Review Letters, JQI Fellow Alexey Gorshkov and several collaborators proposed new ways of studying this unusual flat physics, suggesting that small numbers of constrained atoms could act as stand-ins for the finicky electrons first predicted to exhibit low-dimensional quirks.

A potent molecular cocktail containing a compound from ayahuasca spurs rapid growth of insulin-producing cells.

• By Emily Willingham on December 21, 2018

Happy holidays! The winter break is here, and LEAF too will shift to a lower gear for a little while, but on the plus side, our readers get the Rejuvenation Roundup early! Before we leave you to unwrapping presents and having dinner with the family, let’s recap what has been going on in the field of rejuvenation during the last month of the year.

HUGE skating rink?

The European Space Agency has shared an incredible composite image showing a 50-mile wide crater on Mars that is filled with water ice all year long.

Budding future colonists hoping for a white Christmas on Mars will be somewhat disappointed as the ESA has confirmed that sitting in the Korolev crater is, in fact, a thick block of water ice, not snow. The enormous, 82-kilometer-wide, 2-kilometer-deep “ice trap” could still be good for ice skating though.

We can now “hear” the universe thanks to these scientists.

How, in today’s world, could a cave this massive go undetected for so…

Today, the application of engineering methodologies to the rational modification of organisms is a persistent goal of synthetic biology. Most synthetic biologists describe biological engineering as a hierarchy, wherein parts (genes, DNA) are used to build devices (many genes together), which in turn can be used to construct systems (a series of many devices). The challenge in transforming synthetic biology into a true engineering discipline is that the parts, which are the rudimentary building blocks of higher-order constructions, are fundamentally limited by the rigor of their characterization. This is really the case in all established engineering disciplines. In electrical engineering, for instance, the baseline components (transistors, resistors, wires, etc.) have been characterized so well that children can use them and the resulting circuits behave as expected. Once all ‘parts’ are standardized, it may be possible for synthetic biologists to use individual DNA building blocks to construct entirely synthetic life forms from the bottom-up.

This working document constitutes a draft of the AI Ethics Guidelines produced by the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG), of which a final version is due in March 2019.

The mapping company StreetCred wants to pay a volunteer mapping army in cryptocurrency to carry out its data missions.