Scientists found that blocking a protein best known for its role in asthma enhances cancer immunotherapy in preclinical models.
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Researchers measure giant light-conversion effect in chiral carbon nanotubes
A sheet of twisted carbon nanotubes has revealed a hidden talent scientists suspected for decades but had never managed to measure.
Researchers at Rice University have created large, highly ordered films of chiral carbon nanotubes (CNTs), hollow cylinders of carbon atoms with either a left-or a right-handed twist. Measurements showed the crystalline films can convert the color of light at a rate two to three orders of magnitude greater than conventional materials.
The findings, reported in a study published in ACS Nano, confirm a long-standing theoretical prediction and point toward a future in which ultrathin carbon nanotube films could help power faster optical communications, flexible photonic chips and light-based computing systems that today exist mostly as prototypes.
Scientists Discovered A Record Number Of New Species In The Ocean Depths
Among the newly discovered species is the ‘ghost shark’ chimaera, a distant relative of sharks and rays, found in the Coral Sea. Other notable finds include symbiotic worms on volcanic seamounts in Japan and a striking new species of shrimp in Marseille, France. These discoveries highlight the diversity and complexity of life beneath the ocean surface.
Dr. Michelle Taylor, Head of Science at Ocean Census, emphasized the importance of these discoveries, stating, “We are in a race against time to understand and protect ocean life.” The Ocean Census is not only about finding new species but also generating evidence to drive global science and policy.
The discoveries provide crucial data for international agreements like the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. As the Census continues, its global network and open-access platform, NOVA, will ensure that this critical data informs global decision-making.
To study how chips really work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
When security researchers want to understand what a modern processor is really doing with the kind of detail that determines whether attacks like Spectre and Meltdown are possible, they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple’s platforms, slated for deprecation.
A team at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) decided to build something different. Fractal, a new operating system kernel written from the ground up, treats the hardware itself as the object of study. Its first major use, a deep look at the branch predictors (CPU’s way of guessing what code to run next before it knows for certain), so it doesn’t have to waste time waiting to find out) inside Apple’s M1 processor, has already turned up findings that prior work missed, including the first evidence that a class of speculative attack known as “Phantom” affects Apple Silicon.
“We’re using hardware in ways it wasn’t designed for,” says Joseph Ravichandran, the MIT PhD student who led the project. “It’s not even obvious that this is a possible thing you could do with the hardware. But we found a way to pull all these different primitives off. It’s like a microscope. If you’ve got a hand magnifying glass, you can see a little bit. But if you had an electron microscope, now we’re really talking. That’s what Fractal is. The electron microscope of operating systems.”
Chickens Hatch From World’s First Artificial Eggs
On May 19, Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences, which last year made headlines when it effectively de-extincted the dire wolf, announced that it had hatched a flock of 26 live chicks from fully artificial eggs. The technology behind the breakthrough can be later applied to bring back the dodo and New Zealand’s giant, flightless moa—both on Colossal’s de-extinction ‘to do’ list…
…Designing an artificial shell is not easy because a natural shell is deceptively complex. Made principally of calcium carbonate arranged in a crystalline structure, a typical egg shell is no more than 0.4 mm thick, and covered with up to 17,000 tiny pores to allow for gas exchange with the ambient atmosphere—carbon dioxide out, and oxygen in. There are, too, a pair of slick inner membranes in the egg that perform another critical function, protecting the growing chick from invading bacteria. But those membranes have to be exceedingly thin…
…The egg Colossal invented was very different. The inner membranes were made of vanishingly thin silicon using a proprietary technology that Colossal is planning to patent. The shell itself was only about two-thirds of a shell—a titanium structure that resembles nothing so much as a soft-boiled-egg cup with its top missing, albeit with hundreds of hexagonal pores to allow for gas exchange. Once a few dozen of the titanium eggs were manufactured, Colossal gathered fertilized chicken eggs from an avian farm the company owns and operates and transported them to the lab. There, the scientists gently opened the top of the egg and transferred the yolk and the white and the tiny embryo onto the titanium egg cup and covered the cup with a transparent lid. The embryos were about three days past fertilization when they were transferred, meaning that they had 18 days remaining in their three-week incubation cycle.
‘We place the egg into an incubator that controls the environment,’ says Lambert. ‘We then collect visual images at periodic milestones to understand how development is progressing.’ When the incubation period was done, the chicks began ‘pipping,’ using their beaks to break through the membrane just the way an ordinary chick breaks through its shell. Eventually, the 26 chicks were moved to the same Texas farm from which their eggs were collected, where they can live out their five to 10 year lifespan.
The breakthrough could help bring giant birds back from extinction.
The Cognitive Scientist Who Says You Don’t Exist | Joscha Bach
The AI theorist who thinks consciousness is a software agent — and that God, AGI, and the apocalypse are all pointing at the same thing.
What you call \.
Is materialism holding science back? | Adam Frank, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Levin
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Levin and Adam Frank discuss whether science should abandon its materialist framework.
Could a different metaphysics help science to progress further?
With a free trial, you can watch the full debate NOW at https://iai.tv/video/science-beyond-t… centuries, we’ve assumed that science has banished the transcendent and established that reality is entirely physical. But critics argue there are signs that a rigorous materialism might be holding science back. Increasingly, “emergence” is used to account for everything from consciousness to spacetime – a convenient placeholder for what materialist science may be unable to explain. Physicists like Heisenberg and Hawking concluded that science gives us models of reality, rather than final descriptions of its true nature, while there are scientists working in everything from biology to computer science who suggest that dualism is a productive metaphysical framework for their research. Materialism may have enabled science to reach beyond the dogmas of religion, but there are now those who are restlessly probing the limits of materialism itself. Does science need to assume a materialist account of the world or might this have fundamental limitations? Could a different metaphysics help science make progress on key questions, from the origin of life to the mysteries of quantum gravity? Or would abandoning materialism risk returning us to the myths of superstition and religion? #science #materialism #metaphysics Lisa Feldman Barrett is among the most cited scientists in the world for her research on the psychology and neuroscience of emotions. Adam Frank is an astrophysicist who explores the origins of stars, civilizations and consciousness, and is a leading figure in astrobiology and the search for alien life. Michael Levin is a synthetic biologist whose pioneering work in regenerative biology involves building biological robots to probe the nature of life, intelligence and evolution. Güneş Taylor hosts. The Institute of Art and Ideas features videos and articles from cutting edge thinkers discussing the ideas that are shaping the world, from metaphysics to string theory, technology to democracy, aesthetics to genetics. Subscribe today! https://iai.tv/subscribe?utm_source=Y… 0:00 Intro 1:34 Science cannot reveal objective reality 5:28 — History shows that materialism is one of many philosophies of science 8:59 There are some mathematical facts which are discovered, not chosen 12:14 Does materialism prevent mythical and superstitious views of reality? 14:56 There is no 3rd person view of the universe 18:05 Is science truly reproducible? For debates and talks: https://iai.tv For articles: https://iai.tv/articles For courses: https://iai.tv/iai-academy/courses.
For centuries, we’ve assumed that science has banished the transcendent and established that reality is entirely physical. But critics argue there are signs that a rigorous materialism might be holding science back. Increasingly, “emergence” is used to account for everything from consciousness to spacetime – a convenient placeholder for what materialist science may be unable to explain. Physicists like Heisenberg and Hawking concluded that science gives us models of reality, rather than final descriptions of its true nature, while there are scientists working in everything from biology to computer science who suggest that dualism is a productive metaphysical framework for their research. Materialism may have enabled science to reach beyond the dogmas of religion, but there are now those who are restlessly probing the limits of materialism itself.
Does science need to assume a materialist account of the world or might this have fundamental limitations? Could a different metaphysics help science make progress on key questions, from the origin of life to the mysteries of quantum gravity? Or would abandoning materialism risk returning us to the myths of superstition and religion?
#science #materialism #metaphysics.
New Quantum Processing Technology Points to Life After the Transistor, Maybe
Research finds that encoding 1s and 0s with electrons’ quantum spin is fast and power-efficient.