Lifeboat Foundation

Just as it’s hard to understand a conversation without knowing its context, it can be difficult for biologists to grasp the significance of gene expression without knowing a cell’s environment. To solve that problem, researchers at Princeton Engineering have developed a method to elucidate a cell’s surroundings so that biologists can make more meaning of gene expression information.

The researchers, led by Professor of Computer Science Ben Raphael, hope the new system will open the door to identifying rare cell types and choosing cancer treatment options with new precision. Raphael is the senior author of a paper describing the method published May 16 in Nature Methods.

The basic technique of linking gene expression with a cell’s environment, called spatial transcriptomics (ST), has been around for several years. Scientists break down tissue samples onto a microscale grid and link each spot on the grid with information about gene expression. The problem is that current computational tools can only analyze spatial patterns of gene expression in two dimensions. Experiments that use multiple slices from a single tissue sample—such as a region of a brain, heart or tumor—are difficult to synthesize into a complete picture of the cell types in the tissue.

Jesper AndersonNo. Nobody can “leave their body”. There is no evidence what so ever that this is possible.

What can be done is, copy many of your attributes and create a copy which behaves very much like you. But that’s simply an advanced method of writing a book. I… See more.

Craig Everett JonesAlthough neurons are much like transistors, our emotions are not just ones and zeroes. We feel things in our gut. I think singularity fans are grossly underestimating the dependencies between human consciousness and organic physiology. And, your b… See more.

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New laws are meant to prevent espionage and leaking.

Today we’re going to shine some light on Lumen, the fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system featured in Unreal Engine 5.

Our latest tech blog… See more.

Continue reading “Unreal Engine 5 goes all-in on dynamic global illumination with Lumen” »

Incredible and somewhat frightening visions of the future will become a reality in the coming decades. According to futurologists, people of the future will gain immortality and will live in the body of a machine. Dr. Ian Pearson predicts that a person will be able to transfer his mind into a computer and one day he will go to a funeral where his previous biological body will be buried. Like anomalien.com on Facebook To stay in touch & get our latest news Cyborgization has some good sides. Let us take into account that we will be able to exchange each of…

In the early 2000s, scientists from the Human Genome Project announced a breakthrough: they had sequenced the complete human reference genome, including all three billion DNA letter, a scientific undertaking likened at the time to landing astronauts on the Moon.

While the reference genome has come under question as of late, with scientists adding more than two million additional variants, it still doesn’t take a whole lot of space to store the entire sequence on a traditional computer.

And now, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is once again weighing in on an issue outside his expertise, arguing that one could “fit the DNA sequences of all humans alive today in a fairly small data storage system” — a vaguely terrifying thought coming from the richest man in the world, as if he didn’t already have enough fires to put out and problems to solve.

Stuart Firestein Science is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise. More than a cheery disposition, it is the source of a philosophical outlook that we might call ‘optimistical’. It reliably produces fundamental and actionable knowledge about the world. We are able to take for granted, in a way even our recent ancestors never imagined, the idea of progress. The engines behind science, surprisingly, are ignorance, the unknown, failure, and, perhaps most vexingly, uncertainty. In recent decades, science has undergone a change in perspective and practice — from viewing the universe like a clockwork regimented by laws and formulas to recognizing it as irreducibly complex and uncertain. Perhaps counter intuitively this has freed science to exploit previously unimaginable possibilities and opportunities. It has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of things and to the production of technologies such as lasers, microchips, the internet, genetics, and many more. And yet socially and societally we remain mired in a 19th century view of deterministic science. We might instead learn to revel in the adventure of navigable uncertainty and take advantage of the creative opportunities of a world where we can confidently say ‘it could be otherwise’. Possibility of this sort is the rarest and purest form of optimism. Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist and the former Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, where he researches the vertebrate olfactory system. He is also a member of SFI’s Fractal Faculty.

Researchers in Delft have succeeded in teleporting quantum information across a rudimentary network. This first of its kind is an important step towards a future quantum internet. This breakthrough was made possible by a greatly improved quantum memory and enhanced quality of the quantum links between the three nodes of the network. The researchers, working at QuTech—a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)—are publishing their findings today in the scientific journal Nature.

The power of a future quantum internet is based on the ability to send quantum information (quantum bits) between the nodes of the network. This will enable all kinds of applications such as securely sharing confidential information, linking several quantum computers together to increase their computing capability, and the use of highly precise, linked quantum sensors.

In addition to being a simple power source built from readily available parts and materials, the system runs day and night (in contrast with solar power). The algae, the team thinks, overproduces food during the day, so it continues to happily munch away, and produce electricity, through the night. Although the paper addresses their findings from just that first six-month period, their algae-powered-computer has now been running continuously for a year (and counting).

It’s a pretty nifty trick, but some scaling is probably in order. The system produces a tiny amount of current. The chip, an Arm Cortex M0+ commonly used in Internet of Things applications, sips just 0.3 microwatts an hour to perform very basic calculations. As The Verge notes, if your average laptop uses around 100 watts an hour, you’d need millions of these algae energy harvesters just to check your email or zone out in a Zoom meeting.

But the researchers aren’t targeting laptops. Rather, they believe future iterations would find a niche application powering the billions or trillions of simple sensors and chips making up the Internet of Things. These might take measurements of local conditions in remote locations, for example, or they might be able to charge a small device.