Lifeboat Foundation

The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to learn how the human brain gives rise to human intelligence and what it means to be intelligent. Understanding how the brain works is considered one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Jeff Hawkins thinks that the reality we perceive is a kind of simulation, a hallucination, a confabulation. He thinks that our brains are a model reality based on thousands of information streams originating from the sensors in our body. Critically — Hawkins doesn’t think there is just one model but rather; thousands.

Continue reading “Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory)” »

A spectacular portrait of the galaxy Centaurus A has been captured by astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. This galaxy’s peculiar appearance—cloaked in dark tendrils of dust—stems from a past interaction with another galaxy, and its size and proximity to Earth make it one of the best-studied giant galaxies in the night sky.

The galaxy Centaurus A, which lies over 12 million light-years away in the direction of the southern-hemisphere constellation Centaurus (The Centaur), is the leading light of this striking image. This image provides a spectacular view of the luminous glow of stars and the dark tendrils of dust that hide the bright center of the galaxy. This dust is the result of a past galactic collision, in which a giant elliptical galaxy merged with a smaller spiral galaxy. As well as large amounts of gas and dust, Centaurus A’s dust lane contains widespread star formation, as indicated by the red clouds of hydrogen and by the large number of faint blue stars visible at each end of the dust lane.

Continue reading “Dark Energy Camera captures detailed view of striking peculiar galaxy” »

Integrated circuits (ICs) based on organic transistors have many valuable applications, for instance, in the fabrication of paper-like displays or other large-area electronic components. Over the past few decades, electronics engineers worldwide have developed a variety of these transistors.

A promising alternative to these transistors are vertical-channel dual-gate organic thin-film transistors. These transistors have several advantageous properties, such as short channel lengths and tuneable threshold voltages (VTH). Despite these advantages, due to a lack appropriate p-and n-type devices, developing complementary inverter circuits for these transistors has so far proved challenging.

Researchers at Technische Universitat Dresden, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden Rossendorf (HZDR) and Northwestern Polytechnical University have recently developed vertical organic permeable dual-base transistors that could be integrated in logic circuits. In a recent paper published in Nature Electronics, they evaluated the potential use of these transistors in complex integrated circuits.

“There’s nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera.”

The US Army is seeking to develop a high-altitude warfare sensor that can fly over enemy territories, transmit data, and potentially even work as a jammer to disrupt an adversary’s communications system.

The project is called High-Altitude Extended-Range Long Endurance Intelligence Observation System, or HELEIOS.

Army capability manager for electronic warfare, Col. Daniel Holland, provided some key details about the device during a military forum on August 17 Army Times reported. HELEIOS will see a sensor attached to a solar glide device or an observation balloon, Holland explained.

Aerospace giant Honeywell is teaming up with anti-jamming expert InfiniDome to develop a new drone sensor capable of enhancing GPS resiliency when signals are weak or experiencing blockages. The new tech, which is being designed for defense and commercial users alike, is expected to hit markets during the first semester of next year.

Drones being flown for all sorts of purposes rely on GPS signals for situational referencing and carrying out tasks assigned to particular locations. The importance of maintaining those feeds, therefore, has become critical to even the most ordinary operation. That dependability of GPS connectivity, however, can be compromised by surrounding structure density – like clusters of high rises, or flights below bridges – or complicated by the ever-proliferating number of craft in the skies at any given time.

Optical image stabilization combined with a lot more zoom.

Apple has been beaten to the periscope “folded” camera punch by pretty much every other smartphone manufacturer, but it continues to design and patent new takes on the now-commonplace tech. It was granted a patent for a new design that includes folded optics and “lens shifting” capabilities.

Folded optics, or more commonly known as periscope cameras, are a design that allows smartphones to gain considerably more optical zoom than a typical lens design by placing the lens array parallel to the long edge of a smartphone body and bending the transmission of light to the sensor by using one or more prisms. The design has been used by Samsung, Huawei, and others to make smartphone cameras that sport massive optical zooming capabilities compared to what Apple offers.

Continue reading “Apple Has Designed a ‘Folded’ Camera With Optical Image Stabilization” »

Scientists at DESY have built a compact electron camera that can capture the inner, ultrafast dynamics of matter. The system shoots short bunches of electrons at a sample to take snapshots of its current inner structure. It is the first such electron diffractometer that uses Terahertz radiation for pulse compression. The developer team around DESY scientists Dongfang Zhang and Franz Kärtner from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL validated their Terahertz-enhanced ultrafast electron diffractometer with the investigation of a silicon sample and present their work in the first issue of the journal Ultrafast Science, a new title in the Science group of scientific journals.

Electron diffraction is one way to investigate the inner structure of matter. However, it does not image the structure directly. Instead, when the electrons hit or traverse a solid sample, they are deflected in a systematic way by the electrons in the solid’s inner lattice. From the pattern of this diffraction, recorded on a detector, the internal lattice structure of the solid can be calculated. To detect dynamic changes in this inner structure, short bunches of sufficiently bright electrons have to be used. “The shorter the bunch, the faster the exposure time,” says Zhang, who is now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “Typically, ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) uses bunch lengths, or exposure times, of some 100 femtoseconds, which is 0.1 trillionths of a second.”

Such short electron bunches can be routinely produced with high quality by state-of-the-art particle accelerators. However, these machines are often large and bulky, partly due to the radio frequency radiation used to power them, which operates in the Gigahertz band. The wavelength of the radiation sets the size for the whole device. The DESY team is now using Terahertz radiation instead with roughly a hundred times shorter wavelengths. “This basically means, the accelerator components, here a bunch compressor, can be a hundred times smaller, too,” explains Kärtner, who is also a professor and a member of the cluster of excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” at the University of Hamburg.

A new 3D-printed bridge in the Netherlands contains sensors that will help researchers study crowd behavior, and the impact tourism has on a neighborhood. Check out more trending stories on ITK: https://bit.ly/39pSMAR