Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know how to respond.

That’s the vision behind a new project from a team of engineers and chemists at the University of Colorado Boulder, California Institute of Technology, University of California Santa Barbara, and three companies. It’s funded by a new contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), part of the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The effort borrows its name, the Standoff Aerosol measUrement Remote Optical Network (SAURON), from the villain in “The Lord of the Rings” book series—a presence who often takes the form of a flaming eye and whose “gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth.”

An international team of researchers has stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — the first regular molecular fractal in nature.

This fascinating finding, led by groups from the Max Planck Institute and the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, has unveiled a microbial enzyme that spontaneously assembles into a pattern known as the Sierpinski triangle.

The enzyme, identified as citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium, was discovered by chance. “We stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn’t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope,” says Franziska Sendker, the study’s first author.

From Words to Numbers.

Your large language model is secretly a capable regressor when given in-context examples.

We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear #regression when given…

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Microsoft presents Rho-1

Not All Tokens Are What You Need https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

Previous language model pre-training methods have uniformly applied a next-token #prediction #LOSS to all training #tokens.

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Want to experience totality again? Here are the next seven total solar eclipses across the world, from Alaska to Australia.

In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

An enzyme in a cyanobacterium can take the unusual form a triangle containing ever-smaller triangular gaps, making a fractal pattern.

By Alex Wilkins

An international team of researchers led by groups from the Max Planck Institute in Marburg and Phillips University in Marburg has now discovered the first regular molecular fractal in nature. They discovered a microbial enzyme—citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium—that spontaneously assembles into a regular fractal pattern known as the Sierpiński triangle. This is an infinitely repeating series of triangles made up of smaller triangles.

“We stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn’t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope,” says first author Franziska Sendker.

“The protein makes these beautiful triangles and as the fractal grows, we see these larger and larger triangular voids in the middle of them, which is totally unlike any protein assembly we’ve ever seen before,” she continues.

Inhibiting necroptosis protects lungs against influenza-mediated damage.

Structures of the TAS2R14 taste receptor.