The US has approved Ioneer’s Rhyolite Ridge Lithium-Boron Project, which will produce batteries for over 370,000 EVs annually for 26 years.

A team of biologists affiliated with several institutions in China has learned more about the means by which tardigrades are able to withstand high doses of radiation. In their study, published in the journal Science, the group focused on a newly found species of the creature.

The Attosecond Science group at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science has developed a novel light source capable of producing extremely short pulses for the investigation of UV-induced molecular dynamics with unprecedented temporal resolution. Scientists from the University of Hamburg and from DESY describe their unique observations in an article published in Nature Communications.

Early experiments suggest a patch that delivers harmless electric currents into the skin can thwart certain bacterial infections. However, it has not yet been tested in humans.

Easter Island consists of several extinct volcanoes. The oldest lava deposits formed some 2.5 million years ago on top of an oceanic plate not much older than the volcanoes themselves. In 2019, a team of Cuban and Colombian geologists left for Easter Island to accurately date the volcanic island. To do so, they resorted to a tried-and-tested recipe: dating zircon minerals. When magma cools, these minerals crystallize. They contain a bit of uranium, which ‘turns’ into lead through radioactive decay.

Because we know how fast that process happens, we can measure how long ago those minerals formed. The team from Colombia’s Universidad de Los Andes, led by Cuban geologist Yamirka Rojas-Agramonte, therefore went in search of those minerals. Rojas-Agramonte, now at the Christian Albrechts-University Kiel, found hundreds of them. But surprisingly, not only from 2.5 million years old, but also from much further back in time, up to 165 million years ago. How could that be?

MIT’s Yang Center shows how light can control muscles with low fatigue, but human use needs more work.

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MIT researchers have demonstrated how light could control muscles without causing much fatigue. Their new approach can help people with amputation or paralysis regain limb control in the future.

Via Multitask Learning.

Ahmed A. Elhag, T. Konstantin Rusch, Francesco Di Giovanni, Michael Bronstein University of Oxford & MIT https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.

Can _equivariance_ be learned by unconstrained models?

The largest known prime number has been discovered by an amateur researcher and former Nvidia employee.

The new number is 2^136,279,841 – 1, which beats the previous title holder (2^82,589,933 – 1) by more than 16 million digits.

This book describes the philosophical implications of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and the smart environment on the human mind.