Lifeboat Foundation

“Push your limits, get out of your comfort zone, and pick tasks that are harder than what you’re used to,” she says.

Science wasn’t always her first choice.

By Christa I. De La Cruz

Continue reading “Meet the Filipina Engineer Who Struggled in Math But Now Works at NASA” »

‘’As a result, it’s nonsensical to ask what happens to space-time beyond the Cauchy horizon because space-time, as it’s regarded within the theory of general relativity, no longer exists. “This gives one a way out of this philosophical conundrum,” said Dafermos.

Mathematicians have disproved the strong cosmic censorship conjecture. Their work answers one of the most important questions in the study of general relativity and changes the way we think about space-time.

Digital security depends on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. A new proof shows why one method for breaking digital encryption won’t work.

Scientists at the University of Würzburg have been able to boost current super-resolution microscopy by a novel tweak. They coated the glass cover slip as part of the sample carrier with tailor-made biocompatible nanosheets that create a mirror effect. This method shows that localizing single emitters in front of a metal-dielectric coating leads to higher precision, brightness and contrast in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM). The study was published in the Nature journal Light: Science and Applications.

The sharpness of a light microscope is limited by physical conditions—structures that are closer together than 0.2 thousandths of a millimeter blur, and can no longer be distinguished from each other. The cause of this blurring is diffraction. Each point-shaped object is therefore not shown as a point, but as a blurry spot.

With mathematical methods, the resolution can still be drastically improved. One method would calculate its exact center from the brightness distribution of the blurry spot. However, it only works if two closely adjacent points of the object are initially not simultaneously but subsequently visible, and are merged later in the image processing. This temporal decoupling prevents superimposition of the blurry spot. For years, researchers in life sciences have been using this tricky method for super high-resolution light microscopy of cells.

by Eloisa Marchesoni

Today, I will talk about the recent creation of really intelligent machines, able to solve difficult problems, to recreate the creativity and versatility of the human mind, machines not only able to excel in a single activity but to abstract general information and find solutions that are unthinkable for us. I will not talk about blockchain, but about another revolution (less economic and more mathematical), which is all about computing: quantum computers.

Quantum computing is not really new, as we have been talking about it for a couple of decades already, but we are just now witnessing the transition from theory to realization of such technology. Quantum computers were first theorized at the beginning of the 1980s, but only in the last few years, thanks to the commitment of companies like Google and IBM, a strong impulse has been pushing the development of these machines. The quantum computer is able to use quantum particles (imagine them to be like electrons or photons) to process information. The particles act as positive or negative (i., the 0 and the 1 that we are used to see in traditional computer science) alternatively or at the same time, thus generating quantum information bits called “qubits”, which can have value either 0 or 1 or a quantum superposition of 0 and 1.

Continue reading “How developments in Quantum Computing could affect cryptocurrencies” »

How atoms arrange themselves at the smallest scale was thought to follow a ‘drum-skin’ rule, but mathematicians have now found a simpler solution.

Atomic arrangements in different materials can provide a lot of information about the properties of materials, and what the potential is for altering what they can be used for.

However, where two materials touch – at their interface – complex interactions arise that make predicting the arrangement of atoms difficult.

Deep learning has been making it possible for powerful machines to approximate and imitate abilities and techniques once thought to be uniquely human. Mathematicians have struggled to explain how they work so well and may now get some answers by looking outside mathematics and into the nature of the universe.

A new mathematical model suggests that signs of extraterrestrial intelligence could be common, for all we know—we’ve barely begun investigating the vastness where they might lie.

What the study shows, the researchers said, is that the interactions between the bacterial populations are as significant to the host’s overall fitness as their presence — the microbiome’s influence cannot be solely attributed to the presence or absence of individual species. “In a sense,” said Jones, “the microbiome’s influence on the host is more than the sum of its parts.”

The gut microbiome — the world of microbes that inhabit the human intestinal tract — has captured the interest of scientists and clinicians for its critical role in health. However, parsing which of those microbes are responsible for effects on our wellbeing remains a mystery.

Taking us one step closer to solving this puzzle, UC Santa Barbara physicists Eric Jones and Jean Carlson have developed a mathematical approach to analyze and model interactions between gut bacteria in fruit flies. This method could lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the complex interactions between human gut microbes.

Continue reading “Modeling the Microbiome” »