Star formation is one of the most important research fields in astrophysics. This process, in which gravitational instabilities cause the collapse of gas to form more compact structures and finally stars, encompasses a broad range of physical scales. These include star-forming galaxies on the large scale, individual young stars with envelopes and circumstellar disks on the smaller scale, and intermediate scales that include giant molecular clouds and protostellar cores.
Posted in habitats, robotics/AI
A “portrait” that is the first piece of artificial-intelligence art sold by a major auction house shattered estimates, selling for 45 times what was expected.
“Portrait of Edmond de Belamy” was sold Thursday at Christies in New York for $432,500. It had been expected to go for $7,000 to $10,000. The buyer was not revealed.
The painting is one of 11 portraits of a fictional family created so far by the Paris-based art collective Obvious.
An 11-acre island in the Pacific Ocean has vanished after Hurricane Walaka, one of the most powerful storms to sweep through the area, struck the island in early October.
Satellite photos show that East Island, located roughly 550 miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, was wiped off the map during the hurricane.
The cerebellum can’t get no respect. Located inconveniently on the underside of the brain and initially thought to be limited to controlling movement, the cerebellum has long been treated like an afterthought by researchers studying higher brain functions.
But researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis say overlooking the cerebellum is a mistake. Their findings, published Oct. 25 in Neuron, suggest that the cerebellum has a hand in every aspect of higher brain functions — not just movement, but attention, thinking, planning and decision-making.
“The biggest surprise to me was the discovery that 80 percent of the cerebellum is devoted to the smart stuff,” said senior author Nico Dosenbach, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of neurology, of occupational therapy and of pediatrics. “Everyone thought the cerebellum was about movement. If your cerebellum is damaged, you can’t move smoothly — your hand jerks around when you try to reach for something. Our research strongly suggests that just as the cerebellum serves as a quality check on movement, it also checks your thoughts as well — smoothing them out, correcting them, perfecting things.”
This video is the third in a multi-part series discussing computing. In this video, we’ll be discussing classical computing, more specifically – how the CPU operates and CPU parallelism.
[0:27–4:57] Starting off we’ll look at, how the CPU operates, more specifically — the basic design of a CPU, how it communicates with memory, the stages it executes instructions in as well as pipelining and superscalar design.
[4:57–8:00] Following that we’ll discuss, computing parallelism, elaborating on the hardware parallelism previously discussed as well as discussing software parallelism through the use of multithreading.
A more detailed look at the CPU:
Drugs that target multiple aging pathways at once significantly extend the healthspan and lifespan of nematodes.
In a paper published in Developmental Cell, scientists from Yale University have demonstrated how targeting multiple pathways related to aging with different drug combinations can slow aging down and extend healthy lifespan in C. elegans [1].
Abstract
There is growing interest in pharmacological interventions directly targeting the aging process. Pharmacological interventions against aging should be efficacious when started in adults and, ideally, repurpose existing drugs. We show that dramatic lifespan extension can be achieved by targeting multiple, evolutionarily conserved aging pathways and mechanisms using drug combinations. Using this approach in C. elegans, we were able to slow aging and significantly extend healthy lifespan. To identify the mechanism of these drug synergies, we applied transcriptomics and lipidomics analysis. We found that drug interactions involved the TGF-b pathway and recruited genes related with IGF signaling. daf-2, daf-7, and sbp-1 interact upstream of changes in lipid metabolism, resulting in increased monounsaturated fatty acid content and this is required for healthy lifespan extension.
