Now Mr. Liu is promoting UHV internationally through his Global Energy Interconnection initiative. Designated a “national strategy” and championed by Xi Jinping, China’s president, the initiative feeds into one of China’s most ambitious international plans — to create the world’s first global electricity grid.
China’s dream of building a global electricity grid may be coming true, the Financial Times reports.
The £13m RemoveDebris spacecraft was taken to the ISS in April and stored onboard ahead of Wednesday’s release.
The spacecraft was pushed out of an airlock where a robotic arm then picked it up gave it a gentle nudge down and away from the 400km-high lab.
In the process, RemoveDebris became the largest satellite to ever be deployed from the International Space Station. The time was about 12:35 BST.
New research shows that the brain‘s neuroplasticity isn’t as flexible as previously thought.
One of the brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time.
Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning.
Their new research indicates that when the brain learns a new activity that it is less flexible than previously thought. The researchers were able to draw strong hypothesis about neural reorganization during learning by using BCI. Through the use of BCI the mapping between #neural activity and learning is completely known
“In this experimental paradigm, we’re able to track all of the neurons that can lead to behavioral improvements and look at how they all change simultaneously,” says Steve Chase, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.
“When we do that, what we see is a really constrained set of changes that happen, and it leads to this suboptimal improvement of performance. And so, that implies that there are limits that constrain how flexible your brain is, at least on these short time scales.”
It is often challenging to learn new tasks quickly that require a high level of proficiency. Neural plasticity is even more constrained than previously thought as results of this research indicate.
“None of us predicted this outcome,” says Matthew Golub, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon. “Learning is far more limited on the scale of a few hours than any of us were expecting when we started this. We were all surprised that the brain wasn’t able to choose the best strategy possible.”
The research was done in collaboration with the Center for Neural Basis of Cognition, a cross university research and educational program between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh that leverages each institution’s strengths to investigate the #cognitive and neural mechanisms that give rise to biological intelligence and behavior.
Nature Neuroscience (2018) Full Abstract Study
An international team of researchers has discovered evidence of 27 previously unknown viruses in bees. The finding could help scientists design strategies to prevent the spread of viral pathogens among these important pollinators.
“Populations of bees around the world are declining, and viruses are known to contribute to these declines,” said David Galbraith, research scientist at Bristol Myers Squibb and a recent Penn State graduate. “Despite the importance of bees as pollinators of flowering plants in agricultural and natural landscapes and the importance of viruses to bee health, our understanding of bee viruses is surprisingly limited.”
To investigate viruses in bees, the team collected samples of DNA and RNA, which is responsible for the synthesis of proteins, from 12 bee species in nine countries across the world. Next, they developed a novel high-throughput sequencing technique that efficiently detected both previously identified and 27 never-seen-before viruses belonging to at least six new families in a single experiment. The results appear in the June 11, 2018, issue of Scientific Reports.
It would be silly to think we completely understand our universe, given how small the Earth is compared to the vastness of the cosmos. But from here on our tiny planet, it appears that much of the universe is missing. And I’m not just talking about dark matter. Regular stuff seems to be missing, too.
Astronomy fans probably know that as far as humans can tell, the universe is composed mostly of some mysterious, unexplained energy called dark energy that pushes it apart. The remaining piece, about a quarter, is dark matter, another unexplained thing that seems to build the universe’s skeleton. Just 4 percent is the regular matter that we can see: stars, planets, and interstellar and intergalactic gas. But the observed amount of this regular matter still falls perhaps a third short of the amount of stuff that physicists think should exist based on their models of the universe.
Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station, even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.
By Dhel Nazario
Filipinos have achieved yet another milestone after contacting with the International Space Station (ISS), even interviewing an astronaut on board the habitable artificial satellite.
A mix of Grade 11 and college students from the from the University of the Philippines Integrated School (UPIS) and electronics engineering students from the Holy Angel University (HAU) made the historical feat at the Department of Science and Technology –Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI) last May.
An interaction between aggregate alpha synuclein and ATP synthase implicated in Parkinson’s Disease.
An open-access paper published in Nature Communications sheds light on how an accumulation of α-synuclein protein in brain cells contributes to causing Parkinson’s disease. In particular, the researchers discovered how clumps of the protein damage important proteins on mitochondrial surfaces, leading to impaired energy production, swelling and bursting of the mitochondria themselves, and, ultimately, cell death [1].
Study abstract
From electric cars that travel hundreds of miles on a single charge to chainsaws as mighty as gas-powered versions, new products hit the market each year that take advantage of recent advances in battery technology.
But that growth has led to concerns that the world’s supply of lithium, the metal at the heart of many of the new rechargeable batteries, may eventually be depleted.
Now researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found new evidence suggesting that batteries based on sodium and potassium hold promise as a potential alternative to lithium-based batteries.
