Lifeboat Foundation

Computer-generated holography (CGH) represents a cutting-edge technology that employs computer algorithms to dynamically reconstruct virtual objects. This technology has found extensive applications across diverse fields such as three-dimensional display, optical information storage and processing, entertainment, and encryption.

Despite the broad application spectrum of CGH, contemporary techniques predominantly rely on projection devices like spatial light modulators (SLMs) and digital micromirror devices (DMDs). These devices inherently face limitations in display capabilities, often resulting in narrow field-of-view and multilevel diffraction in projected images.

In recent developments, metasurfaces composed of an array of subwavelength nanostructures have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in modulating electromagnetic waves. By introducing abrupt changes to fundamental wave properties like amplitude and phase through nanostructuring at subwavelength scales, metasurfaces enable modulation effects that are challenging to achieve with traditional devices.

As object identification and three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction techniques become essential in various reverse engineering, artificial intelligence, medical diagnosis, and industrial production fields, there is an increasing focus on seeking vastly efficient, faster speed, and more integrated methods that can simplify processing.

In the current field of object identification and 3D reconstruction, extracting sample contour information is primarily accomplished by various computer algorithms. Traditional computer processors suffer from multiple constraints, such as high-power consumption, low-speed operation, and complex algorithms. In this regard, there has recently been growing attention in searching for alternative optical methods to perform those techniques.

The development of optical computing theory and image processing has provided a more complete theoretical basis for object identification and 3D reconstruction techniques. Optical methods have received more attention as an alternative paradigm than traditional mechanisms in recent years due to their enormous advantages of ultra-fast operation speed, high integration, and low latency.

String theory found its origins in an attempt to understand the nascent experiments revealing the strong nuclear force. Eventually another theory, one based on particles called quarks and force carriers called gluons, would supplant it, but in the deep mathematical bones of the young string theory physicists would find curious structures, half-glimpsed ghosts, that would point to something more. Something deeper.

String theory claims that what we call particles —the point-like entities that wander freely, interact, and bind together to make up the bulk of material existence—are nothing but. Instead, there is but a single kind of fundamental object: the string. These strings, each one existing at the smallest possible limit of existence itself, vibrate. And the way those strings vibrate dictates how they manifest themselves in the larger universe. Like notes on a strummed guitar, a string vibrating with one mode will appear to us as an electron, while another vibrating at a different frequency will appear as a photon, and so on.

String theory is an audacious attempt at a theory of everything. A single mathematical framework that explains the particles that make us who and what we are along with the forces that act as the fundamental messengers among those particles. They are all, every quark in the cosmos and every photon in the field, bits of vibrating strings.

New research enhances hybrid supercapacitors by creating more efficient electrodes, marking a significant step forward in energy storage technology.

Like batteries, supercapacitors are a type of energy-storage device. However, while batteries store energy electrochemically, supercapacitors store energy electrostatically—through the buildup of charge on their electrode surfaces.

Hybrid supercapacitors (HSCs) combine the advantages of both systems by incorporating battery-type and capacitor-type electrodes. Despite synthesis techniques that allow the active components in HSC electrodes to grow directly on conductive substrates without added binders (“self-supporting” electrodes), the fraction of active material in these electrodes has remained too low for commercial requirements.

The researchers found 139 genes that are common across the primate groups but highly divergent in their expression in human brains.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has uncovered over 100 genes that are common to primate brains but have undergone evolutionary divergence only in humans – and which could be a source of our unique cognitive ability.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Jesse Gillis from the Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the Department of Physiology at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, found the genes are expressed differently in the brains of humans compared to four of our relatives – chimpanzees, gorillas, macaques, and marmosets.

Feng Guo, an associate professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, is addressing the technical limitations of artificial intelligence computing hardware by developing a new hybrid computing system—which has been dubbed “Brainoware”—that combines electronic hardware with human brain organoids.

Advanced AI techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, which are powered by specialized silicon computer chips, expend enormous amounts of energy. As such, engineers have designed neuromorphic computing systems, modeled after the structure and function of a human brain, to improve the performance and efficiency of these technologies. However, these systems are still limited in their ability to fully mimic brain function, as most are built on digital electronic principles.

In response, Guo and a team of IU researchers, including graduate student Hongwei Cai, have developed a hybrid neuromorphic computing system that mounts a brain organoid onto a multielectrode assay to receive and send information. The brain organoids are brain-like 3D cell cultures derived from stem cells and characterized by different brain cell types, including neurons and glia, and brain-like structures such as ventricular zones.

The first vehicles to fly under NASA’s new lunar delivery initiative will aim to be the first commercial spacecraft to land softly on another celestial body.

By Michael Greshko

Military leaders argue that the Department of Defense must be more involved if the US is to win the new space race for a lunar outpost.

Dr. Karl Friston, University College London, applies the free energy principle to set forth an account of life, or self-organization, in terms of active inference. August 19th, 2023.