Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11

A research team at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has uncovered a fundamental principle of how the brain prioritizes vision and hearing differently depending on whether we are still or in motion. The study, led by Dr. Lee Seung-Hee, Associate Director of the IBS Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions and Associate Professor at KAIST, provides new insights into how movement alters the brain’s sensory decision-making process.

In daily life, we constantly process visual (sight) and auditory () information to navigate the world. For instance, when watching a movie, our brain seamlessly integrates images and sounds to create a complete experience. However, when moving—such as when walking on a busy street—our brain may prioritize visual information over sound.

Until now, it was unclear how the brain decides which sense to prioritize in different situations. This is particularly relevant for individuals with sensory processing disorders such as autism or schizophrenia, where the brain may struggle to integrate sensory information correctly. Understanding how the brain naturally shifts between sensory inputs could lead to better treatments for these conditions.

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Things are looking up for Outbound Aerospace’s quest to build a new kind of passenger airplane. The Seattle startup has raised $1.15 million in pre-seed funding so far, and last weekend it sent a small-scale prototype into the skies over Oregon for its first-ever flight test.

“Over the last month, everything came together, and we went out there and got the plane up in the air, and proved that it flies,” said Jake Armenta, the former Boeing engineer who serves as Outbound’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “So, it’s been a really exciting month or two.”

The demonstrator aircraft — which is code-named STeVE (for Scaled Test Ve hicle) — is a remote-controlled plane that weighs 300 pounds and has a 22-foot wingspan. That’s only one-eighth of the planned wingspan for the Olympic airliner that Outbound eventually aims to build. What’s more, Saturday’s flight at the Pendleton UAS Range in eastern Oregon lasted just 16 seconds. Nevertheless, the test proved that Outbound’s fabrication process could turn out a flyable carbon-fiber aircraft.

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A collaborative team of architects and builders has completed the first fully 3D-printed residential home in Auckland, New Zealand, and it’s also the largest building of that type in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Paremoremo home, named after the semi-rural suburb where it’s located, was highlighted by Home Magazine NZ in a short video. The low-slung, one-story residence spans over 2,700 square feet on a north-facing hill and incorporates smooth curved geometric surfaces that were facilitated by the novel 3D-printing process.

Tim Dorrington of Dorrington Atcheson Architects chose a concrete block form design due to the low cost and ease of construction, enlisting 3D-printed concrete specialist QOROX for their first full-sized home build.

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Deep in the galaxy’s central molecular zone (CMZ), surrounding the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s center, clouds of dust and gas swirl amid energetic shock waves.

Now, a collaboration of international astronomers – using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) – has greatly sharpened our view of these processes by a factor of 100.

The team has uncovered an unexpected class of long, narrow filaments within this turbulent region, giving fresh insight into the cyclical formation and destruction of material in the CMZ.

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By way of an answer, I’ll offer one of the physicist Richard Feynman’s most famous dictums: What I cannot create, I do not understand. For much of its history, biology has been a reductionist science, driven by the principle that the best way to understand the mind-boggling complexity of living things is to dissect them into their constituent parts—organs, cells, proteins, molecules. But life isn’t a clockwork; it’s a dynamic system, and unexpected things emerge from the interactions between all those little parts. To truly understand life, you can’t just break it down. You have to be able to put it back together, too.

The C. elegans nematode is a tiny worm, barely as long as a hair is wide, with less than a thousand cells in its body. Of those, only 302 are neurons—about as small as a brain can get. “I remember, when my first child was born, how proud I was when they reached the age they could count to 302,” said Netta Cohen, a computational neuroscientist who runs a worm lab at the University of Leeds. But there’s no shame in smallness, Cohen emphasized: C. elegans does a lot with a little. Unlike its more unpleasant cousins, it’s not a parasite, outsourcing its survival needs to bigger organisms. Instead, it’s what biologists call a “free-living” animal. “It can reproduce, it can eat, it can forage, it can escape,” Cohen said. “It’s born and it develops, and it ages and it dies—all in a millimeter.”

Worm people like Cohen are quick to tell you that no fewer than four Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work on C. elegans, which was the first animal to have both its genome sequenced and its neurons mapped. But there’s a difference between schematics and an operating manual. “We know the wiring; we don’t know the dynamics,” Cohen said. “You would think that’s an ideal problem for a physicist or a computer scientist or a mathematician to solve.”

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