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Feb 15, 2024

The key to fighting fungal infections may have been inside us all along

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Fungal infections have been slipping past their usual geographic boundaries and increasing in hospitals and other settings — and, as Scientific American’s Maryn McKenna has pointed out, we currently don’t have much recourse against them.

Fungal infections are incredibly hard to beat, even with modern medicine.

But MIT researchers studying the common yeast Candida albicans may have found a new effective antifungal candidate, and you’ve got some in you right now: mucus.

Feb 15, 2024

Beyond cute: What tardigrades can teach us about life and death

Posted by in category: electronics

Tardigrades are often considered the most endearing invertebrates, akin to the capybara of their realm, yet their significance surpasses mere charm.


This year, researchers from Harvard Medical School, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, discovered that when the tardigrades are under stress, their bodies produce unstable free radicals of oxygen and an unpaired electron.

Continue reading “Beyond cute: What tardigrades can teach us about life and death” »

Feb 15, 2024

Chinese chipmaker tapes out 16-core DragonChain-powered CPU, 64-core coming — Loongson LS3C6000 server processor will rival Zen 3 CPUs

Posted by in category: computing

Loongson’s next-generation data center CPU is ready.

Feb 15, 2024

Tesla Made $1.79 Billion In 2023 Just From Selling EV Credits To Other Carmakers

Posted by in category: transportation

Saving the world’s automakers from fines made Tesla nearly $9 billion since 2009.

Feb 15, 2024

Google: Next-Gen Gemini 1.5 AI Model Can Handle ‘Vast Amounts’ of Data

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The next-generation AI model from Google excels at processing large amounts of information per one query, such as 30,000 lines of code or over 700,000 words of text.

Feb 15, 2024

Scientists Confirm the Incredible Existence of ‘Second Sound’

Posted by in category: futurism

Here’s visible proof for the first time ever.

Feb 15, 2024

Altermagnetism experimentally demonstrated

Posted by in category: materials

Ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism have long been known to scientists as two classes of magnetic order of materials. Back in 2019, researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) postulated a third class of magnetism, called altermagnetism. This altermagnetism has been the subject of heated debate among experts ever since, with some expressing doubts about its existence.

Recently, a team of experimental researchers led by Professor Hans-Joachim Elmers at JGU was able to measure for the first time at DESY (Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron) an effect that is considered to be a signature of altermagnetism, thus providing evidence for the existence of this third type of magnetism. The research results were published in Science Advances.

Feb 15, 2024

Pioneer or ‘guinea pig?’ Central Texas highway testing tech for driverless trucks

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Independent of the smart-corridor project, two major companies behind self-driving big rig technology told KXAN they plan to remove safety drivers and go completely driverless by the end of the year.

A spokesperson for the California-based company Kodiak Robotics told KXAN it started operating self-driving big rigs on routes around Texas in 2019, always with backup safety drivers.

In that time, “the bulk of Kodiak’s deliveries have been between our Dallas operations hub and Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Atlanta,” Kodiak spokesman Daniel Goff said.

Feb 15, 2024

Startup emerges from stealth with $25 million for robots that lay bricks as fast as humans—and fill the huge shortage of laborers

Posted by in categories: habitats, robotics/AI

Plural and Hummingbird are leading the funding round for the startup that aims to address a major contributor to housing shortfalls in Europe.

Feb 15, 2024

AI May Be Atrophying Our Brains, Professor Warns

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI, transportation

Just like smartphone GPS has harmed our sense of spatial cognition and memory, artificial intelligence may soon impair our ability to make decisions for ourselves — an outcome that would be, one expert warns, “catastrophic.”

In an interview with PsyPost, neuropsychology expert Umberto León Domínguez of the University of Monterrey in Mexico said that his new research shows that AI chatbots may end up not just mimicking our speech patterns, but significantly harming our cognitive functioning in general.

Like many other educators, Domínguez said he’s concerned about how his students are using tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Spurred by those concerns, he told PsyPost, he began to explore ways AI chatbots “could interfere with higher-order executive functions to understand how to also train these skills.”