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Researchers have developed a revolutionary material that can help eliminate microplastics, one of the most pervasive artificial contaminants in nature, from our waterways.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science have created a sustainable hydrogel — a polymer-based material that can adapt its structure to its environment even after absorbing water — with a “unique intertwined polymer network” that binds the microplastics and breaks them down using UV light, the institute summarized on its website.

Hydrogels have chainlike molecules called polymers that are tightly joined like glue and can easily stick to water molecules. When particles adhere to it, the structure remains intact despite holding a lot of water.

The lab’s latest AI news is something different, though. Instead of designing a model to master a single game, DeepMind has teamed up with researchers from the University of British Columbia to develop an AI agent capable of playing a whole bunch of totally different games.

Called SIMA (scalable i nstructable m ulti-world a gent), the project also marks a shift from competitive to cooperative play as the AI operates by following human instructions.

But SIMA wasn’t created simply to help sleepy players grind out levels or farm up resources. The researchers instead hope that by better understanding how SIMA learns in these virtual playgrounds, we can make AI agents more cooperative and helpful in the real world.

Scientists believe the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is tumultuous, featuring hot magnetized gas that spirals in a disk at tremendous speeds and temperatures. Astronomical observations show that within such a disk, mysterious flares occur up to several times a day, temporarily brightening and then fading away.

Now a team led by Caltech scientists has used telescope data and an artificial intelligence (AI) computer-vision technique to recover the first three-dimensional video showing what such flares could look like around SagittariusA* (Sgr A the supermassive black hole at the heart of our own Milky Way galaxy.

The 3D flare structure features two bright, compact features located about 75 million kilometers (or half the distance between Earth and the sun) from the center of the black hole. It is based on data collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile over a period of 100 minutes directly after an eruption seen in Xray data on April 11, 2017.

In a discovery that could hasten treatment for patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), UC San Francisco scientists have discovered a harbinger in the blood of some people who later went on to develop the disease.

In about 1 in 10 cases of MS, the body begins producing a distinctive set of antibodies against its own proteins years before symptoms emerge. These autoantibodies appear to bind to both human cells and common pathogens, possibly explaining the immune attacks on the brain and spinal cord that are the hallmark of MS.

The findings were published in Nature Medicine on April 19.

An international collaboration of researchers, led by Philip Walther at University of Vienna, have achieved a significant breakthrough in quantum technology, with the successful demonstration of quantum interference among several single photons using a novel resource-efficient platform. The work published in the journal Science Advances represents a notable advancement in optical quantum computing that paves the way for more scalable quantum technologies.

Interference among photons, a fundamental phenomenon in quantum optics, serves as a cornerstone of optical quantum computing.

It involves harnessing the properties of light, such as its wave-particle duality, to induce interference patterns, enabling the encoding and processing of quantum information.

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When Roger Penrose originally came out with the idea that the human brain uses quantum effects in microtubules and that was the origin of consciousness, many thought the idea was a little crazy. According to a new study, it turns out that Penrose was actually right… about the microtubules anyways. Let’s have a look.

Paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs

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A colossal structure in the distant Universe is defying our understanding of how the Universe evolved.

In light that has traveled for 6.9 billion years to reach us, astronomers have found a giant, almost perfect ring of galaxies, some 1.3 billion light-years in diameter. It doesn’t match any known structure or formation mechanism.

The Big Ring, as the structure has been named, could mean that we need to amend the standard model of cosmology.

Mehmood Khaan opening the Rejuvenation Startup Summit with an outstanding speech on the state of longevity and the groundbreaking work that Hevolution is doing in funding scientists around the globe.

With the Rejuvenation Startup Summit in Berlin the Forever Healthy Foundation produced a great platform for founders and investors to meet and learn from and about eachother.