Lifeboat Foundation

A large team of scientists with a wide variety of backgrounds has joined together to suggest that a data-driven approach to search for life elsewhere in the universe should replace methods now in use. In their paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, the group explains how a data-driven approach could help prevent human-centered biases from overlooking potential signs of life.

Over the past few decades, scientists have become much more open to the possibility of discovering life in places other than on Earth. And because of that, more work has been done to find life—or at least signs of it. But, as the group on this new effort points out, most such approaches tend to expect that other forms of life will resemble those found on Earth. And that could be blinding scientists to signs of life that might be there but are being missed.

To overcome such a problem, the researchers suggest a more data-driven approach be used. They note that a lot of data have been obtained regarding various parts of the night sky. They also note that the data are in different formats. Some are radio wave graphs, while others describe the attributes of light emitted by a section of the sky, or even a given planet.

Magnets, those everyday objects we stick to our fridges, all share a unique characteristic: they always have both a north and a south pole. Even if you tried breaking a magnet in half, the poles would not separate—you would only get two smaller dipole magnets. But what if a particle could have a single pole with a magnetic charge?

For over a century, physicists have been searching for such magnetic monopoles. A new study on the preprint server arXiv from the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) places new limits on these hypothetical particles, adding new clues for the continuing search.

In 1931, physicist Paul Dirac proved that the existence of magnetic monopoles would be consistent with quantum mechanics and require—as has been observed—the quantization of the electric charge. In the 1970s, magnetic monopoles were also predicted by new theories attempting to unify all the fundamental forces of nature, inspiring physicist Joseph Polchinski to claim that their existence was “one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen.” Magnetic monopoles might have been present in the early universe but diluted to an unnoticeably tiny density during the early exponential expansion phase known as cosmic inflation.

Research led by the Department of Anthropology and School of Biomedical Sciences, Kent State University, Ohio, has investigated neuropeptide Y innervation in an area of the brain called the nucleus accumbens of various primate species, including humans. The research was focused on understanding its role in brain evolution and any implications for human health, particularly regarding addiction and eating disorders.

In a paper, “Hedonic eating, obesity, and addiction result from increased neuropeptide Y in the nucleus accumbens during human brain evolution,” published in PNAS, the researchers suggest that the combination of increased neuropeptide Y (NPY) and dopamine (DA) within the human nucleus accumbens (NAc) may have allowed for enhanced brain development. This same configuration may have also made humans exceptionally vulnerable to eating disorders and substance abuse, hinting at addictive traits having a deep evolutionary origin.

NPY plays a role in the reward system, emotional behavior and is associated with increased alcohol use, drug addiction and fat intake. The NAc brain region is central to motivation and action, exhibiting one of the highest densities of NPY in the brain and is of great interest to researchers investigating brain-related promoters of addiction.

UK researchers have developed a new publicly accessible database, and they hope to see it shrink over time. That’s because it is a compendium of the thousands of understudied proteins encoded by genes in the human genome, whose existence is known but whose functions are mostly not.

The database, dubbed the “unknome,” is the work of Matthew Freeman of the Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford.

The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England that is made up of 39 constituent colleges, and a range of academic departments, which are organized into four divisions. It was established circa 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world’s second-oldest university in continuous operation after the University of Bologna.

The behaviors, physiology and existence of living organisms is supported by countless biological processes, which entail the communication between cells and other molecular components. These molecular components are known to transmit information to each other in various ways, for instance via processes know as diffusion and electrical depolarization or by exchanging mechanical waves.

Researchers at Yale University recently carried out a study aimed at calculating the energetic cost of this transfer of information between cells and molecular components. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, introduces a new tool that could be used to study cellular networks and better understand their function.

“We have been thinking about this project for a while now in one form or another,” Benjamin B. Machta, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend in higher education to incorporate modern technologies and practices in order to improve the overall educational experience. Learning management systems, gamification, video assisted learning, virtual and augmented reality, are some examples of how technology has improved student engagement and education planning. Let’s talk about AI in education. The classroom response system allowed students to answer multiple-choice questions and engage in real-time discussions instantly.

Despite the many benefits that technology has brought to education, there are also concerns about its impact on higher education institutions. With the rise of online education and the growing availability of educational resources on the internet, many traditional universities and colleges are worried about the future of their institutions. As a result, many higher education institutions need help to keep pace with the rapid technological changes and are looking for ways to adapt and stay relevant in the digital age.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education: Impact & Examples” »

Machines don’t have eyes, but you wouldn’t know that if you followed the progression of deep learning models for accurate interpretation of medical images, such as x-rays, computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, pathology…

Hacksmiths are continuing to improve their lightsaber designs.

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Vanderbilt researchers have developed a way to more quickly and precisely trap nanoscale objects such as potentially cancerous extracellular vesicles using cutting-edge plasmonic nanotweezers.

The practice by Justus Ndukaife, assistant professor of electrical engineering, and Chuchuan Hong, a recently graduated Ph.D. student from the Ndukaife Research Group, and currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northwestern University, has been published in Nature Communications.

Optical tweezers, as acknowledged with a 2018 Physics Nobel Prize, have proven adept at manipulating micron-scale matter like biological cells. But their effectiveness wanes when dealing with nanoscale objects. This limitation arises from the diffraction limit of light that precludes focusing of light to the nanoscale.