The disc is as tough as quartz and withstands cosmic radiation.
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DNA Computing Evolves: New System Stores Data, Plays Chess, and Solves Sudoku Puzzles
Last month, a team from North Carolina State University and Johns Hopkins University found a workaround. They embedded DNA molecules, encoding multiple images, into a branched gel-like structure resembling a brain cell.
Dubbed “dendricolloids,” the structures stored DNA files far better than those freeze-dried alone. DNA within dendricolloids can be repeatedly dried and rehydrated over roughly 170 times without damaging stored data. According to one estimate, each DNA strand could last over two million years at normal freezer temperatures.
Unlike previous DNA computers, the data can be erased and replaced like memory on classical computers to solve multiple problems—including a simple chess game and sudoku.
Roger Penrose: Time, Black Holes, and the Cosmos
Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose joins Brian Greene to explore some of his most iconic insights into the nature of time, black holes, and cosmological evolution.
Moderator: Brian Greene.
Participant: Sir Roger Penrose.
00:00 — Introduction.
00:49 — Participant Introduction.
02:02 — A Working Definition of Time.
07:25 — Applying Entropy and The Second Law to the Directionality of Time.
16:37 — What The Early Universe May Have Looked Like.
20:27 — Solving the Puzzle of The Past Hypothesis.
31:46 — Investigating Exponential Expansion.
38:50 — New Discoveries and Discourse Since 2004
55:41 — A Peek Into Sir Roger Penrose’s Continuing Research.
01:08:17 — Credits.
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FDA approves Rybrevant for advanced lung cancer
The FDA approved amivantamab-vmjw in combination with standard chemotherapy for the treatment of certain adults with non-small cell lung cancer, according to the agent’s manufacturer.
The indication applies to adults with locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC with EGFR exon 19 deletions or L858R substitution mutations whose disease progressed on or following treatment with an EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor.
Amivantamab-vmjw (Rybrevant, Janssen) is an EGFR and mesenchymal epithelial transition (MET) factor bispecific antibody that targets activating and resistant EGFR and MET mutations and amplifications.
Neural Categories
In Disguised Queries, I talked about a classification task of “bleggs” and “rubes”. The typical blegg is blue, egg-shaped, furred, flexible, opaque, glows in the dark, and contains vanadium. The typical rube is red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, translucent, unglowing, and contains palladium. For the sake of simplicity, let us forget the characteristics of flexibility/hardness and opaqueness/translucency. This leaves five dimensions in thingspace: Color, shape, texture, luminance, and interior.
Mathematicians discover new class of shape seen throughout nature
Mathematicians have described a new class of shape that characterizes forms commonly found in nature — from the chambers in the iconic spiral shell of the nautilus to the way in which seeds pack into plants.
‘Soft cells’ — shapes with rounded corners and pointed tips that fit together on a plane — feature in onions, molluscs and more.
Combining soft artificial muscles with a rigid, magnetic exoskeleton to create building blocks for versatile robots
Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) have developed hexagon-shaped robotic components, called modules, that can be snapped together LEGO-style into high-speed robots that can be rearranged for different capabilities.
The team of researchers from the Robotic Materials Department at MPI-IS, led by Christoph Keplinger, integrated artificial muscles into hexagonal exoskeletons that are embedded with magnets, allowing for quick mechanical and electrical connections.
The team’s work, “Hexagonal electrohydraulic modules for rapidly reconfigurable high-speed robots” was published in Science Robotics on September 18, 2024.
The biggest diamond mine has started to produce solar energy: 4.2 GWh and a historic breakthrough
Rio Tinto has ambitious goals when it comes to sustainability. According to the company’s website, it aims to transition all its facilities and operations to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To achieve this, the company is working with governments to scale up renewable energy resources where it works. For example, Rio Tinto invested more than $500 million to partner with the Canadian government to decarbonize an iron and titanium mine in Quebec.
Mining companies like Rio Tinto provide necessary metals and minerals for global clients. The company’s products and resources are used all over the world in items that people use in their daily lives. Unfortunately, mining with diesel fuel produces carbon dioxide. Rio Tinto is exploring the effectiveness of renewable energy sources in its operations to try and reduce the negative impacts mining has on the Earth.
The Diavik diamond mine features a historic solar power plant that can produce up to 4.2GW hours of electricity for its operations. The solar panels on-site use both the light of the sun as well as light reflected off of snow to generate electricity.
How An Algorithm Feels From Inside
“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” I remember seeing an actual argument get started on this subject—a fully naive argument that went nowhere near Berkeleyan subjectivism. Just:
“It makes a sound, just like any other falling tree!” “But how can there be a sound that no one hears?”
The standard rationalist view would be that the first person is speaking as if “sound” means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if “sound” means an auditory experience in a brain. If you ask “Are there acoustic vibrations?” or “Are there auditory experiences?”, the answer is at once obvious. And so the argument is really about the definition of the word “sound”