Lifeboat Foundation

While human beings have many living ancestors — bonobos, chimps, gorillas — our absence of fur immediately marks us as something different.

And though our big brains and bipedal posture have taken us to outer space, the reason our species transitioned to a mostly hairless body remains somewhat of a mystery.

Only a few other mammals share our genetic preference for sleek bodies, including rhinos, whales, elephants, and — everyone’s favorite — the naked mole rat.

Gal Frenkel built a wooden deck and pool in the backyard of his home in central Israel the summer after he had sold luxury wedding/bar mitzvah event planner Sky Productions (opening price for an event: $1 million).

Frenkel hosted a few parties there, and after the summer he didn’t think much about his pool and deck. When he went out to look at it the following spring, he was shocked.

“The whole area looked old and ruined and faded. I was so disappointed,” he tells ISRAEL21c. “I called the guy who installed the deck and said, ‘Nadav, you really messed it up.’ He started laughing. ‘Decks need ongoing maintenance,’ he explained. So, I asked him, ‘Can you do that for me?’ ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘The price will be 10,000 shekels.’”

Well, I’ve got news for you: none of those three are bad things. You’re shooting the messenger. It’s an emotional friendly fire incident.

In fact, boredom, frustration, and impatience are downright good for you. Yeah, I said it.

Continue reading “New Neuroscience Reveals How To Overcome Boredom, Frustration, And Impatience” »

The central problem quantum state engineering is trying to solve, says Ryan Glasser is “what do I need to do to get my quantum system to be in the state I desire?” Researchers hope ManQala, a version of the ancient game mancala, has answers. (Credit: Tobias Tullius/Unsplash)

The game mancala may have originated as far back as 6,000 BCE in Jordan and is played around the world to this day. It consists of stones that players move between a series of small pits on a wooden game board. The point of the game is to get all the stones into the last pit at the end of the board.

A new project is using cutting-edge levitation techniques to make bioprinting heart models and other complex tissues a reality.

Dubbed PULSE, the project combines the recently developed techniques of acoustic levitation and magnetic levitation to manipulate individual components without actually touching them. It’s a process that the researchers involved hope will one day facilitate the bioprinting of organs and other human tissues in much greater detail and complexity than what is achievable with current techniques.

If perfected, the researchers also hope this type of bioprinting could even help on long-term space missions as more accurate organ models can create more accurate defenses against radiation and other stresses of space travel.

The Indonesian capital of Jakarta was ranked the most polluted city in the world on Wednesday.

Swiss air quality technology company IQAir has consistently ranked it among the top 10 polluted cities around the globe since May.

Jakarta registers unhealthy air pollution levels nearly every day, it said.

Recent developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence have led to solutions to a variety of use cases. Different text-to-image generative models have paved the way for an exciting new field where written words can be transformed into vibrant, engrossing visual representations. The capacity to conceptualize distinctive ideas inside fresh circumstances has been further expanded by the explosion of personalization techniques as a logical evolution. A number of algorithms have been developed that simulate creative behaviors or aim to enhance and augment human creative processes.

Researchers have been putting in efforts to find out how one can use these technologies to create wholly original and inventive notions. For that, in a recent research paper, a team of researchers introduced Concept Lab in the field of inventive text-to-image generation. The basic goal in this domain is to provide fresh examples that fall within a broad categorization. Considering the challenge of developing a new breed of pet that is radically different from all the breeds we are accustomed to, the domain of Diffusion Prior models is the main tool in this research.

This approach has drawn its inspiration from token-based personalization, which is a pre-trained generative model’s text encoder using a token to express a unique concept. Since there are no previous photographs of the intended subject, creating a new notion is more difficult than using a conventional inversion technique. The CLIP vision-language model has been used to direct the optimization process in order to address this. There are positive and negative sides to the limitations; while the negative limitations cover the existing members of the category from which the generation should deviate, the positive constraint promotes the development of images that are in line with the wide category.

Modular robots—robotic systems that can adapt their body configuration to change locomotion style or move on different terrains—can be highly advantageous for tackling missions in diverse environments. Over the past decade or so, engineers have developed a wide range of modular robots that rely on different designs and underlying mechanisms.

A research team at Westlake University and Zhejiang University in China recently introduced a new modular robot design inspired by the paper-folding art of origami, specifically by an origami fold known as the Kresling pattern. Their design, introduced in a paper in Nature Communications, relies on newly introduced, universally deformable modules that can be rearranged to create different shapes and configurations.

Continue reading “An origami-inspired universally deformable module for robotics applications” »

A team of researchers from the ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP) led by professor Liu Tie from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has stumbled on a forming quadruple-star system in one of the 72 dense cores in the Orion Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs).

This is according to a press release by the Chinese Academy of Sciences published on Monday.

Astronomers have long known that approximately half of the stars in the galaxy reside in systems with two or more stars. Now they are working to explain how the multiple star systems form in order to produce valis theories on the formation of stars and planets.