Lifeboat Foundation

US scientists have achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the second time since a historic breakthrough in December last year in the quest to find a near-limitless, safe and clean source of energy.

Scientists at the California-based Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory repeated the breakthrough in an experiment in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) on 30 July that produced a higher energy yield than in December, a Lawrence Livermore spokesperson said.

For many people, they are tiny pests. These fruit flies that sometimes hover over a bowl of peaches or a bunch of bananas. But for a dedicated community of researchers, fruit flies are an excellent model organism and source of information into how neurons self-organize during the insect’s early development and form a complex, fully functioning nervous system.

That’s the scientific story on display in this beautiful image of a larval fruit fly’s developing nervous system. Its subtext is: fundamental discoveries in the fruit fly, known in textbooks as Drosophila melanogaster, provide basic clues into the development and repair of the human nervous system. That’s because humans and fruit flies, though very distantly related through the millennia, still share many genes involved in their growth and development. In fact, 60 percent of the Drosophila genome is identical to ours.

Once hatched, as shown in this image, a larval fly uses neurons (magenta) to sense its environment. These include neurons that sense the way its body presses against the surrounding terrain, as needed to coordinate the movements of its segmented body parts and crawl in all directions.

Cattle may seem like uniquely American animals, steeped in the lore of cowboys, cattle drives and sprawling ranches. But cattle didn’t exist on the American continents prior to the arrival of the Spanish, who brought livestock with them from Europe by way of the Canary Islands.

In a new study, researchers analyzed ancient DNA from Spanish settlements in the Caribbean and Mexico. Their results indicate cattle were also imported from Africa early in the process of colonization, more than 100 years before their arrival was officially documented.

Records kept by Portuguese and Spanish colonists reference breeds from the Andalusian region of Spain but make no mention of transporting cattle from Africa. Some historians have interpreted this omission to mean that the first wave of colonists relied entirely on a small stock of European cattle initially shipped to the Caribbean Islands.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a feeding supermassive black hole from when the universe was less than 600 million years old.

For the first time ever, research scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the Institute for Soldier Technologies have demonstrated a level of control over the phenomenon known as quantum randomness.

If perfected, controlling quantum randomness could lead to a number of scientific breakthroughs, including the ability to perform previously impossible probabilistic quantum computing and advanced field sensing technologies.

Continue reading “Impossible Science: MIT Scientists Successfully Demonstrate First-Ever Control over Quantum Randomness” »

Spirituality declines, depression rises. Is there a link?

Study reveals an important discovery in the realm of nanomachines within living systems. Prof. Sason Shaik from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Kshatresh Dutta Dubey from Shiv Nadar University, conducted molecular-dynamics simulations of Cytochromes P450 (CYP450s) enzymes, revealing that these enzymes exhibit unique soft-robotic properties.

Cytochromes P450 (CYP450s) are enzymes found in living organisms and play a crucial role in various biological processes, particularly in the metabolism of drugs and xenobiotics. The researchers’ simulations demonstrated that CYP450s possess a fourth dimension — the ability to sense and respond to stimuli, making them soft-robot nanomachines in “living matters.”

In the catalytic cycle of these enzymes, a molecule called a substrate binds to the enzyme. This leads to a process called oxidation. The enzyme’s structure has a confined space that allows it to act like as a sensor and a soft robot. It interacts with the substrate using weak interactions, like soft impacts. These interactions transfer energy, causing parts of the enzyme and the molecules inside it to move. This movement generates ultimately a special substance called oxoiron species, which serves the enzyme to oxidize a variety of different substances.

AI-based translation software, DeepL, is making its first appearance on the Forbes Cloud 100 list this year thanks to a machine learning translation model that users say is more precise than Google’s.

Jaroslaw Kutylowski speaks German, Polish and English (and he can order a Coke in French). With DeepL, his startup’s AI-powered translation tool, he can read and write in about 30 more.

Founded in 2017, DeepL has developed translation software that it says is far more accurate than rival products offered by Google and others, thanks to some powerful artificial intelligence working in concert with human native language speakers.

When an artist – whether they are a painter, writer, photographer, poet, etc. – creates a piece of work, they automatically own the copyright to it. This means they get to choose how that work of art can be used and, of course, get paid for it. But what happens when a piece of art is created by a computer?

This is a problem that we’ve only had to deal with in the last year – since Generative AI took the world by storm. Tools like ChatGPT can write stories, songs or plays, while Stable Diffusion or DALL-E 2 can produce images of anything we can describe to them.

But should the credit (and royalties) go to the person who used the tool to create the art or to the company that built the AI tool?… More.

Continue reading “Is Generative AI Stealing From Artists?” »