University of British Columbia (UBC) and BC Children’s Hospital scientists discovered that disease-causing bacteria in the gut feed on sialic acid, a sugar found in the intestinal mucus layer.
Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University, has a knack for taking an unassuming organism and showing it’s capable of the darnedest things. He and his team once extracted skin cells from a frog embryo and cultivated them on their own. With no other cell types around, they were not “bullied,” as he put it, into forming skin tissue. Instead, they reassembled into a new organism of sorts, a “xenobot,” a coinage based on the Latin name of the frog species, Xenopus laevis. It zipped around like a paramecium in pond water. Sometimes it swept up loose skin cells and piled them until they formed their own xenobot—a type of self-replication. For Levin, it demonstrated how all living things have latent abilities. Having evolved to do one thing, they might do something completely different under the right circumstances.
Slime mold grows differently depending on the music playing.
Not long ago I met Levin at a workshop on science, technology, and Buddhism in Kathmandu. He hates flying but said this event was worth it. Even without the backdrop of the Himalayas, his scientific talk was one of the most captivating I’ve ever heard. Every slide introduced some bizarre new experiment. Butterflies retain memories from when they were caterpillars, even though their brains turned to mush in the chrysalis. Cut off the head and tail of a planarian, or flatworm, and it can grow two new heads; if you amputate again, the worm will regrow both heads. Levin argues the worm stores the new shape in its body as an electrical pattern. In fact, he thinks electrical signaling is pervasive in nature; it is not limited to neurons. Recently, Levin and colleagues found that some diseases might be cured by retraining the gene and protein networks as one might train a neural network.
A new way of 3D printing wood that takes advantage of warping could change how we build things in the future — an innovation that could potentially save us all time and money.
The challenge: Wood is made of fibers that absorb moisture like a sponge. If lumber isn’t dried properly, the wood will eventually shrink — bending or twisting in different directions depending on the orientation of the fibers.
Continue reading “3D-printed wood furniture could ship flat, then dry into shape” »
Dr. Robert Floyd, Ph.D. is Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO — https://www.ctbto.org/), the organization tasked with building up the verification regime of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, a multilateral treaty opened for signature in 1996 by which states agree to ban all nuclear explosions in all environments, for military or civilian purposes.
Prior to joining CTBTO, Dr. Floyd was the Director General of the Australian Safeguards and Non-proliferation Office (ASNO), where he was responsible for Australia’s implementation of and compliance with various international treaties and conventions including the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM) and the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Amazon has begun rolling out its custom electric delivery vans from Rivian in Europe, the e-commerce giant said Monday. This will be Rivian’s first commercial shipment of vans outside the United States.
The first tranche of 300 vans will be seen on streets in Munich, Berlin and Dusseldorf in the coming weeks. Amazon already has a fleet of thousands of electric vans operating in Europe, including more than 1,000 e-vans in Germany, the company said. Amazon last year said it plans invest more than €1 billion to electrify its European transportation network.
“Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon by 2040, and reducing our delivery-related emissions is a critical part of this goal,” said Rocco Bräuniger, country manager for Amazon, in a statement. “Last year we delivered more than 45 million packages in Germany with electric vans and e-cargo bikes, and these new additions from Rivian will help us deliver packages more sustainably and to more customers.”
After swathes of users were unable to access parts of TweetDeck over the last few days, Twitter started rolling out a new version of the web app to users Monday. The company also added that in 30 days, users will have to be verified to access TweetDeck. This means only Twitter Blue subscribers, verified organizations, and some folks who have been gifted verification by Twitter will be able to use TweetDeck.
Twitter said that all saved searches and workflows from the old TweetDeck will be ported to the new version. It noted that users migrating to the new version will have an option to import their columns as well.
The social network is introducing full composer functionality, Spaces, video docking, and polls on TweetDeck. However, it said that Teams functionality is “temporarily unavailable.”
Generative AI art service Midjourney has added two new features that make images “weirder” and more panoramic. Midjourney has been rapidly spitting out features over the past few weeks, with the service expected to make the jump to version 6 before the end of July. In the meantime, customers have been given a selection of creative new toys to play with in version 5.2.
New features tell the Midjourney AI to make images weirder or to pan the camera in different directions.
Consumers are experimenting with the latest generative AI applications to write text, compose music, and create digital art.
Many believe AI will bring the end of the world, but Emad Mostaque (CEO of Stability AI) believes AI (and humans) can.
The Fourth of July holiday celebrates the day America’s Founding Fathers, representing the 13 colonies, officially adopted the Declaration of Indepen | Cancer.
