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Blog – Page 1854

Researchers have discovered a mechanism steering the evolution of multicellular life. They identify how altered protein folding drives multicellular evolution.

In a new study led by researchers from the University of Helsinki and the Georgia Institute of Technology, scientists turned to a tool called experimental evolution. In the ongoing Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE), laboratory yeast are evolving novel multicellular functions, enabling researchers to investigate how they arise.

The study, published in Science Advances, puts the spotlight on the regulation of proteins in understanding evolution.

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A team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) detailed their ‘Complementary-Transformer’ AI chip during the recent 2024 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The new C-Transformer chip is claimed to be the world’s first ultra-low power AI accelerator chip capable of large language model (LLM) processing.

In a press release, the researchers power-shame Nvidia, claiming that the C-Transformer uses 625 times less power and is 41x smaller than the green team’s A100 Tensor Core GPU. It also reveals that the Samsung fabbed chip’s achievements largely stem from refined neuromorphic computing technology.

Though we are told that the KAIST C-Transformer chip can do the same LLM processing tasks as one of Nvidia’s beefy A100 GPUs, none of the press nor conference materials we have provided any direct comparative performance metrics. That’s a significant statistic, conspicuous by its absence, and the cynical would probably surmise that a performance comparison doesn’t do the C-Transformer any favors.

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A Russian state-backed group that Microsoft said hacked into its corporate email accounts was able to gain access to its core software systems, the company announced on Friday.

Microsoft said its security team detected the attack in January and identified the group responsible as Midnight Blizzard, “the Russian state-sponsored actor also known as Nobelium.”

“In recent weeks, we have seen evidence that Midnight Blizzard is using information initially exfiltrated from our corporate email systems to gain, or attempt to gain, unauthorized access,” Microsoft said in a blog post update on Friday. “This has included access to some of the company’s source code repositories and internal systems.”

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Water determines life: humans are three-quarters water. An international research team led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has now discovered how water also determines the structure of the material that holds us together: collagen.

In a paper published in PNAS, the researchers elucidate the role of water in the molecular self-assembly of . They show that by replacing water with its ‘twin molecule’ heavy water (D2O), one can ‘tune’ the interaction between collagen molecules, and thus influence the process of collagen self-assembly. The findings will help to better understand the tissue failures resulting from heritable collagen-related diseases, such as brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta).

As lead author Dr. Giulia Giubertoni of the UvA’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS) puts it, “In studying these and other collagen diseases, many researchers, including myself, … have always missed an important part of the puzzle, and the possibility that tissue failure might be partly due to water-collagen interaction was not taken very seriously. We now show that perturbing the water layer around the , even very slightly, has dramatic effects on collagen assembly.”

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