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While a lot of theories have been centred around attraction, the team found that the insects do not steer directly towards the light, but instead turn their dorsum towards the light. In natural light, this tilting helps insects to maintain the proper flight attitude and control. However, the models developed by the researchers showed that dorsal tilting creates the erratic flight paths around artificial light, causing the insects to continuously steer around the light and become trapped in a constant motion.

“It is the idea that short-range light entrapment is not a navigational disruption, but instead subversion of a basic flight stability reflex, predicting that requirements for stable flight can explain this phenomenon,” says Sondhi.

“The most standout result is that artificial lights confuse insects as to which way is up,” Fabian tells Physics World. “On the ground, we find this obvious. In the air, this is a lot more challenging. In-flight accelerations are indistinguishable from acceleration due to gravity. Simply taking the direction of light as being the sky works, even at night. The night has a lot less light, obviously, but the contrast between sky and ground is just as strong. This is a beautiful, robust way to work out which way is up – until we started lighting up the night.”

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A relatively new way to attack cancer, called immunotherapy, is revolutionizing cancer treatment by enabling patients’ own immune systems to attack cancer cells. It hasn’t worked for many kinds of cancers, though — evading the immune system is one of the first tricks that cancer learns. As it turns out, many cancers are also pretty good at hiding from immunotherapies.

In a recent study published in the journal Science, though, Salk Institute researchers have discovered a new way to make cancer visible to immunotherapy. To do this, the team reprogrammed mitochondria — the organelle widely memed as the “powerhouse of the cell” — to make cancer cells easier to find and kill.

The engine of cancer: What connects mitochondria and cancers? Another hallmark of cancer is their uncontrolled growth. Fueling this rapid and relentless proliferation requires a lot of energy. This increased demand is met by changes in how mitochondria function in cancer cells.

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Real-Time Artist and Unreal Engine specialist Ayoub Attache, known to many for his jaw-dropping experiments with Epic Games’ game creation tool, has once again blurred the line between the digital realm and real life with a brand-new project.

This time, he has developed an incredible setup for simulating earthquakes in Unreal Engine 5 by simply shaking a smartphone attached to a cutting board surrounded by RC car shock absorbers, which mimic the ground’s movement. The shaking data, including acceleration and gyroscope readings, is then sent via a UDP server straight to Unreal Engine, where it simulates an earthquake affecting a construction site.

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Dr. John Swierk: “This is also the first study to explicitly look at inks sold in the United States and is probably the most comprehensive because it looks at the pigments, which nominally stay in the skin, and the carrier package, which is what the pigment is suspended in.”

Do the ingredients in tattoo inks match the labels on their respective bottles? This is what a recent study published in Analytical Chemistry hopes to address as a team of researchers from Binghamton University investigated the accuracy of ink ingredients and what’s labeled on their containers. This study holds the potential to help scientists, artists, and their customers better understand the health risks, to include allergic reactions and other risks, of using the wrong ink ingredients for tattoos.

For the study, the researchers examined ingredients from 54 inks emanating from nine common brands within the United States with the goal of ascertaining their exact chemical compositions compared to what was labeled on their respective bottles. In the end, the researchers identified that 45 of the 54 inks possessed a myriad of pigments and/or additives that were not properly labeled on the bottles that could pose health risks to customers receiving ink tattoos, including allergic skin reactions and other long-term health risks, including non-skin-related risks, such as cancer. Despite the alarming findings, the researchers could not ascertain which unlisted ingredients were intentionally or accidentally added to the inks.

This study comes as Congress passed the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) in 2022, which grants the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first-time power to monitor tattoo ink ingredients and their labels. Until MoCRA, the cosmetic industry was almost entirely unregulated.

Continue reading “Ink Alert: Discrepancies Found in Tattoo Ink Composition” | >

For better or for worse, generative AIs continue to evolve by leaps and bounds with each passing day, a fact that has once again been proven by Google’s DeepMind team with the reveal of Genie, a new AI-powered model capable of creating entire games from just a single image prompt. Trained without any action labels on a large dataset of publicly available Internet videos, Genie can turn any image, whether it’s a real-world photograph, a sketch, an AI-generated image, or a painting, into a simplistic 2D platformer, with the team noting that this approach is versatile and applicable across various domains. Moreover, developers highlight that this new model opens the door for future AI agents to be trained “in a never-ending curriculum of new, generated worlds.”

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“God looked upon his world and called it good, but Man was not content. He looked for ways to make it better and built machines to do the work. But in vain we build the world, unless the builder also grows.” Tinged with earthbound authenticity and verbal courtroom sparring straight out of “Perry Mason,” this classic episode finds a robot — Adam Link — on trial for the murder of the scientist who created him. “Star Trek’s” Leonard Nimoy turns in a fine performance as the cock-sure reporter who coaxes a crusty lawyer, Thurman Cutler (Howard Da Silva), out of retirement to defend the accused automaton. Based on the classic “Adam Link” stories first published in 1939’s “Amazing Stories” magazine, “I, Robot” asks the question: In the race for more complex technology, are we creating beneficial machinery…or futuristic Frankenstein monsters? In 1995, Nimoy will return to this story in the revival series of “The Outer Limits,” this time as the District Attorney.

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Our history has been one of inventing ever more devastating and unstoppable weapons, and yet they may pale in comparison to those made to wreck whole galaxies or tear asunder reality itself.
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Continue reading “Super Weapons” | >

The speed of innovation in bioelectronics and critical sensors gets a new boost with the unveiling of a simple, time-saving technique for the fast prototyping of devices.

A research team at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University reported a simple way to fabricate electrochemical transistors using a standard Nanoscribe 3D micro printer. Without cleanroom environments, solvents, or chemicals, the researchers demonstrated that 3D micro printers could be hacked to laser print and micropattern semiconducting, conducting, and insulating polymers.

Anna Herland, professor in Micro-and Nanosystems at KTH, says the printing of these polymers is a key step in prototyping new kinds of electrochemical transistors for medical implants, wearable electronics and biosensors.

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Human coexistence depends on cooperation. Individuals have different motivations and reasons to collaborate, resulting in social dilemmas, such as the well-known prisoner’s dilemma. Scientists from the Chatterjee group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) now present a new mathematical principle that helps to understand the cooperation of individuals with different characteristics. The results, published in PNAS, can be applied to economics or behavioral studies.

A group of neighbors shares a driveway. Following a heavy snowstorm, the entire driveway is covered in snow, requiring clearance for daily activities. The neighbors have to collaborate. If they all put on their down jackets, grab their snow shovels, and start digging, the road will be free in a very short amount of time. If only one or a few of them take the initiative, the task becomes more time-consuming and labor-intensive. Assuming nobody does it, the driveway will stay covered in snow. How can the neighbors overcome this dilemma and cooperate in their shared interests?

Scientists in the Chatterjee group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) deal with cooperative questions like that on a regular basis. They use to lay the mathematical foundation for decision-making in such social dilemmas.

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