Menu

Blog

Page 1994

Nov 1, 2023

Lung cancer awareness: The importance of early detection and treatment

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Lung cancer is the third most common cancer in the U.S. and there have been more than 235,000 new cases of lung cancer in 2021. While this figure is significant, the rate of new lung and bronchus cancer cases is decreasing, in part because more people have stopped smoking. This trend, along with innovations in early detection and treatment, is also reducing the number of lung cancer deaths.

Dr. Robert Taylor Ripley, associate professor of surgery in the Division of General Thoracic Surgery, is an expert in mesothelioma and thoracic surgical oncology. In the following Q&A, he discusses common causes of lung cancer, risks and the latest treatments.

Q: What are the most common causes of lung cancer? A: Smoking cigarettes is the most common cause, but others include secondhand smoke and environmental inhalants. We see a fair number of patients with lung cancer who have never smoked. Exposure to diesel exhaust or other chemicals may also cause lung cancer in some non-smokers.

Nov 1, 2023

It’s Cheap to Exploit Software — and That’s a Major Security Problem

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, mobile phones

How much would it cost to hack your phone? The best guess for an iPhone is between $0 and $65,000 — and that price mainly depends on you. If you skipped a really important security update, the cost is closer to $0.

Say you were up to date. That $65,000 figure is an upper cost of exploiting the median individual — switch to an Android, a Mac, or a PC and it could get a lot lower. Apple has invested enormous resources in hardening the iPhone. The asking price for an individual exploit, rather than as a service, can go as high as $8 million. Compare that to the cost of an exploit of a PDF reader like Adobe Acrobat — notoriously riddled with security vulnerabilities — which according to this TrendMicro research report (PDF) is $250 and up.

Switch from targeting a specific person to targeting any of the thousands of people at a large company and there are myriad ways in. An attacker only needs to find the cheapest one.

Nov 1, 2023

The Largest-Ever Simulation of The Universe Could Finally Reveal How We Got Here

Posted by in categories: computing, cosmology

How did we get here? Not just we humans, scrabbling about on a pale blue dot, hurtling around a star, hurtling around a supermassive black hole, hurtling through the local cluster. But how did the dot get here, and the star, and the black hole, and the cluster?

How did the incomprehensibly immense everything of it all get to where it is now, from an unimaginable nothing, billions of years ago?

That’s it, really, the question of questions. And, with the largest project of its kind to date, astronomers are attempting to find answers – by conducting computer simulations of the entire Universe.

Nov 1, 2023

AI in Breast Radiology

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

The large blue warning signs read “Video recording for fall detection and prevention” on the third-floor dementia care unit of the Trousdale, a private-pay senior living community in Silicon Valley where a studio starts from about $7,000 per month.

Continue reading “AI in Breast Radiology” »

Nov 1, 2023

The Kardashev Scale: Type I to Type VII Civilizations

Posted by in category: futurism

Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCphTF9wHwhCt-BzIq-s4V-g/joinThumbnail artwork by https://gtgraphics.deCheck out our…

Nov 1, 2023

The future of AI hardware: Scientists unveil all-analog photoelectronic chip

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI

Researchers from Tsinghua University, China, have developed an all-analog photoelectronic chip that combines optical and electronic computing to achieve ultrafast and highly energy-efficient computer vision processing, surpassing digital processors.

Computer vision is an ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence focused on enabling machines to interpret and understand from the world, similar to how humans perceive and process images and videos.

It involves tasks such as image recognition, object detection, and scene understanding. This is done by converting from the environment into for processing by , enabling machines to make sense of visual information. However, this -to-digital conversion consumes significant time and energy, limiting the speed and efficiency of practical neural network implementations.

Nov 1, 2023

Nanowire ‘brain’ network learns and remembers ‘on the fly’

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, robotics/AI

For the first time, a physical neural network has successfully been shown to learn and remember “on the fly,” in a way inspired by and similar to how the brain’s neurons work.

The result opens a pathway for developing efficient and low-energy machine intelligence for more complex, real-world learning and .

Published today in Nature Communications, the research is a collaboration between scientists at the University of Sydney and University of California at Los Angeles.

Nov 1, 2023

Scientists will soon find out whether the Lucy mission works as intended

Posted by in category: space

A little more than two years have passed since the Lucy mission launched on an Atlas V rocket, ultimately bound for asteroids that share an orbit with Jupiter. After a gravity assist from Earth in 2022, the spacecraft has been making a beeline for an intermediate target, and now it is nearly there.

On Wednesday, the $1 billion mission is due to make its first asteroid flyby, coming to within 265 miles (425 km) of the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. In a blog post, NASA says the encounter will take place at 12:54 pm ET (16:54 UTC).

About an hour before the encounter, the spacecraft will begin attempting to lock on to the small asteroid so that its instruments are oriented toward it. This will allow for the best possible position to take data from Dinkinesh as Lucy speeds by at 10,000 mph (4,470 meters per second).

Nov 1, 2023

Tesla ramps up hiring for humanoid robot, including reinforcement learning

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI

Tesla is ramping up hiring for its humanoid robot program, Optimus, including some reinforcement learning engineers.

It was hard to take Tesla Bot seriously when Elon Musk announced it by having someone dressed as a robot dance on stage.

To this day, many people are taking the project seriously, but Tesla certainly is.

Nov 1, 2023

Engineers Develop Efficient Process To Make Fuel From Carbon Dioxide

Posted by in categories: materials, sustainability

The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.