Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 19

By Chuck Brooks.

Source: Forbes

Robotics is now revolutionizing numerous industry sectors through the integration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and reinforcement learning, as well as advances in computer vision that empower robots to make complicated judgments.

Industrial automation in factories and warehouses has been the main emphasis of robotics for many years because of its efficiency and affordability. These settings are usually regulated, organized, and predictable. Consequently, industries like manufacturing, agriculture, warehouse operations, healthcare, and security have utilized robotics to automate mundane programmable tasks.

Robotics in those and many other industries are becoming more refined and capable with the contributions of new material sciences, and artificial intelligence tools. It now appears that with those advances, we are at the precipice of building functional, dexterous, and autonomous humanoid robots that were once the topic of futurist writing.

Read more | >

Researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and Harvard University have experimentally demonstrated that new artificial materials known as metamaterials, with magnetic properties, can have their mechanical and structural behavior reprogrammed without altering their composition. This breakthrough could drive innovations in fields such as soft robotics and biomedicine.

The study explains how flexible magnets embedded within the structure of mechanical metamaterials can be used to reprogram their behavior.

The integration of flexible magnets in metamaterials allows for reprogrammable structures, offering vast potential in robotics and biomedical engineering.

Read more | >

Until now, only expensive and slow electron microscopes could reach this level of detail. But LICONN opens the door for more labs around the world to explore the brain’s cellular “wiring diagram” using tools they already have. It’s like giving everyone a high-powered zoom lens for decoding how the brain works, learns, and perhaps breaks down in disease.

In collaboration with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), we published in Nature the first-ever method for using light microscopy to comprehensively map all the neurons and their connections in a block of brain tissue. The key finding from this validation experiment is that this approach works as well as electron microscopy-based connectomics.

Read more | >

Our brain is a complex organ. Billions of nerve cells are wired in an intricate network, constantly processing signals, enabling us to recall memories or to move our bodies.

Making sense of this complicated network requires a precise look into how these are arranged and connected. “LICONN,” a new microscopy method developed by scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and Google Research, now helps piece together this puzzle.

Light microscopes have been evolving for centuries. Scientists use light microscopy to—literally and figuratively—illuminate the most intricate biological structures. However, unraveling the complex details and architecture of the brain remains a seemingly impossible challenge, considering its billions of densely packed neurons, each linked to other cells via thousands of synapses.

Read more | >

This Perspective discusses unresolved questions about how the chromatin modifier Polycomb repressive complex 2 (PRC2) binds RNA in vivo and the functional consequences of binding. The authors posit that RNA conformation is integral to PRC2 control and thus to regulation of chromatin state.

Read more | >

IN A NUTSHELL 🔬 Scientists have measured the speed of quantum entanglement for the first time, marking a major milestone in quantum physics. 💡 The study uses attosecond precision to track electron motion, offering unprecedented insight into quantum dynamics. 🔗 Quantum entanglement shows how particles can be interconnected over vast distances, defying traditional physics. 🚀

Read more | >

Engineers from Australia and China have invented a sponge-like device that captures water from thin air and then releases it in a cup using the sun’s energy, even in low humidity where other technologies such as fog harvesting and radiative cooling have struggled.

The water-from-air device remained effective across a broad range of humidity levels (30–90%) and temperatures (5–55 degrees Celsius).

Senior researcher Dr. Derek Hao, from RMIT University in Melbourne, said the invention relied on refined balsa wood’s naturally spongy structure, modified to absorb water from the atmosphere and release it on demand.

Read more | >