Bacteria choose to swarm based on what happened to their great-grandmothers.
Feng Guo, an associate professor of intelligent systems engineering at the Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, is addressing the technical limitations of artificial intelligence computing hardware by developing a new hybrid computing system—which has been…
A team of IU bioengineers are building the intersection of brain organoids and artificial intelligence, which could potentially transform the performance and efficiency of advanced AI techniques.
If you read and believe headlines, it seems scientists are very close to being able to merge human brains with AI. In mid-December 2023, a Nature Electronics article triggered a flurry of excitement about progress on that transhuman front:
“‘Biocomputer’ combines lab-grown brain tissue with electronic hardware”
“A system that integrates brain cells into a hybrid machine can recognize voices”
Paleontologists have made a startling discovery in South Africa which suggests that it was not humans who created the world’s oldest known burial site.
The researchers have found remains of small-brained distant relatives of humans in the burial site, which has hinted at them being the creators. These mammals were known to be incapable of complex behaviour.
The researchers, headed by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, in June announced that several specimens of Homo naledi have been discovered by them. These remains of Stone Age hominids, who were good at tree-climbing, were found buried around 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system inside the Cradle of Humankind, which is a designated UNESCO world heritage site close to Johannesburg.
Fatigue and Cancer Treatment
Posted in biotech/medical
Fatigue is a common side effect of cancer and cancer treatment. Learn about what causes cancer and what you can do to manage and treat it.
We finally got our first look at the new all-electric Porsche Macan EV this week. Porsche’s electric Macan features a 100 kWh battery pack that will reportedly be supplied by China’s CATL.
Ten years after debuting the SUV, Porsche revealed the all-electric Macan Thursday. The electric Macan is Porsche’s second EV, after the Taycan and the first fully electric SUV to wear the iconic badge.
The Macan EV is also the first existing Porsche model to receive an electric upgrade. With 87,355 Macan models handed over last year, the SUV plays a critical role in Porsche’s lineup.
For the first time, a team of scientists has imaged a single atom by using X-rays. And according to the resulting study published in the journal Nature, it offers transformative advantages over other techniques.
“Atoms can be routinely imaged with scanning probe microscopes, but without X-rays one cannot tell what they are made of,” study co-author Sai Wai Hla, a physicist at Ohio University and the Argonne National Laboratory, said in a press release.
“We can now detect exactly the type of a particular atom, one atom-at-a-time, and can simultaneously measure its chemical state,” Hla added. “Once we are able to do that, we can trace the materials down to the ultimate limit of just one atom.”
Radiowave clocks currently used for precise timekeeping have their shortcomings and optical clocks can help overcome them.
The U.S. Department of Defense plans to develop a program to estimate prices and predict supplies of nickel, cobalt and other critical minerals, a move aimed at boosting market transparency but one that throws a new, uncertain variable into global metals markets.
Is there life on Mars or has life ever existed in its ancient past? What conditions would be the right combination for life to exist there? These questions are what NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are trying to answer as they continue to explore the barren and dry landscape of the Red Planet in hopes of unlocking its secrets above or buried deep beneath the surface. One such component that could contribute to life is methane, which has been identified by the Curiosity rover to exist on Mars in bursts. Now, a recent study published in Journal of Geophysical Research Letters: Planets (JGR: Planets) hopes to explain why, how, and when these methane gases reach the surface in bursts. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the internal mechanisms of Mars and whether this could lead to life existing on the Red Planet.
2019 news report discussing Curiosity finding methane on Mars.
“Understanding Mars’ methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” said John Ortiz, who is a PhD Student Researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study. “There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, and a big one is knowing what time of a given sol (Martian day) is best for Curiosity to perform an atmospheric sampling experiment.”