Lifeboat Foundation

In today’s world of digital information, an enormous amount of data is exchanged and stored on a daily basis.

In the 1980s, IBM unveiled the first hard drive—which was the size of a refrigerator—that could store 1 GB of data, but now we have memory devices that have a thousand-fold greater data-storage capacity and can easily fit in the palm of our hand. If the current pace of increase in digital information is any indication, we require yet newer data recording systems that are lighter, have low environmental impact, and, most importantly, have higher data storage density.

Recently, a new class of materials called axially polar-ferroelectric columnar liquid crystals (AP-FCLCs) has emerged as a candidate for future high-density memory storage materials. An AP-FCLC is a liquid crystal with a structure of parallel columns generated by molecular self-assembly, which have polarization along the column axis.

DNA can do more than pass genetic code from one generation to the next. For nearly 20 years, scientists have known of the molecule’s ability to stabilize nanometer-sized clusters of silver atoms. Some of these structures glow visibly in red and green, making them useful in a variety of chemical and biosensing applications.

Stacy Copp, UCI assistant professor of materials science and engineering, wanted to see if the capabilities of these tiny fluorescent markers could be stretched even further—into the near-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum—to give bioscience researchers the power to see through living cells and even centimeters of biological tissue, opening doors to enhanced methods of disease detection and treatment.

“There is untapped potential to extend fluorescence by DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters into the near-infrared region,” she says. “The reason that’s so interesting is because our biological tissues and fluids are much more transparent to near-infrared light than to visible light.”

In 2023, several breakthroughs have shaken the academic community. Freezing entire organs to sub-zero temperatures for future transplantation is now a reality.

It is incredible how people ignore unambiguous research. This piece takes a couple of minutes to explain why and what we can do about it, at least for ourselves.

The Way Out of Psychic Numbing.
http://www.psychedinsanfrancisco.com/way-psychic-numbing/

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In this episode of Universe of Art, astrophysicist Dr. Erin Macdonald talks about consulting on the famous series and the real (and fictional) science on screen.

Learn more www.sciencefriday.com/startrek

Mysterious radio wave pulses from deep in space have been hitting Earth for decades, but the scientists who recently discovered them have no concrete explanation for the origin of the signals.

For 35 years, the strange blasts of energy in varying levels of brightness have occurred like clockwork approximately every 20 minutes, sometimes lasting for five minute intervals. That’s what Curtin University astronomers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) concluded in research published last week in the journal Nature.

The discovery of the signal, which researchers named GPMJ1839-10, has the scientists baffled. Believed to be coming from around 15,000 light years away from Earth, the signal has been occurring at intervals and for a period of time previously thought to be impossible.

PhotoGuard, created by researchers at MIT, alters photos in ways that are imperceptible to us but stops AI systems from tinkering with them.

Remember that selfie you posted last week? There’s currently nothing stopping someone taking it and editing it using powerful generative AI systems. Even worse, thanks to the sophistication of these systems, it might be impossible to prove that the resulting image is fake.

The good news is that a new tool, created by researchers at MIT, could prevent this.

A couple of ex-Googlers set out to create the search engine of the future. They built something faster, simpler, and ad-free. So how come you’ve never heard of Neeva?

Sridhar Ramaswamy didn’t leave Google to build another search engine. At least not at first. At the close of his 15-year tenure at Google, Ramaswamy was running the company’s entire advertising division, overseeing more than 10,000 people — he knew better than most exactly how much work it took to do search well.

You almost can’t overstate how dominant Google is in search. Most studies put Google at about 90 percent of the global search market, and that number has been steadily climbing for 20 years. Google is the default search… More.

Continue reading “How a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died” »