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Blog – Page 2093

Scientific investigations on the ISS’s latest resupply mission include advancements in 3D metal printing, semiconductor manufacturing, reentry thermal protection, robotic surgery, and cartilage tissue regeneration. These studies aim to enhance space mission sustainability and have significant implications for Earth-based technologies and health care.

Tests of a 3D metal printer, semiconductor manufacturing, and thermal protection systems for reentry to Earth’s atmosphere are among the scientific investigations that NASA and international partners are launching to the International Space Station on Northrop Grumman’s 20th commercial resupply services mission. The company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft is scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida by late January.

Read more about some of the research making the journey to the orbiting laboratory:

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SynapShot, developed by an international research team, marks a major advancement in neuroscience by enabling real-time, live observation of synaptic changes in the brain.

The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons and 600 trillion synapses that exchange signals between the neurons to help us control the various functions of the brain including cognition, emotion, and memory. Interestingly, the number of synapses decrease with age or as a result of diseases like Alzheimer’s, and research on synapses thus attracts a lot of attention. However, limitations have existed in observing the dynamics of synapse structures in real-time.

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Scientists have developed “quantum ping-pong”: Using a special lens, two atoms can be made to bounce a single photon back and forth with high precision.

Atoms can absorb and reemit light — this is an everyday phenomenon. In most cases, however, an atom emits a light particle in all possible directions — recapturing this photon is therefore quite hard.

A research team from TU Wien in Vienna (Austria) has now been able to demonstrate theoretically that using a special lens, a single photon emitted by one atom can be guaranteed to be reabsorbed by a second atom. This second atom not only absorbs the photon though, but directly returns it back to the first atom. That way, the atoms pass the photon to each other with pinpoint accuracy again and again – just like in ping-pong.

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We’re reading more than ever before – but much of it is on screens rather than physical books. Is it changing the way our brains work? Reading books has so many physical, emotional and economic benefits — here’s why how we read might be more important than what or how much we read.

Video by Daniel Nils Roberts.

Made in partnership with the Open University.

If you liked this video then why not watch this one about the power of stories to shape our minds 👉 • How stories shape our minds | The sci…

Continue reading “What does reading on screens do to our brains? | BBC Ideas” | >

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Cornell Univ scientists reptdly have created metallic form of gas Xenon by subjecting it to unprecedented pressure; success heightens hopes that metallic hydrogen, hypothetical substance that would have enoumous practical utility, may soon be within reach; NASA sponsored work of team headed by Dr Arthur L Ruoff; Ruoff comments on process (S)

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Autism is characterized by impairments in social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive behaviors. In this video, I discuss the neuroscience of autism along with potential factors and mechanisms involved in the development of autism.

TRANSCRIPT:

Autism, also known as autism spectrum disorder, is characterized by symptoms that include impairments in social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive behaviors. Although the neuroscience of autism is still poorly understood, autism is considered to be a complex developmental disorder that involves atypical brain organization starting early in development.

Individuals with autism often experience a period of unusually rapid brain growth in infancy and early childhood. This accelerated brain growth is linked to an atypical pattern of connectivity between brain regions. A number of studies report that alterations in brain circuitry involved with social interaction and attention can be detected well before the symptoms of autism begin to appear. At this point, however, it’s unclear how brain overgrowth and atypical connectivity might be linked to the occurrence of autism symptoms.

Continue reading “2-Minute Neuroscience: Autism” | >

Airships are essentially rigid, steerable balloons that fly because they’re filled with a lighter-than-air gas. The Hindenburg is probably the most well-known example of an — and also the most-well known example of why filling them with flammable hydrogen is dangerous.

Brin’s plan is to fill hiss with non-flammable helium and then use them to transport tons of cargo hundreds of miles efficiently and cleanly. He also hopes to use them for humanitarian missions, delivering supplies and personnel to places that are hard to access by road.

The Pathfinder-1: In 2015, Brin founded a startup, LTA Research, to help him reach this goal, and the team came up with the Pathfinder-1, a 400-foot-long prototype with electric motors, a carbon-fiber skeleton, and an ultra-light synthetic cover.

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The Glaze/Nightshade team, for its part, denies it is seeking destructive ends, writing: Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.

In other words, the creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.

How did we get here? It all comes down to how AI image generators have been trained: by scraping data from across the web, including scraping original artworks posted by artists who had no prior express knowledge nor decision-making power about this practice, and say the resulting AI models trained on their works threatens their livelihood by competing with them.

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