Gemini just got even better.
A new technology developed at MIT enables scientists to label proteins across millions of individual cells in fully intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using the technology, the team was able to richly label whole rodent brains and other large tissue samples in a single day.
In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also demonstrate that the ability to label proteins with antibodies at the single-cell level across whole brains can reveal insights left hidden by other widely used labeling methods.
Profiling the proteins that cells are making is a staple of studies in biology, neuroscience and related fields because the proteins a cell is expressing at a given moment can reflect the functions the cell is trying to perform or its response to its circumstances, such as disease or treatment.
Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have used machine learning to design nano-architected materials that have the strength of carbon steel but the lightness of Styrofoam.
In a new paper published in Advanced Materials, a team led by Professor Tobin Filleter describes how they made nanomaterials with properties that offer a conflicting combination of exceptional strength, light weight and customizability. The approach could benefit a wide range of industries, from automotive to aerospace.
“Nano-architected materials combine high performance shapes, like making a bridge out of triangles, at nanoscale sizes, which takes advantage of the ‘smaller is stronger’ effect, to achieve some of the highest strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios, of any material,” says Peter Serles, the first author of the new paper.
Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water.
This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe.
Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.
The chameleon, a lizard known for its color-changing skin, is the inspiration behind a new electromagnetic material that could someday make vehicles and aircraft “invisible” to radar.
As reported today in the journal Science Advances, a team of UC Berkeley engineers has developed a tunable metamaterial microwave absorber that can switch between absorbing, transmitting or reflecting microwaves on demand by mimicking the chameleon’s color-changing mechanism.
“A key discovery was the ability to achieve both broadband absorption and high transmission in a single structure, offering adaptability in dynamic environments,” said Grace Gu, principal investigator of the study and assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “This flexibility has wide-ranging applications, from stealth technology to advanced communication systems and energy harvesting.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said Thursday (Jan. 23) that accelerated advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in biology, can lead to a doubling of human lifespans in as little as five to 10 years “if we really get this AI stuff right.”
During a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Amodei called this the “grand vision.” He explained that if AI today can shrink a century’s worth of work in biology to five to 10 years, and if one believes it would take 100 years to double the average length of human life, then “a doubling of the human lifespan is not at all crazy, and if AI is able to accelerate that we may be able to get that in five to 10 years.”
Amodei also said that Anthropic is working on a “virtual collaborator,” an AI agent capable of doing higher-level tasks in the workplace such as opening Google Docs, using the Slack messaging channel, and interacting with workers. A manager will only need to check in with this AI agent “once in a while,” similar to what management does with human employees.
DATEV and IQM Quantum Computers collaborated to explore the potential of quantum computing in optimizing DATEV’s product portfolio.
A study led by scientists at Rutgers University-New Brunswick has shown that specialized cells involved in how the body responds to insulin are activated in the brain after exercise, suggesting that physical activity may directly improve brain function.
The combination problem may, in fact, be a reason to favor a version of panpsychism in which consciousness is fundamental in the form of a continuous, pervasive field, analogous to spacetime. Just as spacetime and gravity have an interactive relationship, consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental “field” that interacts with, and is integral to, matter. We typically don’t think of spacetime as bits and pieces that build on each other (it’s simply everywhere), and I don’t think we should be tempted to think of consciousness, if it is indeed a pervasive field, as divisible into building blocks either. Rather, it makes more sense to talk about a field that contains a range of content —the content depending on the other forces or fields it’s interacting with. In the same way that gravity is a two-way street—matter warps spacetime and the shape of spacetime determines how matter moves—a consciousness field would imbue matter with another property, giving rise to the range of content experience d. Under this view, content is divisible, but consciousness isn’t. Therefore, consciousness is also not interacting with itself, as it would be in the act of “combining.” Considering consciousness to be fundamental allows for matter to have a specific internal character everywhere, in all of its various forms.
If consciousness is fundamental, then the questions that prompt the combination problem are potentially the same as all the other questions we might ask about spacetime in which we don’t anticipate this problem. All matter would entail consciousness, and complex systems, such as human brains, would give rise to certain types of content in those locations in spacetime. Even if each individual atom has its own experience, consciousness itself is not necessarily isolated. The matter might be isolated, and therefore the content associated with the consciousness at that location is isolated. But consciousness itself would not be said to be isolated. Again, we can think of consciousness as analogous to spacetime: How it’s affected by matter depends on the matter in question (its mass, in the case of spacetime). Similarly, a consciousness field might be “shaped” by matter in terms of experiential quality or content. And this line of thinking yields interesting questions.