California-based startup Opener has been developing eVTOLs since 2011, when founder Marcus Leng flew a proof-of-concept aircraft that he had constructed himself (using wooden chopsticks as part of the build).
Startup Pivotal has unveiled the Helix eVTOL, a one-seater aircraft it plans to begin selling for $190,000 in 2024.
An AI has created stills from a non-existent Alejandro Jodorowsky version of “The Matrix” that “stars” Jeff Goldblum as Morpheus — and it’s honestly epic.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated the remarkable ability to perturb pairs of spatially separated yet interconnected quantum entangled particles without altering their shared properties.
The team includes researchers from the Structured Light Laboratory (School of Physics) at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, led by Professor Andrew Forbes, in collaboration with string theorist Robert de Mello Koch from Huzhou University in China (previously from Wits University).
“We achieved this experimental milestone by entangling two identical photons and customizing their shared wave-function in such a way that their topology or structure becomes apparent only when the photons are treated as a unified entity,” explains lead author, Pedro Ornelas, an MSc student in the structured light laboratory.
“We think that the HD 144,432 disk may be very similar to the early Solar System that provided lots of iron to the rocky planets we know today,” said Dr. Roy van Boekel.
How did our solar system form and is this process similar in other solar systems throughout the universe? This is what a study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to figure out as a team of international researchers used data from the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) to analyze the protoplanetary disk around HD 144,432, which is a young star located approximately 500 light-years from Earth. This study holds the potential to not only help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of solar systems, but also gain greater insight into how life could evolve in these systems, as well.
“When studying the dust distribution in the disk’s innermost region, we detected for the first time a complex structure in which dust piles up in three concentric rings in such an environment,” said Dr. Roy van Boekel, who is a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and one of more than three dozen co-authors on the study. “That region corresponds to the zone where the rocky planets formed in the Solar System.”
For context in terms of the distance between the three rings, the innermost ring orbits at the same distance as Mercury, the second farthest ring orbits at the same distance as Mars, and the farthest ring orbits at the same distance as Jupiter.
Posted in biotech/medical, health
Diverse gut microbiomes protect against pathogens by blocking nutrient access, according to a new Science study. The findings highlight why microbiome diversity is important to human health.
While dementia is much more common in older adults, hundreds of thousands of people are diagnosed with young-onset dementia (YOD) each year – and an extensive new study sheds some considerable new light on why.
Most previous research in this area has looked at genetics passed down through generations, but here, the team was able to identify 15 different lifestyle and health factors that are associated with YOD risk.
“This is the largest and most robust study of its kind ever conducted,” says epidemiologist David Llewellyn from the University of Exeter in the UK.
The Wall Street bank estimates that specialized memory and storage products meant for AI chips will help chipmakers regain pricing power and raise earnings.
“The misperception of Neptune’s color, as well as the unusual color changes of Uranus, have bedeviled us for decades. This comprehensive study should finally put both issues to rest,” said Dr. Heidi Hammel.
In space, not everything is how it seems, and this might be the case with Uranus and Neptune, as a study scheduled to be published in February 2024 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society examines how the colors of the two gas giants might be more similar that what NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft imaged in 1986 and 1989, respectively, as it flew past the gas giants during its mission. Originally, Voyager 2 imaged Uranus to exhibit a greenish-type color while Neptune appeared to be a strong blue, and this new study holds the potential to help scientists better understand how to estimate the true colors of planets throughout the cosmos.
“Although the familiar Voyager 2 images of Uranus were published in a form closer to ‘true’ color, those of Neptune were, in fact, stretched and enhanced, and therefore made artificially too blue,” said Dr. Patrick Irwin, who is a Professor of Planetary Physics at the University of Oxford and lead author of the study. “Even though the artificially-saturated color was known at the time amongst planetary scientists – and the images were released with captions explaining it – that distinction had become lost over time.”
For the study, the researchers used data obtained from the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, between 1950 and 2016 and supplemental data obtained from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope between 2016 and 2022 to determine that both Uranus and Neptune exhibit similar greenish-blue colors, with Neptune being slightly bluer than Uranus, which the team attributes to the planet’s possessing a thinner haze layer than Uranus. Additionally, the team might have also determined the color changes that Uranus experiences throughout its 84-year orbit, which they attributed to occurring during the planet’s equinoxes, when sunlight is directly over Uranus’ equator. When this happens, Uranus exhibits a slightly bluer color than during the rest of its orbit.
Chronic liver diseases such as hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, and hepatocellular carcinoma are a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Fibrosis—the thickening and scarring of connective tissue—plays a major role in these liver diseases but detection of fibrosis is limited to biopsy, which suffers from limitations including the risk of complications, sampling only a tiny fraction of the liver, and an inability to serially monitor disease progression due to its invasive nature.
To provide better diagnosis and treatment of chronic liver diseases, researchers are working to use non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect and quantify liver fibrosis throughout the entire organ, which would enable earlier detection and the ability to monitor disease progression as well as the effects of treatment over time.
Adapting MRI for detecting chronic conditions such as fibrosis involves the development of tissue-specific MRI contrast agents that target diseased tissue such as the collagen that accumulates in fibrotic liver. To develop such agents, researchers have been challenged to design and synthesize compounds that must find and bind the tissue target, provide a strong signal under MRI, and rapidly clear from the system to minimize any toxicity.
