Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 216

Researchers at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Maryland recently developed MyTimeMachine (MyTM), a new AI-powered method for personalized age transformation that can make human faces in images or videos appear younger or older, accounting for subjective factors influencing aging.

This algorithm, introduced in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, could be used to broaden or enhance the features of consumer-facing picture-editing platforms, but could also be a valuable tool for the film, TV and entertainment industries.

“Virtual aging techniques are widely used in (VFX) in movies, but they require good prosthetics and makeup, often tiresome and inconvenient for actors to wear regularly during shooting,” Roni Sengupta, the researcher who supervised the study, told Tech Xplore.

Read more | >

In-plane magnetic fields are responsible for inducing anomalous Hall effect in EuCd2Sb2 films, report researchers from the Institute of Science Tokyo. By studying how these fields change electronic structures, the team discovered a large in-plane anomalous Hall effect.

These findings, published in Physical Review Letters on December 3, 2024, pave the way for new strategies for controlling electronic transport under magnetic fields, potentially advancing applications in .

The Hall effect is a fundamental phenomenon in material science. It occurs when a material carrying an electric current is exposed to a magnetic field, producing a voltage perpendicular to both the current and the magnetic field. This effect has been extensively studied in materials under out-of-plane magnetic fields. However, research on how in-plane magnetic fields induce this phenomenon has been very limited.

Read more | >

UNSW engineers have developed and built a special maser system that boosts microwave signals—such as those from deep space—but does not need to be super-cooled.

They say that diamonds are a girl’s best friend—but that might also soon be true for astronomers and astrophysicists following the new research. The team of quantum experts have developed a device known as a which uses a specially created purple diamond to amplify weak microwave signals, such as those which can come from .

Most importantly, their maser works at room temperature, whereas previous such devices needed to be super-cooled, at great expense, down to about minus 269°C.

Read more | >

Queen Mary University of London physicist Professor Chris White, along with his twin brother Professor Martin White from the University of Adelaide, have discovered a surprising connection between the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the future of quantum computing.

For decades, scientists have been striving to build quantum computers that leverage the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics to achieve far greater processing power than traditional computers. A recently identified property—amusingly called “magic”—is critical for building these machines, but its generation and enhancement remain a mystery.

For any given quantum system, magic is a measure that tells us how hard it is to calculate on a non-quantum computer. The higher the magic, the more we need quantum computers to describe the behavior. Studying the magic properties of quantum systems generates profound insights into the development and use of quantum computers.

Read more | >

When two probes orbiting the sun aligned with one another, researchers harnessed the opportunity to track the sun’s magnetic field as it traveled into the solar system. They found that the sharply oscillating magnetic field smooths out to gentle waves while accelerating the surrounding solar wind, according to a University of Michigan-led study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The sharp S-shaped bends of the magnetic fields streaming out of the sun, called magnetic switchbacks, have long been of interest to solar scientists. Switchbacks impact the —the , or plasma, that stream from the sun and influence space weather in ways that can disrupt Earth’s electrical grids, radio waves, radar and satellites.

The new understanding of magnetic switchback changes over time will help improve solar wind forecasts to better predict space weather and its potential impacts on Earth.

Read more | >

The magnetic moment of the muon is an important precision parameter for putting the Standard Model of particle physics to the test. After years of work, the research group led by Professor Hartmut Wittig of the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has calculated this quantity using the so-called lattice quantum chromodynamics method (lattice QCD method).

Their result agrees with the latest experimental measurements, in contrast to earlier theoretical calculations.

After the experimental measurements had been pushed to ever higher precision in recent years, attention had increasingly turned to the theoretical prediction and the central question of whether it deviates significantly from the experimental results and thus provides evidence for the existence of new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Read more | >

Different types of cancer have distinct molecular “fingerprints” that can be identified in the early stages of the disease with remarkable accuracy. Small, portable scanners can detect these fingerprints within just a few hours, according to a study published today in Molecular Cell.

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona made this breakthrough, paving the way for non-invasive diagnostic tests that could identify various types of cancer more quickly and at earlier stages than current methods allow.

The study centers around the ribosome, the protein factories of a cell. For decades, ribosomes were thought to have the same blueprint across the human body. However, researchers discovered a hidden layer of complexity – tiny chemical modifications which vary between different tissues, developmental stages, and diseases.

Read more | >

Altermagnetism, a newly imaged class of magnetism, offers potential for the development of faster and more efficient magnetic memory devices, increasing operation speeds by up to a thousand times.

Researchers from the University of Nottingham have demonstrated that this third class of magnetism, combining properties of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, could revolutionize computer memory and reduce environmental impact by decreasing reliance on rare elements.

Altermagnetism’s Unique Properties

Read more | >

Sharks differ from one another, so there are no other examples within the kingdom. Only this shark. All the same, researchers intend to analyze the Greenland shark’s DNA further and compare it to other sharks and fish to continue to unravel this mystery.

Scientists are exploring ways to prolong human life.

“The goal is to have better DNA repair,” an expert told CNN, and scientists have to study all the animals with an unusually long lifespan to determine which ones would “more easily adapt to human use.”

Read more | >