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Dec 9, 2023

Asteroid Will Pass In Front Of Bright Star Betelgeuse To Produce A Rare Eclipse Visible To Millions

Posted by in category: space

One of the biggest and brightest stars in the night sky will momentarily vanish as an asteroid passes in front of it to produce a one-of-a-kind eclipse.

Dec 9, 2023

A superconducting junction made from a single 2D material promises to harness strange new physics

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering, particle physics, quantum physics

Physicists at RIKEN have developed an electronic device that hosts unusual states of matter, which could one day be useful for quantum computation.

When a material exists as an ultrathin layer—a mere one or a few atoms thick—it has totally different properties from thicker samples of the same material. That’s because confining electrons to a 2D plane gives rise to exotic states. Because of their flat dimensions and their broad compatibility with existing semiconductor technologies, such 2D materials are promising for harnessing new phenomenon in .

These states include quantum spin Hall insulators, which conduct electricity along their edges but are electrically insulating in their interiors. Such systems when coupled with superconductivity have been proposed as a route toward engineering topological superconducting states that have potential application in future topological quantum computers.

Dec 9, 2023

Study offers new insights into how immune cells recognize their enemies

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

In order for immune cells to do their job, they need to know against whom they should direct their attack. Research teams at the University of Würzburg have identified new details in this process.

As complicated as their name is, they are important for the human organism in the fight against pathogens and cancer: Vγ9Vδ2 T cells are part of the immune system and, as a subgroup of white blood cells, fight cells and cells infected with pathogens. They recognize their potential victims by their altered cell metabolism.

Research teams from the University of Würzburg and the University Hospital of Würzburg, together with groups in Hamburg, Freiburg, Great Britain and the U.S., have now gained new insights into how these cells manage to look inside the cell. Thomas Herrmann, Professor of Immunogenetics at the Institute of Virology and Immunobiology and his colleague Dr. Mohindar Karunakaran at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), were responsible for the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

Dec 9, 2023

Rotor R550X: A full-size autonomous helicopter anyone can buy

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Rotor Technologies is now in production on a full-size unmanned helicopter for civilian use. Based on the Robinson R44 Raven II, the R550X flies for more than three hours, at speeds up to 150 mph (241 km/h), carrying up to 1,200 lb (550 kg) of cargo.

According to Torklaw, helicopters have about 9.84 crashes per 100,000 hours of flight time. That’s curiously low, given their reputation and the fact that “general aircraft” have 7.28 crashes per 100,000 hours. But still, they’re notoriously tricky to fly, and there are a growing number of projects attempting to make them much easier, using simple fly-by wire joystick controls, or even simpler one-finger tablet control schemes.

Continue reading “Rotor R550X: A full-size autonomous helicopter anyone can buy” »

Dec 9, 2023

PlayStation Will Delete Purchased Discovery Shows

Posted by in category: computing

The negative side of not having it on a disk or flash drive.


Sony announced on Monday that it would remove all Discovery content, including shows like “MythBusters” and “Deadliest Catch,” from user libraries, even if they had been purchased on the PlayStation Store.

The company, which owns and operates PlayStation game consoles, said in a brief statement that the Discovery shows would be deleted on Dec. 31, attributing the decision to “our content licensing arrangements with content providers.”

Continue reading “PlayStation Will Delete Purchased Discovery Shows” »

Dec 9, 2023

How Former Astronaut Mike Massimino Turned Three No’s From NASA Into a YES

Posted by in category: space

“One in a million is not zero.” If you’re unfamiliar with the story of how New York Times bestselling author, Columbia University professor of engineering an…

Dec 8, 2023

Paving the way to efficient architectures: StripedHyena-7B, open source models offering a glimpse into a world beyond Transformers

Posted by in category: futurism

One of the focus areas at Together Research is new architectures for long context, improved training, and inference performance over the Transformer architecture. Spinning out of a research program from our team and academic collaborators, with roots in signal processing-inspired sequence models, we are excited to introduce the StripedHyena models. This release includes StripedHyena-Hessian-7B (SH 7B), a base model, and StripedHyena-Nous-7B (SH-N 7B), a chat model. StripedHyena builds on the many lessons learned in the past year on designing efficient sequence modeling architectures: H3, Hyena, HyenaDNA, and Monarch Mixer.

Dec 8, 2023

Researchers crack the cellular code on protein folding, offering hope for many new therapeutic avenues

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, innovation

While we often think of diseases as caused by foreign bodies—bacteria or viruses—there are hundreds of diseases affecting humans that result from errors in cellular production of proteins.

A team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst leveraged the power of cutting-edge technology, including an innovative technique called glycoproteomics, to unlock the carbohydrate-based code that governs how certain classes of proteins form themselves into the complex shapes necessary to keep us healthy.

The research, published in the journal Molecular Cell, explores members of a family of proteins called serpins, which are implicated in a number of diseases. The research is the first to investigate how the location and composition of carbohydrates attached to the serpins ensure that they fold correctly.

Dec 8, 2023

Six Ways Machine Learning Will Transform the Biopharmaceutical Lifecycle

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

This listicle explores four ways that AI and ML are accelerating the biopharmaceutical lifecycle and two big ways that companies are starting to think about their data differently.

Dec 8, 2023

Reevaluating Exomoon Claims: New Study Challenges Findings around Kepler-1625b and Kepler-1708b

Posted by in category: space

A recent study published in Nature Astronomy uses a new method to challenge previous studies regarding the discoveries of the first exomoons around two exoplanets, Kepler-1708b and Kepler-1625b, located approximately 5,436 and 7,534 light-years from Earth, respectively. This study was conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the Sonnenberg Observatory and holds the potential to develop new observational methods in identifying and confirming the existence of exomoons throughout the cosmos.

Artist illustration of an exomoon orbiting a gas giant. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“Exomoons are so far away that we cannot see them directly, even with the most powerful modern telescopes,” said Dr. René Heller, who is an astrophysicist at Max Planck and lead author of the study.