Lifeboat Foundation

It was therefore shortly after the discovery of g that Spearman’s contemporary, Godfrey Thomson, proposed that the general factor represents a global network phenomenon 11, 12, 13. Thomson held that g emerges from the interaction among the many elements of the brain, which he referred to as neural arcs or bonds 14, 15. According to Thomson’s Sampling Theory of Mental Ability, each item on an achievement test samples a number of these bonds 11, 12, 13. He proposed that the degree of overlap among bonds accounted for the correlation between tests and the resulting positive manifold. Thus, Thomson’s theory was the first to show that Spearman’s discovery of the general factor of intelligence is consistent with a network perspective.

Thomson’s legacy can be found in modern psychological theories which posit that g originates from the mutual interactions among cognitive processes [16]. Individual differences in g are known to be influenced, for example, by language abilities 10, 17, which facilitate a wealth of cognitive, social, and affective processes through mutual interactions (i.e., reciprocal causation) [18]. The central idea of the Mutualism Model is that change or growth in one aspect of mental ability is (i) partially autonomous (owing to developmental maturation), and is also (ii) based on growth in other areas (owing to the mutual interaction between cognitive processes). By accounting for both the autonomous and interactive nature of cognitive processes, this model is able to explain individual differences in the general factor of intelligence – accounting for the positive manifold and the hierarchical pattern of correlations among tests [16].

Advances in network neuroscience have further sharpened Thomson’s notion of neural bonds, revealing principles of brain organization that support (i) the modularity of cognitive processes (enabling the autonomy of mental processes), and (ii) the dynamic reorganization of this modular architecture in the service of system-wide flexibility and adaptation (enabling mutual interactions between cognitive processes). The following sections review these principles of brain organization and introduce a Network Neuroscience Theory for understanding individual differences in the general factor of intelligence based on the small-world topology and network dynamics of the human brain. This framework relies upon formal concepts from network neuroscience and their application to understanding the neurobiological foundations of g.

In this, we present QuASeR, a reference-free DNA sequence reconstruction implementation via de novo assembly on both gate-based and quantum annealing platforms. This is the first time this important application in bioinformatics is modeled using quantum computation. Each one of the four steps of the implementation (TSP, QUBO, Hamiltonians and QAOA) is explained with a proof-of-concept example to target both the genomics research community and quantum application developers in a self-contained manner. The implementation and results on executing the algorithm from a set of DNA reads to a reconstructed sequence, on a gate-based quantum simulator, the D-Wave quantum annealing simulator and hardware are detailed. We also highlight the limitations of current classical simulation and available quantum hardware systems. The implementation is open-source and can be found on https://github.com/QE-Lab/QuASeR.

Citation: Sarkar A, Al-Ars Z, Bertels K (2021) QuASeR: Quantum Accelerated de novo DNA sequence reconstruction. PLoS ONE 16: e0249850. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.

Editor: Archana Kamal, University of Massachusetts Lowell, UNITED STATES.

Scientists have discovered yet another amazing aspect of the weird and wonderful behavior of water—this time when subjected to nanoscale confinement at sub-zero temperatures.

The finding that a crystalline substance can readily give up water at temperatures as low as −70 °C, published in the journal Nature on April 12, has major implications for the development of materials designed to extract water from the atmosphere.

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Researchers at Texas A&M University have discovered a novel circuit element referred to as a meminductor that led to a significant breakthrough in circuit elements.

In an electrical circuit, circuit elements play a crucial role in managing the flow of electricity. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor are the traditional circuit elements, while the memristor and memcapacitor are the more recent additions discovered in the past 15 years. These newer components, known as “mem-” versions of the classical elements, have different voltage and current characteristics that are influenced by previous voltage or current values over time, giving them memory-like properties.

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The robot tasked with making bricks out of lunar soil will be launched during China’s Chang’e-8 mission around 2028.

With Artemis II set to launch on November 24, it is no surprise that science journals are buzzing with research on lunar regolith, building bases on the moon, and working with moon soil to grow plants… you get the drift.

A recent study in the journal Communications Biology described an experiment in which the moon soil samples collected during the Apollo missions were used to grow plants. And for the first time, an Earth plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called thale cress, grew and thrived in the lunar soil samples during the experiment.

This one-of-a-kind robot is an exobiology extant life surveyor (EELS) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It is time to move over the traditional wheeled or legged robots. NASA has developed a robotic concept that sounds straight out of a science-fiction and has the potential to take space exploration to the next level.

The US space agency has been working on sending a snake-like robot to explore and search for extraterrestrial life forms in the solar system. This robot is an exobiology extant life surveyor (EELS) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Continue reading “NASA’s snake-like robot concept could search for life on Saturn’s moon” »

Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That’s what a developer that goes by “BioBootloader” did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs “regenerative healing abilities,” reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.)

GPT-4 is a multimodal AI language model created by OpenAI and released in March, available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and in API form to beta testers. It uses its “knowledge” about billions of documents, books, and websites scraped from the web to perform text-processing tasks such as composition, language translation, and programming.

Incubating The UAE National Space Program — H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri — Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center

H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri, is Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), in Dubai, UAE, which is an advanced scientific and technological hub, responsible for making the UAE a world leader in space services and exploration.

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Researchers propose a way to relieve the material requirements needed to realize topological quantum computers.