A remarkable group of drone prototypes from a team at the University of Tokyo takes multirotor complexity to the next level. These hypnotic flying robots are able to change their structural shape mid-air, creating some unprecedented capabilities.
Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. is launching a subscription service called Meta Verified that will include a handful of additional perks and features, including account verification badges for those who pay.
The new subscription will cost $11.99 per month — $14.99 if purchased through the iOS app — and is primarily targeted toward content creators. In addition to a verification badge, the subscription includes “proactive account protection, access to account support, and increased visibility and reach,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced the new product via his Instagram Channel, a service that was unveiled in the past week. The option will be available on both Facebook and Instagram, but they’ll be separate subscriptions.
Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing unnerved some people recently with shocking responses.
Amid discussions and scrutiny, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his thoughts on AI In a series of tweets on Sunday.
He warned the world may not be “that far from potentially scary” AI and said regulation will be “critical.”
Are quantum fields real, or are they simply calculational tools? These 3 experiments show that if energy is real, so are quantum fields.
Using the ALMA telescope in Chile and Einstein’s theory of relativity, scientists observed a young galaxy in the early universe that is invisible in nearly every wavelength.
Up to now, the use of models to research the barrier that separates the circulatory from the nervous system has proven to be either limited or extremely complicated. Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a more realistic model that can also be used to better explore new treatments for brain tumors.
Mario Modena is a postdoc working in the Bio Engineering Laboratory at ETH Zurich. If he were to explain his research on the blood-brain barrier —the wall that protects our central nervous system from harmful substances in the blood stream —to an 11-year-old, he would say, “This wall is important, because it stops the bad guys from getting into the brain.” If the brain is damaged or sick, he says, holes can appear in the wall. Sometimes, such holes can actually be useful, for example, for supplying the brain with urgently needed medicine. “So what we are trying to understand is how to maintain this wall, break through it and repair it again.”
This wall is also important from a medical perspective, because many diseases of the central nervous system are linked to an injury to the blood-brain barrier. To discover how this barrier works, scientists often conduct experiments on live animals. In addition to such experiments being relatively expensive, animal cells may provide only part of the picture of what is going on in a human body. Moreover, there are some critics, who question the basic validity of animal testing. An alternative is to base experiments on human cells that have been cultivated in the laboratory.
In a recent study published in the journal Cell, researchers utilized a genetically encoded mirror-TRAP strategy to investigate the functional importance of aggression-mirroring neurons.
The GPT-3 large language model performs at the level of a nine year old human in standard Theory of Mind tests, says psychologist.
Vibrations are the main drivers of a mysterious process in which a liquid flow generates an electric current in the solid below it.
Liquid flowing over a conducting surface is known to produce electric currents, but the mechanism behind this effect has been unclear. New experiments with a single liquid drop dragged over a graphene surface demonstrate that viscous forces at the liquid–solid interface create vibrations, or phonons, in the graphene sheet that drag electrons in the direction of the flow [1]. The researchers verified this “phonon wind” interpretation by observing multiple liquids and by testing graphene surfaces with and without wrinkles. The results could lead to highly sensitive flow sensors or to devices that can harvest electricity from flows.
Researchers have found that water flowing over a material—in particular, carbon nanotubes or graphene—can generate electric currents in the solid. The effect appears in carbon materials because the surfaces are atomically flat and thus allow the liquid to flow largely unobstructed at the liquid–solid boundary, explains Alessandro Siria from the École Normale Supérieure in France. Several models have been proposed to explain the flow-induced currents, often involving charges within the liquid acting on the electrons in the solid. However, experimental uncertainties have prevented researchers from determining which model is best.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Chemistry have engineered silicon nanowires that can convert sunlight into electricity by splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen gas, a greener alternative to fossil fuels.
Fifty years ago, scientists first demonstrated that liquid water can be split into oxygen and hydrogen gas using electricity produced by illuminating a semiconductor electrode. Although hydrogen generated using solar power is a promising form of clean energy, low efficiencies and high costs have hindered the introduction of commercial solar-powered hydrogen plants.
An economic feasibility analysis suggests that using a slurry of electrodes made from nanoparticles instead of a rigid solar panel design could substantially lower costs, making solar-produced hydrogen competitive with fossil fuels. However, most existing particle-based light-activated catalysts, also referred to as photocatalysts, can absorb only ultraviolet radiation, limiting their energy-conversion efficiency under solar illumination.
