At HLTH, Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka gave a window into how his health system is mitigating generative AI risks. Some of the measures Mayo is taking include running analyses on how well algorithms perform across various subgroups and training models only on internal de-identified data.
The rich dust clouds that are responsible for producing these giant stars are blocking the light from Hubble’s view. The star and the jet of material it is emitting are visible near the very center.
“The small, bright orange streak is a cavity in the dust carved out by the ferocity of the jet as it streams towards us. By breaking through its dusty cocoon, the jet reveals light from the protostar, but there is still so much dust that the light is “reddened” to a fiery orange. The massive protostar lies at the very lower-left tip of this cavity,” NASA wrote in a post.
Jet-setting through a star formation hotbed!The glimmering, star-forming region seen in this #HubbleFriday view is called G35.2–0.7N. The spectacular light show is caused by a powerful jet of matter ejecting from a very young star: https://go.nasa.gov/3twrzbE pic.twitter.com/hLEwFDqZCy — Hubble (@NASAHubble) October 13, 2023
Full episode with Joscha Bach (Jun 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-2P3MSZrBM
Clips channel (Lex Clips): https://www.youtube.com/lexclips.
Main channel (Lex Fridman): https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman.
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If you want optimism about life extension, here is Bill Faloon at RAADFest with the latest.
Bill Faloon gave the keynote presentation at the RAADfest conference in September 2023. In his talk, he discussed many of the advances in longevity research over the past year and described the main barrier to faster advances in regenerative medicine.
As you might imagine for a scroll that has been buried under mounds of volcanic ash from Mount Vesuvius for close to 2,000 years, the rolled-up papyrus excavated from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum is rather difficult to open, let alone read – but AI has found a way.
Scholars from the University of Kentucky launched the Vesuvius Challenge in March, releasing thousands of X-ray images of charred, carbonized Herculaneum scrolls together with untrained artificial intelligence software that could be used to interpret the scans.
Now two students have claimed the first prizes to be awarded: Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a biorobotics grad student at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.
Around planets that have a magnetosphere, something magical happens.
If you listen with the right instruments, you can hear chirping and whistling, almost like the singing of birds at dawn and dusk. These so-called chorus waves have been recorded at Earth, and Jupiter, and Saturn; and observed at Uranus and Neptune.
Now, led by astronomer Mitsunori Ozaki of Kanazawa University, scientists from Japan and France have detected them whistling around Mercury, barren and alone as it skirts the Sun.
Materials scientists at Kiel University and the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology in Itzehoe (ISIT) have cleared another hurdle in the development and structuring of new materials for next-generation semiconductor devices, such as novel memory cells.
They have shown that ferroelectric aluminum scandium nitride can be scaled down to a few nanometers and can store different states, making it suitable as a nanoswitch. In addition, they have proved aluminum scandium nitride to be a particularly stable and powerful semiconductor material for current technologies based on silicon, silicon carbide and gallium nitride. In contrast to today’s microelectronics, the material can withstand extreme temperatures of up to 1,000°C.
This opens up applications such as information storage or sensors for combustion processes in engines or turbines in both the chemical industry and in the steel industry. The results were published in the journal Advanced Science. The study was part of a research project that brings together basic research in materials development and applications in microelectronics.
Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a range of new single-walled transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) nanotubes with different compositions, chirality, and diameters by templating off boron-nitride nanotubes. They also realized ultra-thin nanotubes grown inside the template, and successfully tailored compositions to create a family of new nanotubes. The ability to synthesize a diverse range of structures offers unique insights into their growth mechanism and novel optical properties.
The work is published in the journal Advanced Materials.
The carbon nanotube is a wonder of nanotechnology. Made by rolling up an atomically thin sheet of carbon atoms, it has exceptional mechanical strength and electrical conductivity among a range of other exotic optoelectronic properties, with potential applications in semiconductors beyond the silicon age.
Karin’s life took a dramatic turn when a farming accident claimed her right arm more than 20 years ago. Since then, she has endured excruciating phantom limb pain. “It felt like I constantly had my hand in a meat grinder, which created a high level of stress and I had to take high doses of various painkillers.”
In addition to her intractable pain, she found that conventional prostheses were uncomfortable and unreliable, and thus of little help in daily life. All this changed when she received groundbreaking bionic technology that allowed her to wear a much more functional prosthesis comfortably all day. The higher integration between the bionics and Karin’s residual limb also relieved her pain. “For me, this research has meant a lot, as it has given me a better life.”
Mechanical attachment and reliable control are two of the biggest challenges in artificial limb replacement. People with limb loss often reject even the sophisticated prostheses commercially available due to these reasons, after experiencing painful and uncomfortable attachment with limited and unreliable controllability.
Automation and sector-wide collaboration will be critical as developers try to move beyond the production challenges that slow growth of the cell and gene therapy sector. So says Julie G. Allickson, PhD, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Regenerative Biotherapeutics who argues that, despite considerable investment in infrastructure, production is still the biggest challenge.
“Both industry and academia are challenged by the lack of manufacturing capacity for cell and gene therapies,” she says, citing plasmid production and viral vector production as examples. “Besides these issues, the scalability of production processes can be difficult, especially when coupled to individually expanded cells. When looking at the patient cells variability, quantity and quality of cells is critical to ensure consistency in the product delivered to the patient,” she says.
