Lifeboat Foundation

“Astronomers have been searching for exoplanets that are likely precursors to hot Jupiters, or that are intermediate products of the migration process, for more than two decades, so I was very surprised — and excited — to find one,” team leader Arvind Gupta, a NOIRLab postdoctoral researcher, said in a statement. “It’s exactly what I was hoping to find.”

The scientists first used the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI) to remove “twinkling” patterns caused by Earth’s atmosphere, as well as reduce noise coming from other sources of light that could pollute the signal from the star TIC 241,249,530 as its planet transits its face.

Next, they measured the velocity of the exoplanet around the star using the NEID spectrograph to determine the star’s shift in light.

Our bone marrow—the fatty, jelly-like substance inside our bones—is an unseen powerhouse quietly producing 500 billion new blood cells every day. That process is driven by hematopoietic stem cells that generate all of the various types of blood cells in our bodies and regenerating themselves to keep the entire assembly line of blood production operating smoothly.

As with any complex system, hematopoietic stem cells lose functionality as they age—and, in the process, contribute to the risk of serious diseases, including blood cancers. We know that the risk of developing aging-associated diseases is different among different individuals. Surprisingly, however, little is known about whether hematopoietic stem cells age differently between individuals.

“If you take a room full of 50-year-olds, some will be completely gray-haired, others will be salt-and-pepper, and a few will not have any gray hairs at all,” said Jennifer Trowbridge, Dattels Family Endowed Chair and professor at the Jackson Laboratory. “Logically, you’d expect to see the same kind of variation in the function of hematopoietic stem cells—but until now, nobody has studied that directly.”

Florida Atlantic Center for Connected Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence (CA-AI.fau.edu) researchers have “cracked the code” on interference when machines need to talk with each other—and people.

Electromagnetic waves make wireless connectivity possible but create a lot of unwanted chatter. Referred to as “electromagnetic interference,” this noisy byproduct of wireless communications poses formidable challenges in modern day dense IoT and AI robotic environments. With the demand for lightning-fast data rates reaching unprecedented levels, the need to quell this interference is more pressing than ever.

Equipped with a breakthrough algorithmic solution, researchers from FAU Center for Connected Autonomy and AI, within the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and FAU Institute for Sensing and Embedded Network Systems Engineering (I-SENSE), have figured out a way to do that.

Scientists develop flexible, lead-free perovskite membranes for X-ray detection, achieving high sensitivity and stability. This advance could enable wearable radiation dosimeters.

Researchers from the University of Queensland have found that high-intensity interval training significantly enhances brain function in older adults, with cognitive improvements lasting up to five years. This study, led by Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr. Daniel Blackmore, confirms that such exercise can not only improve but sustain cognition in aging populations, potentially reducing the risks and costs associated with dementia.

Researchers from the University of Queensland have conducted a longitudinal study demonstrating that high-intensity interval exercise can enhance brain function in older adults for up to five years. Led by Emeritus Professor Perry Bartlett and Dr. Daniel Blackmore of UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, the study involved participants engaging in physical exercise and undergoing brain scans.

Continue reading “New Study Reveals Exercise Brain Boost Can Last for Years” »

AI will enable drone wingmen to make autonomous decisions without centralized command.

According to Airbus, FCAS will be centered around a core Next Generation Weapon System (NGWS). In this “system of systems,” piloted New Generation Fighters will work together with Unmanned Remote Carriers – all connected to other systems in space, in the air, on the ground, at sea and in cyberspace via a data cloud called the “Combat Cloud.”

Continue reading “AI-powered drone wingmen to aid Europe’s 6th-gen combat jets” »

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models are being increasingly adopted in diverse global communities where they create visual representations of their unique cultures. Current T2I benchmarks primarily focus on faithfulness, aesthetics, and realism of generated images, overlooking the critical dimension of cultural competence. In this work, we introduce a framework to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models along two crucial dimensions: cultural awareness and cultural diversity, and present a scalable approach using a combination of structured knowledge bases and large language models to build a large dataset of cultural artifacts to enable this evaluation. In particular, we apply this approach to build CUBE (CUltural BEnchmark for Text-to-Image models), a first-of-its-kind benchmark to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models. CUBE covers cultural artifacts associated with 8 countries across different geo-cultural regions and along 3 concepts: cuisine, landmarks, and art. CUBE consists of 1) CUBE-1K, a set of high-quality prompts that enable the evaluation of cultural awareness, and 2) CUBE-CSpace, a larger dataset of cultural artifacts that serves as grounding to evaluate cultural diversity. We also introduce cultural diversity as a novel T2I evaluation component, leveraging quality-weighted Vendi score. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the cultural awareness of existing models across countries and provide valuable insights into the cultural diversity of T2I outputs for under-specified prompts. Our methodology is extendable to other cultural regions and concepts, and can facilitate the development of T2I models that better cater to the global population.

From: Nithish Kannen [view email].

Unlike letters carved on the Rosetta stone, digital data is not written on a virtually immutable support. Just a few years after it is written, its format becomes obsolete, the readout analysis tools can’t run on computers and the visualization code no longer works. But data can still contain interesting scientific information that should remain available to future generations of scientists.

Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), TU Chemnitz, TU Dresden and Forschungszentrum Jülich have been the first to demonstrate that not just individual bits, but entire bit sequences can be stored in cylindrical domains: tiny, cylindrical areas measuring just around 100 nanometers.