Which practitioners use artificial intelligence in the clinic, and what do they ask?
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Miniature solar cells offer wireless control of living cell alignment
Tiny solar cells use light to wirelessly control living cell alignment, opening new possibilities for tissue engineering.
Life defies the second law of thermodynamics
The second law of thermodynamics says disorder always increases. But life looks like an exception, since living things are ordered and create further order. Physicists usually explain this away: order here is balanced by extra disorder elsewhere. Philosopher Dorothea Olkowski doesn’t dispute the law itself. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine’s work, she argues that order is not a debt repaid elsewhere, but the natural result of open systems exchanging energy with their surroundings. The real question, she suggests, is not whether the second law is wrong, but whether its classical, closed-system version ever described the reality of life at all. Through natural selection, life’s order overcomes reality’s chaos.
Language, Logic, and the Limits of Formalization
I would argue that I have been working with the idea of complex systems since grad school, although I certainly would not have been aware of that term nor of the multitude of scientists, philosophers, and others who engaged with what became complexity theory. My first introduction to the term “science of complexity” came from the work of the mathematician John L. Casti in his book Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise. With Casti, we encounter the concepts of catastrophe, chaos, lawlessness, irreducibility, emergence, and surprise, but he begins with the simple question of whether our language accurately reflects reality.
Glass does surprising things when stretched 1 atom wide. The discovery could help shrink electronics
Smartwatches worn on millions of wrists today pack vastly more processing power than the computers that helped Apollo astronauts land on the moon. But the scientific drive to go tiny has come at a cost: It means heat, electricity and energy now have much less room to flow through devices.
“We will eventually reach a bottleneck to design the next generation of electronic and photonic devices,” said Longji Cui, an assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. “Thermal management inside electronic devices is extremely important, but to do it more effectively, we need to understand how heat is flowing through these nanoscale devices.”
Building devices at the tiny nanoscale level will require engineers to better understand how the materials inside them, like glass, behave when they are shrunk to such a small size.
A dead star is flashing radio waves every 8 minutes, and its partner looks a lot like the sun
Since 2022, astronomers have been puzzling over a new kind of cosmic object called long-period radio transients. These are objects that emit bright flashes of radio waves into space every few minutes to every few hours. Some have been traced back to binary systems consisting of a small, dim, cool star called a red dwarf in orbit with a stellar remnant called a white dwarf.
In new research published in Nature Astronomy, we report the first discovery of a different source for one of these enigmatic intermittent broadcasters: It still involves a white dwarf, but also a star much like our own sun.
Natural Killer Cells: Tumor Surveillance and Signaling
Natural killer (NK) cells play a pivotal role in cancer immunotherapy due to their innate ability to detect and kill tumorigenic cells. The decision to kill is determined by the expression of a myriad of activating and inhibitory receptors on the NK cell surface. Cell-to-cell engagement results in either self-tolerance or a cytotoxic response, governed by a fine balance between the signaling cascades downstream of the activating and inhibitory receptors. To evade a cytotoxic immune response, tumor cells can modulate the surface expression of receptor ligands and additionally, alter the conditions in the tumor microenvironment (TME), tilting the scales toward a suppressed cytotoxic NK response. To fully harness the killing power of NK cells for clinical benefit, we need to understand what defines the threshold for activation and what is required to break tolerance.
Stanford and SLAC help launch a new view of the universe
With the Simons Observatory fully online, researchers who helped build its powerful camera are shaping new studies of the Milky Way and the cosmos.
Ukrainian-founded drone maker UForce raises $700 million at $6 billion valuation
Ukrainian-founded defense technology company UForce has raised $700 million in a Series A funding round that values it at $6 billion, as it seeks to expand production of unmanned systems for Ukraine and its allies, the company announced on Nov. 12.
The investment highlights the international appetite for Ukraine’s defense tech, as the war has accelerated the use of drones and robotic systems. The investment will help UForce expand production for Ukraine and supply allied countries with systems suited to modern warfare, the company said.
UForce is headquartered in London, with offices in Kyiv and Washington, D.C. It develops uncrewed systems for air, land and sea operations, as well as software to control them.
Automated assembly in space is the future and NOM4D is showing the way
If we want big things in space, we’ll have to build and assemble them there. Rocket fairings are not large enough to accommodate the large things we want to have in space. Not only that, but the stubborn rocket equation refuses to bend itself to our desires.
Telescopes like the JWST feature ingenious folding designs that unfold in space like insects metamorphosing. That was a very impressive way to bypass the restrictions imposed by rocket fairings. But that’s not practical in every case.
What’s far more feasible is sending smaller components into space inside fairings and then assembling them into a larger structure once there. That’s what NOM4D, the Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials and Mass-efficient Design program, is demonstrating. NOM4D reached an important milestone recently when it successfully demonstrated automated in-space assembly for the first time.
Terraforming Asteroids will be back up in a minute
Terraforming Asteroids will be back up in a minute, somehow the last couple minutes got cut off so it needed reloaded. Sorry for the mistake and late catch, we got caught in the nationwide airport shutdown and its made hearing about it, editing, and reloading a bit tricky smile Hopefully if you got caught up in that too you’re safely home or at your destination. Feel free to vent your current or prior airport headaches below, and if you’re free to watch that episode or rewatch, please give a like and comment to appease the algorithm. Enjoy the video when it is back up, see you for the Livestream Tuesday 8pm EST, and have a great week!