Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers in the Yale Department of Cell Biology have created a new microscopy technique that will help unlock the inner workings of cells 100 times faster than current technology allows – and at a fraction of the cost.

Writing in the journal Cell, the Yale team says their FLASH-PAINT technique…

While current microscopy techniques image only a few intracellular molecules at a time, a new technique developed by Yale scientists can help researchers.

Continue reading “Advanced Microscopy Technique Offers a New Look Inside Cells” »

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a new design concept for creating next-generation carbon-based quantum materials, in the form of a tiny magnetic nanographene with a unique butterfly-shape hosting highly correlated spins. This new design has the potential to accelerate the advancement of quantum materials which are pivotal for the development of sophisticated quantum computing technologies poised to revolutionize information processing and high density storage capabilities.

XAI launched Grok-1.5V, a new multimodal AI that can understand text, images, diagrams, and more. xAI claims Grok-1.5V outperforms competitors on key benchmarks such as RealWorldQA.

NASA is proposing to wind down its Chandra X-ray Observatory. And astronomers are pissed.

In a major clean energy benchmark, wind, solar, and hydro exceeded 100% of demand on California’s main grid for 30 of the past 38 days.

Stanford University professor of civil and environmental engineering Mark Z. Jacobson has been tracking California’s renewables performance, and he shares his findings on Twitter (X) when the state breaks records. Yesterday he posted:

Jacobson notes that supply exceeds demand for “0.25−6 h per day,” and that’s an important fact. The continuity lies not in renewables running the grid for the entire day but in the fact that it’s happening on a consistent daily basis, which has never been achieved before.

Protein language models learn from diverse sequences spanning the evolutionary tree and have proven to be powerful tools for sequence design, variant effect prediction and structure prediction. What are the foundations of protein language models, and how are they applied in protein engineering?

Self-driving cars do not get drunk, they do not fall asleep, they do not get distracted by text messages, and experts and manufacturers agree they could be the answer to slashing the road toll.

It’s one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are in the spotlight again, with Tesla promising to unveil a robotaxi in August and Hyundai showing off the results of its driverless car trial in Las Vegas.

But debate is raging in the industry over whether the technology is or will ever be ready to drive in busy, unpredictable environments without any human oversight.

An attention-grabbing report suggests $1 trillion of investment is needed to electrify 100% of the nation’s truck fleet. Here’s what it got wrong.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, according to a new report (see ‘Speedy advances’). Rapid progress in the development of these systems also means that many common benchmarks and tests for assessing them are quickly becoming obsolete.

These are just a few of the top-line findings from the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024, which was published on 15 April by the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University in California. The report charts the meteoric progress in machine-learning systems over the past decade.

In particular, the report says, new ways of assessing AI — for example, evaluating their performance on complex tasks, such as abstraction and reasoning — are more and more necessary. “A decade ago, benchmarks would serve the community for 5–10 years” whereas now they often become irrelevant in just a few years, says Nestor Maslej, a social scientist at Stanford and editor-in-chief of the AI Index. “The pace of gain has been startlingly rapid.”