Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has proven just how powerful it is with its latest discovery: sand storms swirling on a planet 40 light-years from Earth, or about 235 trillion miles away.

One of Webb’s greatest powers is its ability to decipher what’s going on in alien atmospheres. From its vantage point in space, Webb can peer at a distant world and analyze the entire infrared spectrum of starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere.

Different spectra of light correspond to different elements, so Webb can show astronomers exactly which gases and vapors are in another world’s atmosphere.

Large language models can’t understand language the way humans do because they can’t perceive and make sense of the world.

Summary: Researchers found a way to assess consciousness without external stimulation, using a little-used approach where volunteers squeeze a force sensor with their hand when they breathe in and release it when they breathe out, resulting in more precise and sensitive measurements that may help improve treatment for insomnia and coma reversal.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

Studies of consciousness often run into a common conundrum of science—it’s hard to measure a system without the measurement affecting the system. Researchers assessing consciousness, for instance as volunteers receive anesthesia, typically use spoken commands to see if subjects can still respond, but that sound might keep them awake longer or wake them up sooner than normal.

A new robot just 10 microns across is able to navigate in a physiological environment and perform a variety of tasks, both autonomously or through external control by a human operator.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed a new “hybrid micro-robot” the size of a single biological cell. This can be controlled and moved using two different mechanisms – electric and magnetic.

The tail fibre of an extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS) from Photorhabdus asymbiotica recognizes targets expressed on eukaryotic host cells, and can be reprogrammed to target specific organisms and cell types for delivery of novel protein payloads.

Puzzle over ‘Hubble constant’ could suggest many of our basic assumptions are wrong We may be fundamentally wrong about some of the deepest parts of the universe, according to a new study. For years, scientists have been puzzled over the “Hubble tension”. That refers to the difficulty over measuring how quickly the universe is expanding: different measurements show different speeds, and scientists have been unable to say why.

The recent discovery that plants emit inaudible sounds under stress has caused a stir in the scientific community and reminded me of a story from decades ago.

Summary: Researchers have identified a mechanism within the brain that underlies when we apply stored knowledge to novel decision-making situations.

Source: Max Planck Society.

We regularly find ourselves in new shops or restaurants, we land at airports we don’t know or start a new job. In such situations, the remarkable flexibility of human behavior becomes apparent. Even in new situations, we can often predict the consequences of our actions and thus make appropriate decisions.

Cyberpunk focuses on high technology and low life. Here are the 22 best cyberpunk novels of all time, from classics to recent additions.