Lifeboat Foundation

A team of engineers and physicists affiliated with a host of institutions across Japan, working at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, has demonstrated acceleration of positive muons from thermal energy to 100 keV—the first time muons have been accelerated in a stable way. The group has published a paper describing their work on the arXiv preprint server.

Neoen formally opens first stage of what will be Australia’s biggest battery, soaking up rooftop solar and helping ease the last coal generators out of the grid.

The consumer-facing side of electric vehicles paints a limited picture of what’s happening in the broader automotive industry. But when you glance behind the scenes, things start appearing far clearer, to a point where it’s pretty evident that the future of road transport is battery-powered. A big part of what’s happening backstage is making those batteries right here, on American soil.

Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution announced recently that it reached an agreement with Ford to move production of the Ford Mustang Mach-E’s batteries from Poland to Michigan starting next year. Instead, the LGES Poland factory will prioritize producing batteries for Ford’s commercial vans sold in the U.K. and the European Union.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has revolutionized many industries and holds the promise to affect many more in the not too distant future. While people are most familiar with the 3D printers that function much like inkjet printers, another type of AM offers advantages using a different approach: building objects with light one layer at a time.

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants.

Microscopic magnetic nanodiscs could provide a much less invasive means of providing deep brain stimulation, a new study says.

ABOUT THE LECTURE
Animals and humans understand the physical world, have common sense, possess a persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex sequences of subgoals and actions. These essential characteristics of intelligent behavior are still beyond the capabilities of today’s most powerful AI architectures, such as Auto-Regressive LLMs.

I will present a cognitive architecture that may constitute a path towards human-level AI. The centerpiece of the architecture is a predictive world model that allows the system to predict the consequences of its actions. and to plan sequences of actions that that fulfill a set of objectives. The objectives may include guardrails that guarantee the system’s controllability and safety. The world model employs a Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) trained with self-supervised learning, largely by observation.

Continue reading “Lecture Series in AI: ‘How Could Machines Reach Human-Level Intelligence?’ by Yann LeCun” »

In a laboratory set-up simulating the human stomach and intestine, researchers at the University of Amsterdam have explored the fate of plastic nanoparticles during gastrointestinal digestion. In their paper published in the October issue of Chemosphere, they report how a range of model plastic nanoparticles interact with digestive enzymes and form agglomerates.

The BASE experiment aims to answer this question by precisely measuring the properties of antiprotons, such as their intrinsic magnetic moment, and then comparing these measurements with those taken with protons. However, the precision the experiment can achieve is limited by its location.

“The accelerator equipment in the AD hall generates magnetic field fluctuations that limit how far we can push our precision measurements,” said BASE spokesperson Stefan Ulmer. “If we want to get an even deeper understanding of the fundamental properties of antiprotons, we need to move out.”

This is where BASE-STEP comes in. The goal is to trap antiprotons and then transfer them to a facility where scientists can study them with a greater precision. To be able to do this, they need a device that is small enough to be loaded onto a truck and can resist the bumps and vibrations that are inevitable during ground transport.