OpenAI just unveiled a new subscription tier called ChatGPT Pro. Users can pay $200 a month for almost unlimited access to ChatGPT’s tools, and an exclusive new AI model.
“This is a highly engineered design, but the fundamental concepts are fairly simple,” said Dr. Jie Yin. “And with only a single actuation input, our robot can navigate a complex vertical environment.”
What influence can marine life have on robotics? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Virginia and North Carolina State University have developed the fastest swimming soft robot by taking cues from manta ray fins. This study holds the potential to help researchers, engineers, and scientists develop faster and more efficient swimming soft robots that can be used for a variety of purposes worldwide.
This study builds on a 2022 study conducted by this same team of researchers that explored swimming soft robots that exhibited butterfly strokes, achieving a then-record of 3.74 body lengths per second, along with demonstrating high power efficiency, low energy use, and high maneuverability. For this new study, the researchers developed fins used by manta rays with the goal of achieving greater results than before. The fins are flexible when not in use but become rigid when the researchers pumped air into the silicone body that encompasses the soft robot.
In the end, the researchers not only achieved low energy use and maneuverability, but also broke their own record of body lengths per second at 6.8. Additionally, the manta ray-inspired swimming soft robot was able to avoid obstacles, which was an improvement from their 2022 study.
The fastest animals are neither the largest, nor the smallest, but rather intermediately sized, though the mechanism for this is unknown. This study built predictive musculoskeletal simulations, scaled in mass from the size of a mouse to an elephant to understand the underlying mechanisms.
Werner Heisenberg
Posted in internet | 1 Comment on Werner Heisenberg
You deserve an explanation, so please don’t skip this 1-minute read. It’s Friday, December 6. Our fundraiser will soon be over, but we’re still short of our goal. If you’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve visited Wikipedia this year, we hope that means it’s given you at least $2.75 worth of knowledge. If everyone who finds Wikipedia useful gave just $2.75, we’d hit our goal in a few hours.
The internet we were promised—a place of free, collaborative, and accessible knowledge —is under constant threat. On Wikipedia, volunteers work together to create and verify the pages you rely on, supported by tools that undo vandalism within minutes, ensuring the information you seek is trustworthy.
Just 2% of our readers donate, so if you have given in the past and Wikipedia still provides you with $2.75 worth of knowledge, donate today. If you are undecided, remember any contribution helps. Thank you.
Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed map of the gravitational wave background to date, using pulsar timing arrays and the extraordinary sensitivity of the MeerKAT radio telescope. In my new co-author paper, we find potential tantalising hints of a “hot spot” in the gravitational wave map.
Featured ContentThe image featured at the top of this post is ©Song_about_summer/Shutterstock.com.
Researchers have used a mouse model to show that infections in the intestine can change the composition of bile, a fluid that is generated in the liver and is crucial to digestion. Bile aids in the absorption of fat and contributes to defense against infections. This study has suggested that intestinal infections can alter microbes in the gastrointestinal tract, or the microbiome, and modify the immune system. Although the work was conducted in mice, the researchers suggested that their conclusions also apply to humans. The findings have been reported in Nature Microbiology.
“The changes we detected in the composition of bile with infection are beneficial for the intestine to clear infection,” said corresponding study author Matthew Waldor, MD, PhD, of Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Our findings reveal the intricate and dynamic nature of bile composition, shedding new light on the liver’s critical role in defending the intestine from infection. These insights enhance our understanding of the liver’s broader functions in regulating physiological stability and metabolic processes.”
Yale researchers have made an unexpected discovery—turncoat T cells that help a tumor evade other cancer-fighting immune T cells—in a study of patients living with advanced melanoma.
The study by Yale Cancer Center (YCC) researchers at Yale School of Medicine (YSM) discovered that not all CD8+ T cells are allies in a body’s fight against cancer cells. Patients living with severe melanoma who had increased levels of suppressor, regulatory CD8+ T cells had worse survival outcomes.
The study is published in the journal Nature Immunology.
Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and it takes on a different, more nuanced meaning. There is a challenge in simply defining what makes an individual cell alive or dead. Scientists today are working to understand the various ways and reasons that cells disappear, and what these processes mean to biological systems. In this episode, cellular biologist Shai Shaham talks to Steven Strogatz about the different forms of cell death, their roles in evolution and disease, and why the right kinds and patterns of cell death are essential to our development and well-being.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.