Lifeboat Foundation

The infrared (IR) spectrum is a vast information landscape that modern IR detectors tap into for diverse applications such as night vision, biochemical spectroscopy, microelectronics design, and climate science. But modern sensors used in these practical areas lack spectral selectivity and must filter out noise, limiting their performance. Advanced IR sensors can achieve ultrasensitive, single-photon level detection, but these sensors must be cryogenically cooled to 4 K (−269 C) and require large, bulky power sources making them too expensive and impractical for everyday Department of Defense or commercial use.

DARPA’s Optomechanical Thermal Imaging (OpTIm) program aims to develop novel, compact, and room-temperature IR sensors with quantum-level performance – bridging the performance gap between limited capability uncooled thermal detectors and high-performance cryogenically cooled photodetectors.

“If researchers can meet the program’s metrics, we will enable IR detection with orders-of-magnitude improvements in sensitivity, spectral control, and response time over current room-temperature IR devices,” said Mukund Vengalattore, OpTIm program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “Achieving quantum-level sensitivity in room-temperature, compact IR sensors would transform battlefield surveillance, night vision, and terrestrial and space imaging. It would also enable a host of commercial applications including infrared spectroscopy for non-invasive cancer diagnosis, highly accurate and immediate pathogen detection from a person’s breath or in the air, and pre-disease detection of threats to agriculture and foliage health.”

This user-processed NIRCam image of a glittering star field shows that Reddit is the gift that keeps on giving for Webb Space Telescope fans.

We could one day charge our phones and tablets wirelessly through the air, thanks to newly developed technology.

Researchers have used infrared laser light to transmit 400mW of light power over distances of up to 30 meters (98 feet). That’s enough juice to charge small sensors, though in time it could be developed to charge up larger devices such as smartphones too.

All this is done in a way which is perfectly safe – the laser falls back to a low power mode when not in use.

Circa 2015 freeze laser :3.

Thanks to Elsa’s freezing powers lasers and some advanced techniques, a team of MIT scientists has managed to freeze a molecule to 500 nanokelvins: a temp that’s nearly absolute zero.

At Hot Chips, CEO Pat Gelsinger said Intel has everything it needs to put a trillion transistors in a package by 2030.

face_with_colon_three femtosecond logic gate on computer.

Rochester and Erlangen team uses lasers to control real and virtual charge.

Alan Turing’s Imitation Game has long been a benchmark for machine intelligence. But what it really measures is deception.

Creating images from text in seconds—and doing so with a conventional graphics card and without supercomputers? As fanciful as it may sound, this is made possible by the new Stable Diffusion AI model. The underlying algorithm was developed by the Machine Vision & Learning Group led by Prof. Björn Ommer (LMU Munich).

“Even for laypeople not blessed with artistic talent and without special computing know-how and computer hardware, the new model is an effective tool that enables computers to generate images on command. As such, the model removes a barrier to ordinary people expressing their creativity,” says Ommer. But there are benefits for seasoned artists as well, who can use Stable Diffusion to quickly convert new ideas into a variety of graphic drafts. The researchers are convinced that such AI-based tools will be able to expand the possibilities of creative image generation with paintbrush and Photoshop as fundamentally as computer-based word processing revolutionized writing with pens and typewriters.

In their project, the LMU scientists had the support of the start-up Stability. Ai, on whose servers the AI model was trained. “This additional computing power and the extra training examples turned our AI model into one of the most powerful image synthesis algorithms,” says the computer scientist.

A multi-institute research team led by BGI-Research has used BGI Stereo-seq technology to construct the world first spatiotemporal cellular atlas of the axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) brain development and regeneration, revealing how a brain injury can heal itself. The study was published as a cover story in the latest issue of Science.

The research team analyzed the development and regeneration of salamander brain, identified the key neural stem cell subsets in the process of salamander brain regeneration, and described the reconstruction of damaged neurons by such stem cell subsets. At the same time, the team also found that brain regeneration and development have certain similarities, providing assistance for cognitive brain structure and development, while offering new directions for regenerative medicine research and treatment of the nervous system.

In contrast to mammals, some vertebrates have the ability to regenerate multiple organs, including parts of the central nervous system. Among them, the axolotl can not only regenerate organs such as limbs, tail, eyes, skin and liver, but also the brain. The axolotl is evolutionarily advanced compared to other teleost, such as zebrafish, and its brain features a higher similarity to mammalian brain structure. Therefore, this study used the axolotl as an ideal model organism for research into brain regeneration.