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Sep 20, 2022

Genetic Link to Moving to the Beat of Music

Posted by in categories: genetics, media & arts

Summary: Researchers have discovered 69 genetic variants associated with musical beat synchronization, or the ability to move in sync with the beat of music.

Source: Vanderbilt University.

The first large-scale genomic study of musicality — published on the cover of today’s Nature Human Behaviour — identified 69 genetic variants associated with beat synchronization, meaning the ability to move in synchrony with the beat of music.

Sep 20, 2022

MIT Contributes to Success of Historic Fusion Ignition Experiment

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

MIT students are part of the large team that achieved fusion ignition for the first time in a laboratory. Researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition in a laboratory for more than half a century. It is a grand challenge of the 21st century. An approach called inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses lasers to implode a pellet of fuel in a quest for ignition, has been the focus of the High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) group at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. This group, including nine former and current MIT students, was crucial to a historic ICF ignition experiment performed in 2021. The results were published this year on the anniversary of that success.

Sep 20, 2022

The World’s First Quantum Computing Integrated Circuit Achieved

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Scientists simulated an organic molecule at the atomic scale. What does this mean for the future of quantum computing?

Sep 20, 2022

Aubrey de Grey is working to cure aging whether you like it or not

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension

Don’t think about living forever. Just think about never getting sick, ever again.

At least that’s how Aubrey de Grey would like you to contextualize his work. The notoriously bearded biomedical gerontologist is the scientific spark that lights up so many all-caps “immortality” headlines. De Grey wants to increase human longevity so significantly that death could become a thing of the past, a condition people fell prey to before they developed the medical technology to stop it. It’s been the center of his work for approximately 20 years.

De Grey started as a software guy at the genetics department of Cambridge University in 1992, maintaining a database of genetic information on fruit flies. In 1999 he published a book called “The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,” where he first laid out the key idea we know him for today: preventing damage to mitochondrial DNA ought to make people live much longer. The idea was so well-received that Cambridge awarded him a PhD the following year. De Grey condensed his thesis to a sound byte in a 2007 interview: “[Humans] are machines, and aging is the wearing out of a machine, the accumulation of damage to a machine, and hence potentially fixable.”

Sep 20, 2022

UNITY Biotechnology Completes Enrollment in Phase 2 ENVISION Study of UBX1325 in Wet Age-related Macular Degeneration

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Enrollment of 51 patients exceeds target by ~10% due to high interest in the study

16-week data anticipated in Q1 2023 and 24-week data anticipated in Q2 2023

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 19, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — UNITY Biotechnology, Inc. (“UNITY”) [NASDAQ: UBX], a biotechnology company developing therapeutics to slow, halt, or reverse diseases of aging, has completed enrollment for the ENVISION study, its Phase 2 clinical trial of UBX1325 in patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This is an active comparator study, examining the efficacy of two doses of UBX1325 compared to every other month treatment with aflibercept through 24 weeks.

Sep 20, 2022

A Robot on Mars Detected The Tremors of Meteorites Hitting The Red Planet

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space

An instrument designed to detect seismic activity on Mars has just revealed an incredibly cool new ability, detecting faint tremors from meteorites impacting the red planet.

By combining data collected from the NASA’s Mars InSight lander with information from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter researchers have successfully linked those ground-shaking booms with freshly formed craters.

Not only does this help us understand the impact processes that continue to shape Martian geology, it demonstrates how collecting seismic data can reveal information beyond expected mission parameters. This may help inform future exploration of other worlds.

Sep 19, 2022

AI image search engine finds great prompts for Stable Diffusion and co

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

With the advent of generative image AI, a new discipline is emerging: prompt engineering. Search engines like Krea provide inspiration.

Prompts are the short text descriptions that an image AI like DALL-E 2, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion uses to generate an image.

Often it is difficult to put the idea you have in mind into fitting words. Moreover, the AI may execute instructions differently than you want it to. And there are plenty of modifiers, for example for image cropping or style, that can lead to very different results for the otherwise same prompt.

Sep 19, 2022

There’s no Tiananmen Square in the new Chinese image-making AI

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

ERNIE-ViLG, the new text-to-image AI developed by Baidu can generate images that show Chinese objects and celebrities more accurately than existing AIs. But a built-in censorship mechanism will filter out politically sensitive words.

Sep 19, 2022

At least 1 dead after 7.6-magnitude earthquake strikes Mexico’s Pacific coast, officials say

Posted by in category: futurism

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook the Pacific coast of central Mexico Monday, killing at least one person, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Sep 19, 2022

AWS AI call for proposals — Fall 2022

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Advancing the frontiers of machine learning.