Lifeboat Foundation

A “bio-battery” made from genetically engineered bacteria could store excess renewable energy and release it as needed.

However, AI functionalities on these tiny edge devices are limited by the energy provided by a battery. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is crucial. In today’s AI chips, data processing and data storage happen at separate places – a compute unit and a memory unit. The frequent data movement between these units consumes most of the energy during AI processing, so reducing the data movement is the key to addressing the energy issue.

Stanford University engineers have come up with a potential solution: a novel resistive random-access memory (RRAM) chip that does the AI processing within the memory itself, thereby eliminating the separation between the compute and memory units. Their “compute-in-memory” (CIM) chip, called NeuRRAM, is about the size of a fingertip and does more work with limited battery power than what current chips can do.

“Having those calculations done on the chip instead of sending information to and from the cloud could enable faster, more secure, cheaper, and more scalable AI going into the future, and give more people access to AI power,” said H.-S Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering.

Yes, it does. Although OrganEx helps revitalize pigs’ organs, it’s far from a deceased animal being brought back to life. Rather, their organs were better protected from low oxygen levels, which occur during heart attacks or strokes.

“One could imagine that the OrganEx system (or components thereof) might be used to treat such people in an emergency,” said Porte.

The technology could also help preserve donor organs, but there’s a long way to go. To Dr. Brendan Parent, director of transplant ethics and policy research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, OrganEx may force a rethink for the field. For example, is it possible that someone could have working peripheral organs but never regain consciousness? As medical technology develops, death becomes a process, not a moment.

The device uses magnetic fields to carry out computation rather than shuttling electricity around, so it consumes far less power.

In new research from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have achieved efficient quantum coupling between two distant magnetic devices, which can host a certain type of magnetic excitations called magnons. These excitations happen when an electric current generates a magnetic field. Coupling allows magnons to exchange energy and information. This kind of coupling may be useful for creating new quantum information technology devices.

“Remote coupling of magnons is the first step, or almost a prerequisite, for doing quantum work with magnetic systems,” said Argonne senior scientist Valentine Novosad, an author of the study. “We show the ability for these magnons to communicate instantly with each other at a distance.”

Johannes Kalliauer, a postdoc at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, studies how structures like DNA and bridges relate with Newtonian mechanics.

A biotechnology company based in Israel wants to replicate a recent experiment that successfully created an artificial mouse embryo from stem cells — only this time with human cells.

Scientists at Weizmann’s Molecular Genetics Department grew “synthetic mouse embryos” in a jar without the use of sperm, eggs, or a womb, according to a paper published in the journal Cell on August 1. It was the first time the process had been successfully completed, Insider’s Marianne Guenot reported.

The replica embryos could not develop into fully-formed mice and were therefore not “real,” Jacob Hanna, who led the experiment, told the Guardian. However, scientists observed the synthetic embryos having a beating heart, blood circulation, the start of a brain, a neural tube, and an intestinal tract.

Our model of the Universe, dominated by dark matter and dark energy, explains almost everything we see. Almost. Here’s what remains.

Discussion with Joscha Bach, Marcus Bingenheimer, Pei Wang, and Simon Wiles about Buddhist models of the mind and contemporary research in Artificial General Intelligence.

This event was a Global Studies webinar, co-sponsored by the Science, Technology, and Society CHAT Interdisciplinary Research Group, and the Temple University Libraries. It took place on 2021/03/05.

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