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Scientific and technological advances have enabled us to zoom into the biological world. We can get down to the biomolecular scale, a domain where quantum phenomena can take place and therefore cannot be neglected.

Watch the Q&A with Alexandra here: https://youtu.be/_rElT2_NukY
Subscribe for regular science videos: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe.

This talk was recorded at the Royal Institution on 28 October 2022.

Upon completing her doctoral studies in 2005 at the University of Oxford, Alexandra Olaya-Castro was subsequently awarded a three-year Junior Research Fellowship by Trinity College (Oxford), where she began her independent research career.

Continue reading “A future with quantum biology — with Alexandra Olaya-Castro” | >

Advances in display technologies prompt the development of electronic products with foldable and flexible panels. Flexible displays have thin-film transistors (TFTs) built in that act as an on/off light switch for the display. At the same time, important considerations for the advancement of next generation displays include electrical charge transmission velocity, operation stability, and production cost reduction.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has proposed a highly efficient crosslinking strategy for a dense and defect-free thin-film organic-inorganic hybrid . The findings from the study were published in Nature Communications.

The global evolution of IoT has raised interest in metal-oxide semiconductor-based circuits with low standby power consumption. Attention has been particularly keen on TFT materials capable of low-cost solution processing. Among several solution-processable semiconductors, are regarded as the most successful material platforms for TFTs mainly because of their high charge carrier mobility and operational stability.

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Musk is co-founder of OpenAI, the U.S. startup that developed ChatGPT — a so-called generative AI tool which returns human-like responses to user prompts.

ChatGPT is an advanced form of AI powered by a large language model called GPT-3. It is programmed to understand human language and generate responses based on huge bodies of data.

ChatGPT “has illustrated to people just how advanced AI has become,” according to Musk. “The AI has been advanced for a while. It just didn’t have a user interface that was accessible to most people.”

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I think we need to ensure that the chatbot can’t do what it said it can.

It’s only a chatbot, so it shouldn’t be able to access some networks.

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript.

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Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated frictional forces slow down the motion of surfaces in contact. Friction, he determined, is proportional to normal force. When two objects are pressed together twice as hard, friction doubles.

“We see this principle with tectonic plate boundaries,” says Utah State University geophysicist Srisharan Shreedharan. “As surfaces slide against each other, we observe frictional properties, including frictional healing that describes the degree of fault restrengthening between earthquakes. However, we know little about how this phenomenon may affect future slip events, including earthquakes.”

He and colleagues Demian Saffer and Laura Wallace of the University of Texas at Austin, where Shreedharan was previously employed as a postdoctoral fellow, and Charles Williams of New Zealand’s GNS Science geoscience research institute, publish findings about ultralow frictional healing and slow slip events along the Hikurangi in the Feb. 17, 2023, issue of the journal Science.

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When New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose recently “met” Sydney — the chatbot feature is not yet available to the public, but is being offered to a small group of testers, Roose reported — he walked away from the encounter “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.” The technology behind Sydney is “created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT,” Roose noted.

Roose described Sydney as being “like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.” And he shared the full conversation he had with the chatbot over a two-hour period.

Some disturbing details that Roose pointed to and/or that could be gleaned from the transcript:

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A single drop of blood from a finger prick. A simple electronic chip. And a smartphone readout of test results that could diagnose a Covid-19 infections or others like HIV or Lyme disease.

It sounds a bit like science fiction, like the beginnings of the medical tricorder used by doctors on Star Trek. Yet researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have taken the first step to showing it can be done, and they’ve published their results in the journal Small.

Postdoctoral fellow Neda Rafat and Assistant Professor Aniruddh Sarkar created a small chip that harnesses the fundamental chemistry of the gold-standard lab method but uses electrical conductivity instead of optics to detect antibodies and indicate infection.

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