In the latest filing related to Anthropic’s IPO, the company says RSI could be arriving “imminently,” which would mean self-improving AI.
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Startup Northwood Space hits $2 billion valuation
Northwood Space raised $375 million in a Series C funding that valued the Torrance, California-based satellite antenna builder and ground station provider at $2 billion.
Why it matters: Modern and fortified infrastructure on Earth becomes more crucial for commercial, civil and military missions as the number of satellites in orbit swells.
Natural tooth protein could pave way for regenerative dental treatments
A protein that helps build teeth may one day be used to allow damaged teeth to repair themselves.
That possibility is the focus of research led by Anne George, professor in the Department of Oral Biology at the UIC College of Dentistry. George has received a $1.2 million grant from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research at the National Institutes of Health to advance her studies of dentin phosphophoryn.
Dentin phosphophoryn is mainly found in dentin, which is the mineralized tissue that makes up the bulk of each tooth under its enamel surface. The most acidic protein known in nature, and it helps in the calcification of the protein matrix to form dentin.
Scientists shrink Archimedes’ screw to the size of a single molecule
Scientists have developed a remarkable new molecular motor that spins when electricity passes through it. Inspired by an ancient invention, the tiny machine can even reverse its direction when the electrical voltage is switched. The achievement marks an important step toward creating working machines at the smallest possible scale.
Molecular machines are widely seen as a promising next frontier in miniaturization. Nature already provides examples inside living cells, where molecular motors use energy to produce movement. Researchers have spent decades trying to recreate these remarkable biological systems artificially, and progress in this field was recognized with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Debora Spar on Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny
The plow made men powerful. The pill handed some of that power back to women.
Harvard Business School’s Debora Spar walked me through that idea back in 2020, two years before ChatGPT made everyone suddenly care about how machines reshape our lives.
Her point was bigger than #AI or any single gadget. Technology doesn’t just change how we work. It changes who we marry, how we love, and what we believe men and women are for. Most of us still look at tech through an engineering lens. She insists on the widest lens possible.
Then she told me her book reads history through a Marxist lens. A former Barnard president and HBS dean, saying that on the record.
We also got into why tech self-regulation has never worked, what Keynes predicted for his grandchildren (and us), #FutureOfWork and technological unemployment, and what Tinder is doing to sex and relationships.
Six years later, one question won’t leave me alone: if the plow and the pill rewired the family, what will thinking machines do to it?
A magnetar can be born when two neutron stars touch
All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular magnetic field. They are a likely cause of powerful transient events such as soft gamma-ray repeaters and fast radio bursts. A new study looks at how magnetars might form. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.
The work focuses on the mergers of binary neutron stars. Often when two neutron stars collide, they form a black hole. This is because the combined mass of the two neutron stars is greater than the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff (TOV) limit, which is around 2.6 solar masses. Most neutron stars are more massive than white dwarfs, which have a Chandrasekhar limit of about 1.4 solar masses. But some neutron stars have smaller masses. If they happen to have a total mass less than the TOV limit, then they can merge and become a single neutron star.
Using high-resolution simulations run on the Japanese supercomputer FUGAKU, the team looked at the merger of low-mass neutron star binaries. To simplify things a bit, they assumed stars with identical masses, but otherwise typical neutron stars. They assumed the magnetic field strengths of these stars were around 3 trillion gauss, which is in the upper range of typical neutron stars. Their simulations ran from just moments before the stars collide until just after.
Background static can carry wireless data without an actively generated radio signal
Stanford researchers recently revealed how a seemingly physics-defying wireless communication technology works. The new technology, called thermal noise communication, harnesses background static that normally is the bane of radio, cellular and other wireless signals. In their new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team showed how a transmitter could deliver data to a receiver without any actively produced signal by manipulating tiny oscillations in voltage.
The findings describe how the system works at a fundamental level, opening the door to improving the communication mode and determining real-world applications for it. “We’ve built a system that others could very easily implement,” said senior author Zerina Kapetanovic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering.
A physics mystery In her previous research at the University of Washington, Kapetanovic studied agricultural sensing technologies, which inspired her to pursue low-power modes of relaying data like soil moisture levels. She wondered if it might be possible to create a device similar to the radio-frequency identification (RFID) window tags that are used for highway tolls in cars—without requiring an energy-intensive radio signal to ping.
How Do You Defend a Space Colony? | Beyond Space Defense
In space, every ship, tug, mass driver, and power beam can become a weapon. We explore how future stations and settlements might defend themselves against attack, sabotage, accidents, and siege.
Explore A Dream Renewed: Space Settlement in the 21st Century: https://sfia.s.gy/a-dream-renewed.
🛒 SFIA Merchandise: https://isaac-arthur-shop.fourthwall… Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net ❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur ⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a… 👥 Facebook Group:
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/ discord Credits: Beyond Space Defense: War, Sabotage & Survival Beyond Earth Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur Music by Epidemic Sound: http://nebula.tv/epidemic Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images Table of Contents 0:00 Intro 2:45 The War We Already Have in Space 5:38 Fight Far From Home 8:30 The Perimeter 10:50 Everything Is a Potential Weapon 13:45 A Dream Renewed 14:59 Siege Without Shooting 17:38 The City Is Part of Your Spacesuit 22:07 The Hardest Target to Kill.
🌐 Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
❤️ Support us on Patreon: / isaacarthur.
⭐ Support us on Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/isaac-a…
👥 Facebook Group: / 1583992725237264
📣 Reddit Community: / isaacarthur.
🐦 Follow on Twitter / X: / isaac_a_arthur.
💬 SFIA Discord Server: / discord.
Credits:
Beyond Space Defense: War, Sabotage \& Survival Beyond Earth.
Written, Produced \& Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Music by Epidemic Sound: http://nebula.tv/epidemic.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Table of Contents.
0:00 Intro.
2:45 The War We Already Have in Space.
5:38 Fight Far From Home.
8:30 The Perimeter.
10:50 Everything Is a Potential Weapon.
13:45 A Dream Renewed.
14:59 Siege Without Shooting.
17:38 The City Is Part of Your Spacesuit.
22:07 The Hardest Target to Kill.
Establishing a Biophotonic Signature of Brain Ageing
In this study, we aimed to define ageing-related changes in microglial autofluorescence in the hippocampus and ARC, and whether these were associated with spectral and lifetime signatures that can be identified with plasma lipid profiles. First, we established that our mice had a typical ageing brain phenotype. As shown in previous literature, this is marked by reduced numbers of immature neurons, greater microglia numbers, and greater tissue autofluorescence in the brain (Culig et al. 2022 ; Wong 2013), all of which we recapitulate here. Similar to previous studies in rodents and humans, we also see ageing-related changes to central expression of genes indicative of disease-associated states, or at least inflammaging, including genes relating to inflammation (Itgam, Tlr4, Mhc-II, Aif1), Alzheimer’s disease (Sorl1, Mapt, Abca7), and lipid pathways (Hexb, Ch25h, Lpl) (Boche and Gordon 2022 ; Kim 2018 ; Long et al. 2022).
In association with this typical and well-established ageing-brain profile, we revealed that ageing brains have a propensity to accumulate larger-sized aggregates in all hippocampal regions assessed (DG, CA1, and CA3) and the ARC. When assessing the emission spectra of autofluorescence aggregates of varying sizes in young and aged brains, we identified consistent eight spectral peaks common to both age groups. Notably, the red-shifted intensity ratio we observed consistently distinguished aged from young brains, suggesting the potential utility of an overall emission spectral shift as a future spectral biomarker of ageing. To our knowledge, this is the first study to systematically compare spectral autofluorescence signatures between young and aged brains. We also found that aged tissue exhibited consistently shorter intensity-weighted average lifetimes across all three detection windows compared with young tissue, indicating altered autofluorescence decay dynamics with age. Supporting this interpretation, a previous study examining autofluorescent inclusions in female APPswe: PS1dE9 transgenic mice reported that both plaque-surrounding and plaque-free cells displayed shorter autofluorescence lifetimes than their wild-type counterparts (Gómez et al. 2018). This suggests that changes in autofluorescence lifetime reflect systemic neurodegenerative physiological alterations and are not solely attributable to the presence of disease-specific markers such as amyloid-beta plaques.
One working hypothesis is that these differences likely reflect fundamental physiological changes that accompany ageing. With advancing age, increasing iron accumulation promotes reactive oxygen species formation, which in turn drives lipid peroxidation and the buildup of cross-linked, undegradable biomaterials within lysosomal and autophagosomal compartments of post-mitotic cells (as reviewed in (Yin 1996)). Defective lysosomal acidification–a hallmark of both ageing and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (Lo and Zeng 2023)–further impairs autophagic clearance, exacerbating the accumulation of autofluorescent material (Escrevente et al. 2021). Collectively, these processes may illustrate how ageing-related alterations in cellular maintenance mechanisms, particularly lysosomal and autophagic dysfunction, can create a self-perpetuating cycle of oxidative stress and impaired degradation that underlies the pathogenesis of ageing-related diseases.