Pregnancy caused women to lose gray matter, and reshaped the brain’s “default mode network,” a set of brain regions that are most active when the brain is wandering.
Danielle Boyer knew she was interested in robotics from a young age. But with limited learning resources — a problem many Native American students face — Boyer, who is Ojibwe, said she had to take things into her own hands.
She taught herself through watching YouTube videos, flipping through old electrical engineering books, examining maker kits on Amazon, and then “reverse engineering” everything.
Now, as the founder of the nonprofit The STEAM Connection, Boyer, 22, is on a mission to promote technical and cultural educational opportunities among Native American youth like herself — sometimes combining both in the form of robots that teach Indigenous languages, as they face risks of dying out.
Fusion power may be a more realistic prospect than you think. As Motherboard reports, researchers at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that a new magnetic field setup more than tripled the energy output of the fusion reaction hotspot in experiments, “approaching” the level required for self-sustaining ignition in plasmas. The field was particularly effective at trapping heat within the hotspot, boosting the energy yield.
The hotspot’s creation involved blasting 200 lasers at a fusion fuel pellet made from hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium. The resulting X-rays made the pellet implode and thus produce the extremely high pressures and heat needed for fusion. The team achieved their feat by wrapping a coil around a pellet made using special metals.
The notion of using magnets to heat the fuel isn’t new. University of Rochester scientists found they could use magnetism to their advantage in 2012. The Lawrence Livermore study was far more effective, however, producing 40 percent heat and more than three times the energy.
Physicists at Google Quantum AI have used their quantum computer to study a type of effective particle that is more resilient to environmental disturbances that can degrade quantum calculations. These effective particles, known as Majorana edge modes, form as a result of a collective excitation of multiple individual particles, like ocean waves form from the collective motions of water molecules. Majorana edge modes are of particular interest in quantum computing applications because they exhibit special symmetries that can protect the otherwise fragile quantum states from noise in the environment.
The condensed matter physicist Philip Anderson once wrote, “It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.” Indeed, studying physical phenomena and their relationship to underlying symmetries has been the main thrust of physics for centuries. Symmetries are simply statements about what transformations a system can undergo—such as a translation, rotation, or inversion through a mirror—and remain unchanged. They can simplify problems and elucidate underlying physical laws. And, as shown in the new research, symmetries can even prevent the seemingly inexorable quantum process of decoherence.
When running a calculation on a quantum computer, we typically want the quantum bits, or “qubits,” in the computer to be in a single, pure quantum state. But decoherence occurs when external electric fields or other environmental noise disturb these states by jumbling them up with other states to create undesirable states. If a state has a certain symmetry, then it could be possible to isolate it, effectively creating an island of stability that is impossible to mix with the other states that don’t also have the special symmetry. In this way, since the noise can no longer connect the symmetric state to the others, it could preserve the coherence of the state.
Your weekly news from the AI & Machine Learning world.
OUTLINE:
0:00 — Introduction.
0:25 — AI reads brain signals to predict what you’re thinking.
3:00 — Closed-form solution for neuron interactions.
4:15 — GPT-4 rumors.
6:50 — Cerebras supercomputer.
7:45 — Meta releases metagenomics atlas.
9:15 — AI advances in theorem proving.
10:40 — Better diffusion models with expert denoisers.
12:00 — BLOOMZ & mT0
13:05 — ICLR reviewers going mad.
21:40 — Scaling Transformer inference.
22:10 — Infinite nature flythrough generation.
23:55 — Blazing fast denoising.
24:45 — Large-scale AI training with MultiRay.
25:30 — arXiv to include Hugging Face spaces.
26:10 — Multilingual Diffusion.
26:30 — Music source separation.
26:50 — Multilingual CLIP
27:20 — Drug response prediction.
27:50 — Helpful Things.
Malaria is found in more than 90 countries around the world, causing 241 million cases and an estimated 627,000 deaths every year. Vaccines are one intervention that could help eliminate this deadly disease, yet a highly effective vaccine remains elusive. Recent technological advances in vaccine development–such as the mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV2–could lead to a new generation of malaria vaccines.
Now, a research team led by George Washington University has developed two mRNA vaccine candidates that are highly effective in reducing both malaria infection and transmission. The team also found that the two experimental vaccines induced a powerful immune response regardless of whether they were given individually or in combination. The study was published today in npj Vaccines, an open-access scientific journal that is part of the Nature Portfolio.
“Malaria elimination will not happen overnight but such vaccines could potentially banish malaria from many parts of the world,” Nirbhay Kumar, a professor of global health at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, said. “The mRNA vaccine technology can really be a game changer. We saw how successful this technology was in terms of fighting COVID and for this study we adapted it and used it to develop tools to combat malaria.”
The protests in China have had no impact on Beijing’s ambitions of world domination. On Tuesday, Chinese jets violated South Korea’s Air defence zone. A Pentagon report further claims China will have 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035. Priyanka Sharma reports.
#Gravitas #China #Nuclear.
Dr. Jennifer A. Fogarty, Ph.D. (https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/jennifer-fogarty-100936) is the Chief Scientific Officer for the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH — https://www.bcm.edu/academic-centers/space-medicine/translat…-institute) at Baylor College of Medicine, and the Director of the Applied Health and Performance at Sophic Synergistics LLC.
As Chief Scientist of TRISH, Dr. Fogarty leads an innovative and high-risk research and technology development portfolio to address the most challenging human health and performance risks of space exploration.
Artificial intelligence could help create transparency and consistency in the legal system – our model shows how.
In our cells, the language of DNA is written, making each of us unique. A tandem repeat occurs in DNA when a pattern of one or more nucleotides—the basic structural unit of DNA coded in the base of chemicals cytosine ©, adenine (A), guanine (G) and thymine (T)—is repeated multiple times in tandem. An example might be: CAG CAG CAG, in which the pattern CAG is repeated three times.
Now, using state-of-the-art whole-genome sequencing and machine learning techniques, the UNC School of Medicine lab of Jin Szatkiewicz, Ph.D., associate professor of genetics, and colleagues conducted one of the first and the largest investigations of tandem repeats in schizophrenia, elucidating their contribution to the development of this devastating disease.
Published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, the research shows that individuals with schizophrenia had a significantly higher rate of rare tandem repeats in their genomes—7% more than individuals without schizophrenia. And they observed that the tandem repeats were not randomly located throughout the genome; they were primarily found in genes crucial to brain function and known to be important in schizophrenia, according to previous studies.
