Nuro makes autonomous vehicles that can delivery groceries and food and have no space for humans on them. It reached a recent deal with Uber.
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Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? This is a question that has troubled cosmologists and physicists for decades.
Elon Musk tweeted a fascinating — and frankly unsettling — theory last night about how a brain parasite might be forcing all humans to create advanced AI.
The Tesla CEO was responding to a story from National Geographic about how toxoplasmosis, a common parasite often found in cats, seems to be causing hyenas to be reckless around predators such as lions. In a staggering and perhaps facetious leap of logic, Musk suggested that the parasite is actually what’s causing humans to create advanced artificial intelligence.
“Toxoplasmosis infects rats, then cats, then humans who make cat videos,” Musk tweeted on Friday. “AI trains achieves superhuman intelligence training on Internet cat videos, thus making toxoplasmosis the true arbiter of our destiny.”
A team of researchers in the United States has discovered a novel mechanism in which a key protein drives the inflammatory damage associated with rheumatoid arthritis. The foundational finding is hoped to direct research toward entirely new pathways to treat this autoimmune disease affecting millions.
One of the most impactful rheumatoid arthritis discoveries over the past few decades was finding an immune cytokine called tumor necrosis factor‑alpha (TNF-alpha) plays a crucial role in joint tissue inflammation. Following this discovery the development of monoclonal antibody TNF inhibitors offered rheumatoid arthritis patients a completely new type of medicine to treat their condition.
But, as senior author on the new research Salah‑Uddin Ahmed explained, TNF inhibitors aren’t effective in all patients. And even then, they are not ideal long-term medicines dues to a variety of side effects.
Stelarc discusses the extended arm in this interview with Adam Ford.
“The Extended Arm is an eleven-degree-of-freedom manipulator with wrist flexion, wrist rotation, thumb rotation, individual finger flexion, with each finger splitting open, so each finger can potentially be a gripper in itself. The artist’s fingers rest on a panel of switches enabling the selection of pre-programmed sequences of finger, thumb and wrist movements. The clicking fingers, the compressed air and solenoid generate the sounds when performing. The Extended Arm extends the artist’s right arm to primate proportions. ”
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Senescent macrophages are in fact also found to express senescence-related markers p16(Ink4a) and β-galactosidase (β-gal), and promote inflammation in diseased tissues [25, 26]. Our previous work has indicated increased cellular senescence in dystrophic muscles of mdx/utr(−/−) mice [3], however, whether or not macrophages in particular develop cellular senescence and promote senescence associated phenotypes was still unknown. To this end, here we further examined mdx/utr(−/−) mice and solved these puzzles.
Immune cells in the skeletal muscle are activated during muscle injury and promote the process of muscle regeneration by coordinating with muscle stem cells. However, studies with severely diseased muscles further demonstrate that immune cells can become dominantly activated and is inductive of increased fatty infiltration and fibrosis formation, while at the same time potently repress the proliferation and function of muscle stem cells [27]. Our current results in severely dystrophic muscle reveal a similar situation of interaction between macrophages and MPCs, showing that the function of MPCs is repressed by the senescent macrophages. As senescent cells accumulate in the aged or diseased tissues, it can exert profound effects on the growth and function of normal cells by releasing SASPs [9, 10].
Analysts say the ban will hit a swathe of Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba Group, Tencent Holdings, Baidu, and Huawei Technologies.
NASA — National Aeronautics and Space Administration has tapped SiFive and Microchip Technology Inc. to create a space-centric RISC-V processor: the High-Performance Spaceflight Computing chip. At heart of the HPSC will be SiFive’s X280 64-bit RISC-V cores, which include ML acceleration capabilities.
Designed to replace existing systems still using a processor design from 1997, the RISC-V-powered chip will offer 100 times the performance.
Most of the world’s greatest wind power resources are offshore – often a long way offshore, where the water’s so deep that it’s impractical to build typical fan-on-a-stick wind turbines with bases sunk deep into the sea floor. Floating wind, at this stage, is so vastly expensive to build, deploy and maintain that it ends up costing two to three times as much per kilowatt-hour of energy as fixed-bottom offshore installations.
There’s a huge opportunity here for technological advancement, and companies like Norway’s World Wide Wind are proposing some pretty radical ideas in the space. A lot of the energy cost comes down to the size, weight and materials involved in the structure of the turbine, along with the logistical issues and specialized equipment needed to build, install and maintain the things.
Continue reading “T-Omega re-thinks floating offshore wind turbines for huge cost savings” »
Today, an international team of researchers led by Séamus Davis, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and University College Cork, has announced results that reveal the atomic mechanism behind high-temperature superconductors. The findings are published in PNAS.
Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance, so that an electric current can persist indefinitely. These are already used in various applications, including MRI scanners and high-speed maglev trains, however superconductivity typically requires extremely low temperatures, limiting their widespread use. A major goal within physics research is to develop super conductors that work at ambient temperatures, which could revolutionize energy transport and storage.
Certain copper oxide materials demonstrate superconductivity at higher temperatures than conventional superconductors, however the mechanism behind this has remained unknown since their discovery in 1987.
