Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Mars helicopter has run into a bit of trouble after 28 successful flights and well over an entire dusty Earth year into its mission on the Red Planet.

One of the four-pound rotorcraft’s navigation sensors has given out — an unfortunate new development, especially considering Martian winter is almost upon it. Extreme temperature swings could soon wreak havoc on the rest of the helicopter’s electronics.

But the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab says their plucky rotorcraft isn’t finished yet.

When moving furniture, heavy objects are easier to move if you rotate them while pushing. Many people intuitively do this. An international research team from Konstanz (Germany), Trieste and Milan (Italy) has now investigated on the microscopic scale the reduction in static friction caused by simultaneous rotation.

In their recent study, to be published in Physical Review X on June 15, the researchers found that the reduction in static friction of a microscopic object on a crystalline surface can be described by moiré patterns, which occur when periodic patterns superimpose. Based on this concept, the researchers predict an unusual state, in which microscopic objects can be set in rotation by applying a minimal amount of torque. In the future, this could enable the construction of micro-machines with ultra-low static friction against rotation.

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Differing values of the Hubble constant might be reconciled via the dark sector.

A team of researchers at the Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, have brought us one step closer to the development of a neural network with metamemory through a computer-based evolution experiment. This type of neural network could help experts understand the evolution of metamemory, which could help develop artificial intelligence (AI) with a human-like mind.

The research was published in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.

What is Metamemory?

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All images were generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2: https://openai.com/dall-e-2/

Continue reading “The Epic History of Artificial Intelligence” »

To begin the process of bioprinting an organ, doctors typically start with a patient’s own cells. They take a small needle biopsy of an organ or do a minimally invasive surgical procedure that removes a small piece of tissue, “less than half the size of a postage stamp,” Atala said. “By taking this small piece of tissue, we are able to tease cells apart (and) we grow and expand the cells outside the body.”

This growth happens inside a sterile incubator or bioreactor, a pressurized stainless steel vessel that helps the cells stay fed with nutrients – called “media” – the doctors feed them every 24 hours, since cells have their own metabolism, Lewis said. Each cell type has a different media, and the incubator or bioreactor acts as an oven-like device mimicking the internal temperature and oxygenation of the human body, Atala said.

“Then we mix it with this gel, which is like a glue,” Atala said. “Every organ in your body has the cells and the glue that holds it together. Basically, that’s also called ‘extracellular matrix.’”.

Canadian quantum computer company, Xanadu, has used its photonic quantum computer chip, Borealis, to solve a problem in 36 microseconds versus classical supercomputers taking 9,000 years. This is 7,884 trillion times faster. This runtime advantage is more than 50 million times larger than that of earlier photonic demonstrations.

An earlier quantum photonic computer used a static chip. The Borealis optical elements can all be readily programmed.

Continue reading “Xanadu Photonic Quantum Chip Solves Trillions of Times Faster” »

Whatever you are doing, whether it is driving a car, going for a jog, or even at your laziest, eating chips and watching TV on the couch, there is an entire suite of molecular machinery inside each of your cells hard at work. That machinery, far too small to see with the naked eye or even with many microscopes, creates energy for the cell, manufactures its proteins, makes copies of its DNA, and much more.

Among those pieces of machinery, and one of the most complex, is something known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC, which is made of more than 1,000 individual proteins, is an incredibly discriminating gatekeeper for the cell’s nucleus, the membrane-bound region inside a cell that holds that cell’s genetic material. Anything going in or out of the nucleus has to pass through the NPC on its way.

Nuclear pores stud the surface of the cell’s nucleus, controlling what flows in and out of it. (Image: Valerie Altounian)