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To Live on Mars, Human Architecture Has to Combine Science and Sci-Fi

Our homes are the places that define us; those warm private spaces that we depend on for work, respite, and haven from the harsh realities of the wider world. On Earth, the buildings and dwellings humans spend the majority of their lives in serve as reflections of our society’s culture, beliefs, and values. So if the shelters we make for ourselves truly mirror and influence our everyday lives, how might that sentiment be translated to living in space?

The kinds of structures future explorers might live in on other planets may be more critical to space exploration than sci-fi depictions of cities and homes in a galaxy far, far away suggest. As NASA’s desire for long-term human space colonization comes to fruition with planned crewed missions to Mars, establishing safe and well-made human settlements for life off-Earth is one of the agency’s most urgent tasks.

Putting down roots on Mars is an extremely ambitious goal to accomplish this century — but the reason why isn’t to do with rockets, necessarily. Rather, it is because any human settlement on the Red Planet will have to fight tooth and nail to experience even a modicum of ecological success.

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Exercise and the Brain: The Neuroscience of Fitness Explored

Summary: The neuroscience of fitness explores how regular exercise profoundly impacts our brain and nervous system.

Exercise stimulates neurogenesis – the creation of new neurons – primarily in the hippocampus, influencing memory and learning while increasing key mood-regulating neurotransmitters. It also enhances brain plasticity, essential for recovery from injury and aging, and improves cognitive functions such as attention and memory.

Despite ongoing research, the current evidence underscores the powerful role of physical activity in promoting brain health and cognitive function, emphasizing the importance of integrating regular exercise into our lifestyles.

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NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU

In case anyone is wondering how advances like ChatGPT are possible while Moore’s Law is dramatically slowing down, here’s what is happening:

Nvidia’s latest chip, the H100, can do 34 teraFLOPS of FP64 which is the standard 64-bit standard that supercomputers are ranked at. But this same chip can do 3,958 teraFLOPS of FP8 Tensor Core. FP8 is 8 times less precise than FP64. Also, Tensor Cores accelerate matrix operations, particularly matrix multiplication and accumulation, which are used extensively in deep learning calculations.

So by specializing in operations that AI cares about, the speed of the computer is increased by over 100 times!

A massive leap in accelerated compute.

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Scientists identify genes that can repair the retina and reverse vision loss in humans

There is an army of dormant cells in our eyes that prefer to stay asleep. However, waking them up in patients living with degenerative retinal disease can prevent blindness.

Researchers at the Université de Montréal (UdeM) have proposed a novel treatment strategy that promises to restore vision in patients living with degenerative retinal disease, an inherited medical condition that gradually impairs a person’s ability to read text, sense colors, see objects that are placed sideways, and eventually makes them completely blind.

3drenderings/iStock.

The researchers claim that, unlike the few existing treatment options that can slow down or prevent retinal degeneration in patients only at an early stage, their approach also works for patients who are at an advanced stage of the illness.

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Study suggests a possible connection between mobile phones and hypertension

While the study doesn’t prove causation, it raises important questions about the potential health risks of mobile phone use and highlights the need for further investigation.

Have you ever considered the potential health risks associated with your mobile phone? Our phones are digital devices emitting multiple radiations, and it doesn’t help that we always use them constantly.

A new study conducted by the UK Biobank suggests that there may be a link between mobile phone use and hypertension.

RapidEye/iStock.

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Researchers find ingenious solution to map ocean plastics from orbit

Ocean microplastics have become a major source of concern, especially since they are so hard to track down, but researchers found an ingenious solution using satellites.

Ocean plastics have become a major source of concern for evironmental conservationists and public health professionals in recent years, and there hasn’t been a good way to track how these plastics are moving or their concentrations. But now, researchers from the University of Michigan have developed an ingenious way to track the ebb and flow of these microplastics around the world thanks to NASA satellites.

Solarseven/iStock.

Microplastics are the remnant pieces of larger plastics that have disintegrated over time due to chemical and physical processes, and are typically measured as less than 5mm in size. The underlying plastic compounds remain intact even as the plastic fiber or particle gets physically smaller, and plastics do not chemically decompose.

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AI generated songs face the music: Spotify removes thousands of tracks from platform

Spotify ramps up policing after complaints of ‘artificial streaming.’

Spotify, the world’s most popular music streaming subscription service, has reportedly pulled down tens and thousands of songs from its platform, which were uploaded by an AI company Boomy, which came under the suspicion of ‘artificial streaming.’

Spotify took down around 7% of the AI-generated tracks created by Boomy, whose users have, till date, created a total of 14,591,095 songs, which the company claims is 13.95% of the world’s recorded music.

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Hard drive storage will soon become part of computing history, says expert

It simply does not make sense to keep the disks spinning.

Data storage on hard drives will soon become a thing of the past, according to an expert Shawn Rosemarin, who also owns a company selling solid-storage solutions. According to Rosemarin, we could see the last hard drive being sold in just about five years from now, PC Gamer.

Most computer users have long migrated to cloud storage solutions when it comes to safely storing their data. With content being streamed on smartphones and tablets practically everywhere, there is little reason to own a hard drive these days.

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This Longevity Study Across 5 Species Found a New Pathway to Reverse Aging

A new study in Nature hunted down another piece to the aging puzzle. In five species across the evolutionary scale—worms, flies, mice, rats, and humans—the team honed in on a critical molecular process that powers every single cell inside the body and degrades with age.

The process, called transcription, is the first step in turning our genetic material into proteins. Here, DNA letters are reworked into a “messenger” called RNA, which then shuttles the information to other parts of the cell to make proteins.

Scientists have long suspected that transcription may go awry with aging, but the new study offers proof that it doesn’t—with a twist. In all five of the species tested, as the organism grew older the process surprisingly sped up. But like trying to type faster when blindfolded, error rates also shot up.

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