‘You’re in a world made of marshmallows!’
A Google app that allows people to communicate with artificial intelligence (AI) systems has been made available in the United Kingdom (U.K.) for a limited trial period.
You’re in a world made of marshmallows! As you take a step, a gentle ‘squish’ comes out under your feet. The marshmallow horizon stretches out in all directions. The sky is a gooey, sticky pink.
Andrey Suslov/iStock.
A team of scientists from Korea and Egypt have discovered a better way to grow insect-hunting fungi in a lab, according to research published Wednesday in Frontiers in Microbiology.
The fungi can be grown using grains like brown rice but they do not produce much cordycepin, prompting the researchers to suggest insects—which are a richer protein source and the fungi target in nature—as a better alternative. fungi, which infect and zombify insects, are difficult to cultivate but contain chemicals that could help fight cancer and viruses and possibly help treat Covid-19.
Scientists suggest the geopolitical fallout of discovering extraterrestrials could be more dangerous than the aliens themselves.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project collects data from radio telescopes.
The trouble is that the receiver might not be quite as intelligent.
The consequences of a successful search for extraterrestrial intelligence should be seriously considered to avoid conflict, suggests a new study.
Advances in calibration routines and device fabrication lead to high-fidelity operations.
Reservoir computing (RC) is an approach for building computer systems inspired by current knowledge of the human brain. Neuromorphic computing architectures based on this approach are comprised of dynamic physical nodes, which combined can process spatiotemporal signals.
Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have recently created a new RC system based on memristors, electrical components that regulate the flow of electrical current in a circuit, while also recording the amount of charge that previously flowed through it. This RC system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, has been found to achieve remarkable results, both in terms of performance and efficiency.
“The basic architecture of our memristor RC system comes from our earlier work published in Nature Communications, where we validated the feasibility of building analog reservoir layer with dynamic memristors,” Jianshi Tang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “In this new work, we further build the analog readout layer with non-volatile memristors and integrate it with the dynamic memristor array-based parallel reservoir layer to implement a fully analog RC system.”
Summary: A new theory suggests glial cells, specifically astrocytes, play a key role in cognitive processing.
Source: University Health Network.
A team of scientists from the Krembil Brain Institute, part of the University Health Network in Toronto, and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, has developed the first computer model predicting the role of cortical glial cells in cognition.
Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky.
Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions. Stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), scientists have created what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.
Each map is a tremendous resource for astronomers, but when viewed in sequence as a time-lapse, they serve as an even stronger resource for trying to better understand the universe. Comparing the maps can reveal distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time, what’s known as time-domain astronomy.
Thanks in large part to delays suffered by Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, a small fleet of European satellites are simultaneously converging on the United States to hitch rides into orbit with SpaceX.
SpaceX launching European payloads is nothing new. The company has occasionally launched spacecraft built in Europe for European space agencies or companies, but the combination is exceedingly rare. For several reasons, however, what was once alien is beginning to become commonplace, and that fact is about to be made even clearer over the remainder of 2022.
SpaceX kicked off a string of six or seven launches of spacecraft built by or for Europe on October 15th. Over the weekend, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket – 70 meters (230 ft) tall, 3.7 meters (12 ft) wide, and capable of producing up to 770 tons (1.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff – successfully launched the Hotbird 13F communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for the French satcom company Eutelsat.
But the true nature of the pillars was famously revealed in 1995 by the Hubble Space Telescope, an image that wowed the public and was soon one of the most recognized and widely published photos ever captured by the venerable observatory.
But Hubble is primarily a visible-light telescope with only a limited ability to detect cloud-piercing infrared emissions from the interior of the pillars and from stars shining in and behind a translucent, obscuring layer of gas making up the interstellar medium that is most apparent looking into the plane of the galaxy.
Enter the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.
Have you ever suffered from jet lag or struggled after turning the clock forward or back an hour for daylight saving time? These are examples of you feeling the effects of what researchers call your biological clock, or circadian rhythm – the “master pacemaker” that synchronizes how your body responds to the passing of one day to the next.
This “clock” is made up of about 20,000 neurons in the hypothalamus. This area near the center of the brain coordinates your body’s unconscious functions, such as breathing and blood pressure. Humans aren’t the only lifeforms that have an internal clock system: All vertebrates – or mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish – have biological clocks, as do plants, fungi, and bacteria. Biological clocks are why cats are most active at dawn and dusk, and why flowers bloom at certain times of the day.
Chronobiology is the study of circadian rhythms, the physical, mental, and behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle. These natural processes respond principally to light and dark and affect most living things, including animals, plants, and microbes.
