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Scientists have discovered a pair of stars locked in an incredibly close orbit that circle each other once every 51 minutes — and according to the results of a new study, they are only going to speed up.

The universe is a chaotic place when it comes to orbital mechanics. Our solar system, when viewed in relation to the rest of the cosmos, is a little vanilla. We have our central star — the Sun — which is orbited by eight major planets that are in turn are escorted through the heavens by a plethora of moons and rings of varying levels of impressiveness.

However, astronomers have discovered that roughly half of the stellar systems in our Milky Way are actually comprised of multiple stars that are gravitationally bound to one another. The Alpha Centauri system — which is the closest neighboring stellar population to our Sun — is in fact a collection of three stars that orbit one another roughly 4 light-years from Earth.

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Dr. Amy Proal, Ph.D. serves as President & CEO of the PolyBio Research Foundation (https://polybio.org/), and Chief Scientific Officer of the Long Covid Research Initiative (LCRI — https://lc19.org/).

In her work with PolyBio Research Foundation and the LCRI, Dr. Proal conceptualizes and coordinates large-scale collaborative research projects among research teams studying infection-associated chronic conditions such as Long Covid, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and Long Lyme.

Dr. Proal has written multiple review articles that delineate core biological drivers of both the Long Covid and ME/CFS disease processes. She is a regular speaker at infection-associated chronic disease conferences including IACFS/ME, Lyme Mind and The International Congress on Autoimmunity.

Dr. Proal holds a Bachelors of Science in biology from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in microbiology from Murdoch University in Australia. Her work examines the molecular mechanisms by which viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens dysregulate human gene expression, immunity, and metabolism, and how dysbiosis of the human microbiome, and/or the human virome, can contribute to chronic inflammatory disease processes.

Continue reading “Dr. Amy Proal, Ph.D — Transforming Diagnosis & Treatment Of Complex Chronic Inflammatory Conditions” | >

Dr. Sarita A. Mohanty, MD, MPH, MBA (https://www.thescanfoundation.org/about/board-of-directors/sarita-a-mohanty/), serves as the President and Chief Executive Officer of The SCAN Foundation, one of the largest foundations in the United States focused on improving the quality of health and life for older adults. Its mission is to advance a coordinated and easily navigated system of high-quality services for older adults that preserve dignity and independence.

The SCAN Foundation was created as an independent charitable organization in April 2008 through a $205 Million one-time contribution from the not-for-profit SCAN Health Plan, a not-for-profit, Medicare Advantage based in Long Beach, California.

Previously, Dr. Mohanty served as the Vice President of Care Coordination for Medicaid and Vulnerable Populations at Kaiser Permanente; Assistant Professor of Medicine at USC; Chief Medical Officer of COPE Health Solutions, a health care management consulting company; and Senior Medical Director at L.A. Care, the largest U.S. public health plan.

Dr. Mohanty completed her Internal Medicine residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and research fellowship at Harvard Medical School. She earned her MD from Boston University, MPH from Harvard University, and MBA from UCLA. She completed undergraduate work at UC Berkeley. She currently is an Associate Professor at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine and is a practicing internal medicine physician with Kaiser Permanente.

Continue reading “Dr Sarita A. Mohanty — The SCAN Foundation — Improving The Quality Of Health & Life For Older Adults” | >

For billions of years, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds – the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxies – have followed a perilous journey. Orbiting one another as they are pulled in toward our home galaxy, they have begun to unravel, leaving behind trails of gaseous debris. And yet these dwarf galaxies remain intact, with ongoing vigorous star formation, leaving astronomers baffled.

“A lot of people were struggling to explain how these streams of material could be there,” said Dhanesh Krishnarao, assistant professor at Colorado College. “If this gas was removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars?”

A team of astronomers led by Krishnarao has finally found the answer, with the help of data from NASA.

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Comparing his experience to Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact, Shatner added, “I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”

In the excerpt, Shatner wrote that he later learned he “was not alone in this feeling,” which is called the “Overview Effect” and is “not uncommon among astronauts.”

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Scientists have long looked to the brain as an inspiration for designing computing systems. Some researchers have recently gone even further by making computer hardware with a brain-like structure. These “neuromorphic chips” have already shown great promise, but they have used conventional digital electronics, limiting their complexity and speed. As the chips become larger and more complex, the signals between their individual components become backed up like cars on a gridlocked highway and reduce computation to a crawl.

Now, a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has demonstrated a solution to these communication challenges that may someday allow artificial neural systems to operate 100,000 times faster than the human brain.

The human brain is a network of about 86 billion cells called neurons, each of which can have thousands of connections (known as synapses) with its neighbors. The neurons communicate with each other using short electrical pulses called spikes to create rich, time-varying activity patterns that form the basis of cognition. In neuromorphic chips, electronic components act as artificial neurons, routing spiking signals through a brain-like network.

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Researchers have reported a nano-sized neuromorphic memory device that emulates neurons and synapses simultaneously in a unit cell, another step toward completing the goal of neuromorphic computing designed to rigorously mimic the human brain with semiconductor devices.

Neuromorphic computing aims to realize (AI) by mimicking the mechanisms of neurons and that make up the . Inspired by the cognitive functions of the human brain that current computers cannot provide, neuromorphic devices have been widely investigated. However, current Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS)-based neuromorphic circuits simply connect artificial neurons and synapses without synergistic interactions, and the concomitant implementation of neurons and synapses still remains a challenge. To address these issues, a research team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering implemented the biological working mechanisms of humans by introducing the neuron-synapse interactions in a single memory cell, rather than the conventional approach of electrically connecting artificial neuronal and synaptic devices.

Similar to commercial graphics cards, the artificial synaptic devices previously studied often used to accelerate parallel computations, which shows clear differences from the operational mechanisms of the human brain. The research team implemented the synergistic interactions between neurons and synapses in the neuromorphic memory device, emulating the mechanisms of the biological neural network. In addition, the developed neuromorphic device can replace complex CMOS neuron circuits with a single device, providing high scalability and cost efficiency.

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Learn how your company can create applications to automate tasks and generate further efficiencies through low-code/no-code tools on November 9 at the virtual Low-Code/No-Code Summit. Register here.

With the increasing digitization of services across multiple industries, large corporations are pushing for new security measures to keep their customers’ documents and sensitive information secure. Among these measures are passwordless logins, with new authentication methods adding an extra layer of data protection.

The transition to passwordless logins is undeniable, with approximately 60% of large and global enterprises and 90% of midsize enterprises predicted to adopt passwordless methods in at least 50% of use cases, according to a recent Gartner study. This comes as no surprise, as security problems associated with password-only authentication are among the digital world’s biggest vulnerabilities. Consumers are often tempted to reuse passwords across different services due to the difficulty of managing so many passwords.

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