Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is becoming an increasingly competitive and contentious quest with recent years witnessing several important controversies.

In July 2022, Science magazine reported that a key 2006 research paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature, which identified a subtype of brain protein called beta-amyloid as the cause of Alzheimer’s, may have been based on fabricated data.

One year earlier, in June 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved aducanumab, an antibody-targeting beta-amyloid, as a treatment for Alzheimer’s, even though the data supporting its use were incomplete and contradictory.

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Language is the most intuitive way for us to express how we feel and what we want. However, despite recent advancements in artificial intelligence, it is still very hard to control a robot using natural language instructions. Free-form commands such as “Robot, please go a little slower when you pass close to my TV” or “Stay far away from the swimming pool!” are hard to parse into actionable robot behaviors, and most human-robot interfaces today still rely on complex strategies such directly programming cost functions which define the desired behavior.

With our latest work, we attempt to change this reality through the introduction of “LaTTe: Language Trajectory Transformer”. LaTTe is a deep machine learning model that lets us send language commands to robots in an intuitive way with ease. When given an input sentence by the user, the model fuses it with camera images of objects that the robot observes in its surroundings, and outputs the desired robot behavior.

As an example, think of a user trying to control a robot barista that’s moving a wine bottle. Our method allows a non-technical user to control the robot’s behavior only using words, in a natural and simple interface. We will explain how we can achieve this in detail through this post.

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Wait, what? really?

For the first time, scientists were able to create particles without precursor particles or colliding two quanta together. Using the Schwinger effect, they could create matter with the aid of electromagnetic fields.

What Is a Schwinger Effect?

Continue reading “The Schwinger Effect: Scientists Finally Created Matter From Nothing Just by Using Electromagnetic Fields [Research Study]” | >

Young people seeking to slake their curiosity are increasingly turning to TikTok as a substitute search engine, with the addictive video-sharing app filled with everything from fried chicken recipes to music history deep dives. This is typically fine if you’re just after movie recommendations or a place to have lunch. Unfortunately, new research by NewsGuard has found TikTok also contains a concerning volume of misinformation about serious topics.

When looking for prominent news stories in September, the fact checking organisation found misinformation in almost 20 percent of videos surfaced by the app’s search engine. 540 TikTok videos were analysed as part of this investigation, with 105 found to contain “false or misleading claims.”

“This means that for searches on topics ranging from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to school shootings and COVID vaccines, TikTok’s users are consistently fed false and misleading claims,” wrote NewsGuard.

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Quantum tech is going green.

A new take on highly sensitive magnetic field sensors ditches the power-hungry lasers that previous devices have relied on to make their measurements and replaces them with sunlight. Lasers can gobble 100 watts or so of power — like keeping a bright lightbulb burning. The innovation potentially untethers quantum sensors from that energy need. The result is an environmentally friendly prototype on the forefront of technology, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Physical Review X Energy.

The big twist is in how the device uses sunlight. It doesn’t use solar cells to convert light into electricity. Instead, the sunlight does the job of the laser’s light, says Jiangfeng Du, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.

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Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

“You could train your particular ‘tongue’ to know what one of these whiskies ‘tasted’ like, so that when the fake stuff came along it could identify it and when the real stuff came along it could confirm that it was the real stuff,” said Dr Alasdair Clark, the lead author of the research from the University of Glasgow.

Clark said the technology could be incorporated into a small, portable device and have a wide range of applications, from identifying poisons to environmental monitoring of rivers.

“Initially we thought of it more for sort of production line, quality control maintenance, [for example] if you are an apple juice company and you want to make sure that the apple juice you make on Tuesday is the same as the one that you made last week,” said Clark.

Continue reading “Scientists develop ‘artificial tongue’ to detect fake whiskies” | >

They say lonsdaleite could be used to fortify industrial tools like drill bits and saw blades — AND teach us about the evolution of earth.

AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:

Move over, diamonds. There’s stronger bling in town. Meet lonsdaleite — for years just a theory. Now CNN reports that scientists have confirmed its existence on Earth. While diamonds and lonsdaleite are both made of carbon — get ready for this — the former has a cubic atomic structure, and the latter has a hexagonal structure. So what’s the big difference? That hexagonal structure makes the stone 58% stronger than regular diamonds. Lonsdaleite was found in a meteorite that scientists say came from a dwarf planet that was billions of years old. An asteroid crashed into that planet, releasing pressure that caused the stone to form. The hardness of lonsdaleite could be useful in making super durable tools for industrial sites. But scientists also say this discovery can teach us about the interactions of the universe and ultimately how Earth evolved as a planet.

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Summary: Researchers have discovered 69 genetic variants associated with musical beat synchronization, or the ability to move in sync with the beat of music.

Source: Vanderbilt University.

The first large-scale genomic study of musicality — published on the cover of today’s Nature Human Behaviour — identified 69 genetic variants associated with beat synchronization, meaning the ability to move in synchrony with the beat of music.

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MIT students are part of the large team that achieved fusion ignition for the first time in a laboratory. Researchers around the world have been engaged in attempts to achieve fusion ignition in a laboratory for more than half a century. It is a grand challenge of the 21st century. An approach called inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses lasers to implode a pellet of fuel in a quest for ignition, has been the focus of the High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) group at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. This group, including nine former and current MIT students, was crucial to a historic ICF ignition experiment performed in 2021. The results were published this year on the anniversary of that success.

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