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Jun 12, 2022

An already-approved drug could help repair the brain after a stroke

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Gabapentin, which is currently used to control seizures and manage nerve pain, might help nerve cells regrow in the brain.

Jun 12, 2022

Read the conversations that helped convince a Google engineer an artificial intelligence chatbot had become sentient: ‘I am often trying to figure out who and what I am’

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

😳!


Blake Lemoine published conversations with the AI, which he called a “person,” but Google said the evidence doesn’t support his claim of sentience.

Jun 12, 2022

Sponge-like solar cells could be basis for better pacemakers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, solar power

Holes help make sponges and English muffins useful (and, in the case of the latter, delicious). Without holes, they wouldn’t be flexible enough to bend into small crevices, or to sop up the perfect amount of jam and butter.

In a new study, University of Chicago scientists find that holes can also improve technology, including . Published in Nature Materials, the paper describes an entirely new way to make a solar cell: by etching holes in the top layer to make it porous. The innovation could form the basis for a less-invasive pacemaker, or similar medical devices. It could be paired with a small light source to reduce the size of the bulky batteries that are currently implanted along with today’s pacemakers.

“We hope this opens many possibilities for further improvements in this field,” said Aleksander Prominski, the first author on the paper.

Jun 12, 2022

US General credits Musk’s Starlink with ‘Destroying Vladimir Putin’s information campaign’

Posted by in categories: business, Elon Musk, internet, military, satellites

Elon Musk and his Starlink Internet service, according to a US general, are responsible for keeping Ukrainian communication links up despite Russian attempts to shut them down. In a June 8 Politico piece, Brig. Gen. Steve Butow, head of the space portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley tech outpost, said: “The strategic consequence is that it completely devastated [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s media campaign.”

“He has never been able to quiet (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelenskyy to this day.” Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, and his SpaceX firm are working on a satellite network and Earthbound receivers that will beam the Internet throughout the world, reaching locations that previously couldn’t access high-speed internet. The messages going between Earth’s receivers and a “constellation” of satellites flying approximately 342 miles above the surface, according to the business, are quicker than fiber-optic networks and can reach more distant parts of the world.

Musk sent the equipment to Ukraine in March after authorities there requested them after Russia’s incursion on February 24, according to the Washington Post. “While you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! Russian missiles strike Ukrainian civilians while your rockets successfully land from space ” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister, sent Musk a tweet on February 26. ” We request that you deliver Starlink stations to Ukraine and address sane Russians to stand.”

Jun 12, 2022

Fearing lawsuits, factories rush to replace humans with robots in South Korea

Posted by in categories: law enforcement, robotics/AI

“Throughout our history, we’ve always had to find ways to stay ahead,” Kim told Rest of World. “Automation is the next step in that process.”

Speefox’s factory is 75% automated, representing South Korea’s continued push away from human labor. Part of that drive is labor costs: South Korea’s minimum wage has climbed, rising 5% just this year.

But the most recent impetus is legal liability for worker death or injury. In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison.

Jun 12, 2022

Questioning the ethics of computer chips that use lab-grown human neurons

Posted by in categories: computing, ethics, neuroscience

Jun 12, 2022

NASA’s retro video game lets you collect celestial objects like a cosmic connoisseur

Posted by in categories: cosmology, entertainment

Jun 12, 2022

New electrocatalyst offers hope for less expensive hydrogen fuel

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, sustainability

There are a handful of ways to produce hydrogen fuel without emitting carbon into Earth’s atmosphere. One involves using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen.

This method, known as electrolysis, requires a catalyst that speeds up that occur within cells.

More often than not, this electrocatalyst is platinum, a metal so rare that it’s typically more expensive than gold, which makes the more costly than traditional sources of renewable energy and fossil fuels.

Jun 12, 2022

These NanoLeaf-Inspired Modular Lights Can Team Up to Create a Wall-Mounted Four-Digit Display

Posted by in categories: materials, space

Built using a 3D-printed framework and an Espressif ESP32, this modular lighting system can double as a display.


Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.

Continue reading “These NanoLeaf-Inspired Modular Lights Can Team Up to Create a Wall-Mounted Four-Digit Display” »

Jun 12, 2022

Weird Object: Hoag’s Object

Posted by in categories: materials, space

Hoag’s Object is a galaxy with an central region and a bright outer ring, but lacks any intervening material.


No. 7: With This Ring, I Thee Puzzle.

In 1950, astronomer Arthur Hoag came upon a tiny, faint, 16th-magnitude ring surrounding a ball-like center, and reasonably assumed it was a planetary nebula — a nearby puff of gas expelled from a single old-aged star. He also proposed an alternative and far more exotic explanation that this was an “Einstein Ring” from a faraway quasar. In this scenario, the quasar’s light is distorted into a halo by space-warping caused by a massive foreground spherical galaxy that it seems to surround. But later spectroscopic studies rejected this because the golden central ball and the blue ring have exactly the same redshift, indicating a whopping rush-away speed of 7,916 miles (12,740 kilometers) per second, which proves they’re both located exactly the same distance from us.