face_with_colon_three circa 2020.
Watch any kid play with a tape measure and you’ll understand where researchers from the Seoul National University of Science and Technology found the inspiration for their new chameleon-like robot that can snag objects with its artificial tongue over 30 inches away in less than 600 milliseconds.
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.
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.
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.
Scientists simulated an organic molecule at the atomic scale. What does this mean for the future of quantum computing?
Don’t think about living forever. Just think about never getting sick, ever again.
At least that’s how Aubrey de Grey would like you to contextualize his work. The notoriously bearded biomedical gerontologist is the scientific spark that lights up so many all-caps “immortality” headlines. De Grey wants to increase human longevity so significantly that death could become a thing of the past, a condition people fell prey to before they developed the medical technology to stop it. It’s been the center of his work for approximately 20 years.
De Grey started as a software guy at the genetics department of Cambridge University in 1992, maintaining a database of genetic information on fruit flies. In 1999 he published a book called “The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging,” where he first laid out the key idea we know him for today: preventing damage to mitochondrial DNA ought to make people live much longer. The idea was so well-received that Cambridge awarded him a PhD the following year. De Grey condensed his thesis to a sound byte in a 2007 interview: “[Humans] are machines, and aging is the wearing out of a machine, the accumulation of damage to a machine, and hence potentially fixable.”
Enrollment of 51 patients exceeds target by ~10% due to high interest in the study
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Sept. 19, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — UNITY Biotechnology, Inc. (“UNITY”) [NASDAQ: UBX], a biotechnology company developing therapeutics to slow, halt, or reverse diseases of aging, has completed enrollment for the ENVISION study, its Phase 2 clinical trial of UBX1325 in patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This is an active comparator study, examining the efficacy of two doses of UBX1325 compared to every other month treatment with aflibercept through 24 weeks.
An instrument designed to detect seismic activity on Mars has just revealed an incredibly cool new ability, detecting faint tremors from meteorites impacting the red planet.
By combining data collected from the NASA’s Mars InSight lander with information from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter researchers have successfully linked those ground-shaking booms with freshly formed craters.
Not only does this help us understand the impact processes that continue to shape Martian geology, it demonstrates how collecting seismic data can reveal information beyond expected mission parameters. This may help inform future exploration of other worlds.
With the advent of generative image AI, a new discipline is emerging: prompt engineering. Search engines like Krea provide inspiration.
Prompts are the short text descriptions that an image AI like DALL-E 2, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion uses to generate an image.
Often it is difficult to put the idea you have in mind into fitting words. Moreover, the AI may execute instructions differently than you want it to. And there are plenty of modifiers, for example for image cropping or style, that can lead to very different results for the otherwise same prompt.
ERNIE-ViLG, the new text-to-image AI developed by Baidu can generate images that show Chinese objects and celebrities more accurately than existing AIs. But a built-in censorship mechanism will filter out politically sensitive words.