Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019 o.o!

Black soldier fly meal only won approval as fish and poultry feed in 2018. Koutsos said EnviroFlight and companies such as Enterra in Canada and Protix in the European Union are working to win regulatory approval for using the meal in food for other animals, including swine and even cats and dogs.

The idea is to take pressure off traditional sources of protein meal, such as fish. About one-quarter of the harvest from marine fisheries is turned into food for farmed animals, including fish, hogs and poultry. More than 90 percent of those fisheries are either fully exploited or overfished, meaning that as the world’s population grows, there will be more demand for alternative protein sources.

Continue reading “Maggots could revolutionize the global food supply. Here’s how” »

New work on linear-probing hash tables from MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

Sports giant Nike has taken a leap into the metaverse.

The Beaverton, Oregon, company announced Thursday that it is partnering with Roblox to create a virtual world called Nikeland on Roblox’s online gaming platform.

The virtual world includes Nike buildings, fields and arenas for players to compete in various mini-games, ranging from tag and dodgeball to “The Floor Is Lava.” It’s modeled after the company’s real-life headquarters. Nikeland will be free (for now).

Over the past several decades, researchers have moved from using electric currents to manipulating light waves in the near-infrared range for telecommunications applications such as high-speed 5G networks, biosensors on a chip, and driverless cars. This research area, known as integrated photonics, is fast evolving and investigators are now exploring the shorter—visible—wavelength range to develop a broad variety of emerging applications. These include chip-scale LIDAR (light detection and ranging), AR/VR/MR (augmented/virtual/mixed reality) goggles, holographic displays, quantum information processing chips, and implantable optogenetic probes in the brain.

The one device critical to all these applications in the visible range is an optical phase modulator, which controls the phase of a light wave, similar to how the phase of radio waves is modulated in wireless computer networks. With a phase modulator, researchers can build an on-chip optical switch that channels light into different waveguide ports. With a large network of these optical switches, researchers could create sophisticated integrated optical systems that could control light propagating on a tiny chip or light emission from the chip.

But phase modulators in the visible range are very hard to make: there are no materials that are transparent enough in the visible spectrum while also providing large tunability, either through thermo-optical or electro-optical effects. Currently, the two most suitable materials are silicon nitride and lithium niobate. While both are highly transparent in the visible range, neither one provides very much tunability. Visible-spectrum phase modulators based on these materials are thus not only large but also power-hungry: the length of individual waveguide-based modulators ranges from hundreds of microns to several mm and a single modulator consumes tens of mW for phase tuning. Researchers trying to achieve large-scale integration—embedding thousands of devices on a single microchip—have, up to now, been stymied by these bulky, energy-consuming devices.

Case studies spotlight personalized approaches to tweaking brain circuits.

Two new methods make it possible to delete long sections of the genome, expanding the capabilities of the gene editor CRISPR. The techniques could lead to therapies that excise large insertions or duplications tied to autism, such as the DNA repeats that underlie fragile X syndrome.

To remove a segment of DNA, CRISPR systems typically use an enzyme called Cas9 to snip double-stranded DNA at two target sites. The cell’s own repair machinery can then join the cut ends, omitting the intervening sequence. But this process is error prone and can insert or delete unintended segments of DNA, called ‘indels,’ or rearrange large sections of the genome. Snipping double-stranded DNA can also cause cell death.

A different CRISPR-based system called ‘prime editing’ can make DNA repair more precise. In one version of the technique, a protein complex called a prime editor cuts only one strand of DNA at one of the two sites and the opposite strand at the other site. The prime editor adds a sequence to one of the cut strands to guide the repair.

The most promising application in biomedicine is in computational chemistry, where researchers have long exploited a quantum approach. But the Fraunhofer Society hopes to spark interest among a wider community of life scientists, such as cancer researchers, whose research questions are not intrinsically quantum in nature.

“It’s uncharted territory,” says oncologist Niels Halama of the DKFZ, Germany’s national cancer center in Heidelberg. Working with a team of physicists and computer scientists, Halama is planning to develop and test algorithms that might help stratify cancer patients, and select small subgroups for specific therapies from heterogeneous data sets.

This is important for precision medicine, he says, but classic computing has insufficient power to find very small groups in the large and complex data sets that oncology, for example, generates. The time needed to complete such a task may stretch out over many weeks—too long to be of use in a clinical setting, and also too expensive. Moreover, the steady improvements in the performance of classic computers are slowing, thanks in large part to fundamental limits on chip miniaturization.

NVIDIA’s GauGAN2 artificial intelligence (AI) can now use simple written phrases to generate a fitting photorealistic image. The deep-learning model is able to craft different scenes in just three or four words.

GauGAN is NVIDIA’s AI program that was used to turn simple doodles into photorealistic masterpieces in 2019, a technology that was eventually turned into the NVIDIA Canvas app earlier this year. Now NVIDIA has advanced the AI even further to where it only needs a brief description in order to generate a “photo.”

In an extremely shocking turn of events, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that he posts “at least” half of his tweets from the toilet.

“At least 50% of my tweets were made on a porcelain throne,” Musk tweeted Sunday night, presumably from the toilet.

“It gives me solace,” he added.