Lifeboat Foundation

Inspired by research into how infants learn, computer scientists have created a program that can pick up simple physical rules about the behaviour of objects — and express surprise when they seem to violate those rules. The results were published on 11 July in Nature Human Behaviour¹.

Developmental psychologists test how babies understand the motion of objects by tracking their gaze. When shown a video of, for example, a ball that suddenly disappears, the children express surprise, which researchers quantify by measuring how long the infants stare in a particular direction.

Luis Piloto, a computer scientist at Google-owned company DeepMind in London, and his collaborators wanted to develop a similar test for artificial intelligence (AI). The team trained a neural network — a software system that learns by spotting patterns in large amounts of data — with animated videos of simple objects such as cubes and balls.

At NAACL HLT, Amazon scientists will present a method for improving multitask learning. Their proposed method lets the tasks converge on their own schedules, an… See more.

Allowing separate tasks to converge on their own schedules and using knowledge distillation to maintain performance improves accuracy.

Astronomers from MIT report today that they have discovered a mysterious signal with a pattern akin to a heartbeat, emanating from a far-off galaxy that is billions of light-years from Earth. Exactly what the source may be of this regular pulse of radio waves remains a mystery, as it is the first time that such a signal has been recorded.

They have identified the signal as a fast radio burst (FRB), which is typically an intensely strong burst of radio waves of unknown astrophysical origin that lasts only a few milliseconds at most. This new signal, labelled FRB 20191221A, is unusual, because it persists for up to three seconds, which is about 1,000 times longer than the average FRB. Within this time, there are shorter bursts of radio waves that repeat every 0.2 seconds in a clear periodic pattern, similar to that of a beating heart.

Since the first FRB was discovered in 2007, hundreds of similar radio flashes have been detected across the universe, most recently by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or CHIME, an interferometric radio telescope that is located at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada. CHIME is designed to pick up radio waves emitted by hydrogen in the very earliest stages of the universe, but the telescope is also sensitive to fast radio bursts. Since it began observing the sky in 2018, CHIME has detected hundreds of FRBs emanating from different parts of the sky.

The paradox startled scientists at the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) more than a dozen years ago. The more heat they beamed into a spherical tokamak, a magnetic facility designed to reproduce the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars, the less the central temperature increased.

Big mystery

“Normally, the more beam power you put in, the higher the temperature gets,” said Stephen Jardin, head of the theory and computational science group that performed the calculations, and lead author of a proposed explanation published in Physical Review Letters. “So this was a big mystery: Why does this happen?”

Researchers at the University of California, Davis, have been able to produce antibodies to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein in hen eggs. Antibodies harvested from eggs might be used to treat COVID-19 or as a preventative measure for people exposed to the disease. The work was published July 9 in the journal Viruses.

“The beauty of the system is that you can produce a lot of antibodies in birds,” said Rodrigo Gallardo, professor in poultry medicine, Department of Population Health and Reproduction at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “In addition to a low cost to produce these antibodies in hens, they can be updated very fast by using updated antigens to hyperimmunize hens, allowing protection against current variant strains.”

Birds produce a type of antibody called IgY, comparable to IgG in humans and other mammals. IgY does not cause allergy or set off immune reactions when injected into humans. IgY appears both in birds’ serum and in their eggs. As a hen lays about 300 eggs a year, you can get a lot of IgY, Gallardo said.

Motors are everywhere in our day-to-day lives—from cars to washing machines. A futuristic scientific field is working on tiny motors that could power a network of nanomachines and replace some of the power sources we use in devices today.

In new research published recently in ACS Nano, researchers from the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin created the first ever solid-state optical nanomotor. All previous versions of these light-driven motors reside in a solution of some sort, which held back their potential for most real-world applications.

Continue reading “Tiny motors take a big step forward” »

Although treatments for depression exist, sometimes these treatments don’t work for many who use them. Furthermore, women experience higher rates of depression than men, yet the cause for this difference is unknown, making their illnesses—at times—more complicated to treat.

Researchers uncover a new vulnerability in AMD and Intel microprocessors that could bypass current protections and lead to Specter-based attacks.

Researchers at ESET have discovered three new buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the UEFI firmware of several Lenovo Notebook devices.

Researchers at ESET have discovered three new buffer overflow vulnerabilities in the UEFI firmware of several Lenovo Notebook devices.