Lifeboat Foundation

At the Quark Matter conference today and at the recent Rencontres de Moriond conference, the LHCb collaboration presented an analysis of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that may help determine whether or not any antimatter seen by experiments in space originates from the dark matter that holds galaxies such as the Milky Way together.

Space-based experiments such as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which was assembled at CERN and is installed on the International Space Station, have detected the fraction of antiprotons, the antimatter counterparts of protons, in high-energy particles called cosmic rays. These antiprotons could be created when dark-matter particles collide with each other, but they could also be formed in other instances, such as when protons collide with atomic nuclei in the interstellar medium, which is mainly made up of hydrogen and helium.

To find out whether or not any of these antiprotons originate from dark matter, physicists therefore have to estimate how often antiprotons are produced in collisions between protons and hydrogen as well as between protons and helium. While some measurements of the first have been made, and LHCb reported in 2017 the first-ever measurement of the second, that LHCb measurement involved only prompt antiproton production – that is, antiprotons produced right at the place where the collisions took place.

A galaxy called HD1 may be the most distant object astronomers have ever spotted. Its astonishing brightness is difficult to explain and may be due to an enormous black hole at its centre or the creation of extremely massive primordial stars, both of which confound our understanding of the early universe.

Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and his colleagues found HD1 by sifting through large public data sets from several of the most powerful telescopes available. They then observed it again with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.

Those observations showed that HD1 is about 33.4 billion light years away, more than a billion light years further than the previous most distant object ever spotted, a galaxy called GN-z11. Such a distance is possible, despite the age of the universe being only about 13.8 billion years, because of the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.

In 2021, there was an estimated 2.7 billion gamers globally, in a gaming market that is valued at $300+ billion. The opportunity for developers is huge — but so is the temptation for fraudsters looking for ways to take advantage of the revenue that’s pouring into the industry. But according to the recent Denuvo Global Gaming Survey, many developers don’t fully know how cheating, tampering, and piracy has impacted their revenues — or don’t think they’ve been affected at all.

When players recognize cheating in a game, they often simply quit, because after all, there are an endless number of titles available. Engagement then tanks, and so does a game’s reputation — especially when developers’ social media accounts are overrun with complaints and demands that the issues be fixed.

Tampering and piracy, which usually go hand in hand, undermine a game’s sales, player engagement, and retention, particularly in the first few weeks of a game’s release. While PC and mobile operating systems are more vulnerable, consoles can still be hit, especially because so many games have co-op modes and live updates. For free-to-play games and games that offer in-game items, tampering can also directly impact monetization.

The British James Dyson Foundation presented the first Sustainability Award to Carvey Ehren Maigue, an electrical engineering student in the Philippines. He was awarded for creating new material from recycled crop waste that has the ability to transform ultraviolet (UV) rays from the sun into electrical energy. The technology could soon be turning the windows and walls of buildings into a rich new source of electricity.

The invention of the Filipino university student is called AuREUS (Aurora Renewable Energy and UV Sequestration). Both AuREUS devices (Borealis Solar Window and Astralis Solar Wall) use the same technology used in the beautiful Northern and Southern lights. High energy particles are absorbed by luminescent particles that re-emit them as visible light. A similar type of luminescent particles (derivable from certain fruits and vegetables) were suspended in a resin substrate and is used as the core technology on both devices.

Continue reading “Solar panels created from crop waste produce energy even if the sun isn’t shining” »

In a world where deforestation directly leads to biodiversity loss, disrupts the water cycle, and alters rainfall, looking for alternatives to recycle or produce paper is more important than ever.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a pollen-based paper that, after being printed, can be erased and reused multiple times without any damage to the paper.

Continue reading “Sunflower pollen-based paper that you can print on and unprint” »

In January, 2021, the OpenAI consortium — founded by Elon Musk and financially backed by Microsoft — unveiled its most ambitious project to date, the DALL-E machine learning system. This ingenious multimodal AI was capable of generating images (albeit, rather cartoonish ones) based on the attributes described by a user — think “a cat made of sushi” or “an x-ray of a Capybara sitting in a forest.” On Wednesday, the consortium unveiled DALL-E’s next iteration which boasts higher resolution and lower latency than the original.

The first DALL-E (a portmanteau of “Dali,” as in the artist, and “WALL-E,” as in the animated Disney character) could generate images as well as combine multiple images into a collage, provide varying angles of perspective, and even infer elements of an image — such as shadowing effects — from the written description.

“Unlike a 3D rendering engine, whose inputs must be specified unambiguously and in complete detail, DALL·E is often able to ‘fill in the blanks’ when the caption implies that the image must contain a certain detail that is not explicitly stated,” the OpenAI team wrote in 2021.

Forest floor-dwelling fungi can send one another electrical signals to form word-like clusters, according to a computer scientist, but whether that represents something akin to language isn’t clear.

During the Chiriquí Period between AD 800 – 1,500, many settlements grew into large communities around the alluvial lands of the Térraba River and its main tributaries, constructing large structures using round-edged boulders, paved areas, burial sites, and circular or rectangular mounds with stone walls.

The Diquís reached an apex of cultural development during this period, with Diquís artisans creating elaborate ceramic, bone, and gold objects, and sculpturing stone spheres in important zones within the settlements. Stone spheres were also placed in alignments in public plazas, or along the approach to the dwellings of the ruling elite or chieftains.

Archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the National Museum of Costa Rica (MNCR) have excavated 6 stone spheres as part of a wider project to preserve the monuments.

The Defense Department, in partnership with the private sector, is building three transient training barracks using advanced 3D printing technology.