Lifeboat Foundation

It may seem like technology advances year after year, as if by magic. But behind every incremental improvement and breakthrough revolution is a team of scientists and engineers hard at work.

UC Santa Barbara Professor Ben Mazin is developing precision optical sensors for telescopes and observatories. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, he and his team improved the spectra resolution of their superconducting sensor, a major step in their ultimate goal: analyzing the composition of exoplanets.

“We were able to roughly double the spectral resolving power of our detectors,” said first author Nicholas Zobrist, a doctoral student in the Mazin Lab.

Assistance robots are typically mobile robots designed to assist humans in malls, airports, health care facilities, home environments and various other settings. Among other things, these robots could help users to find their way around unknown environments, for instance guiding them to a specific location or sharing important information with them.

While the capabilities of assistance robots have improved significantly over the past decade, the systems that have so far been implemented in real-world environments are not yet capable of following or guiding humans efficiently within crowded spaces. In fact, training robots to track a specific user while navigating a dynamic environment characterized by many randomly moving “obstacles” is far from a simple task.

Researchers at the Berlin Institute of Technology have recently introduced a new model based on deep reinforcement learning that could allow mobile robots to guide a specific user to a desired location or follow him/her around while carrying their belongings, all within a crowded environment. This model, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could help to significantly enhance the capabilities of robots in malls, airports and other public places.

Theory underpins our understanding of convection in the Earth’s outer core and its function in controlling the planet’s magnetic field. Convective flows or how they may be changing have never been directly observed by scientists. Virginia Tech geoscientist Ying Zhou puts proof forward for the first time.

A large earthquake shook the Kermadec Islands region in the South Pacific Ocean in May 1997. A little over 20 years later, in September 2018, a second big earthquake hit the same location, with its waves of seismic energy emanating from the same region.

Although two decades separated the earthquakes, because they occurred in the same region, they’d be expected to send seismic waves through the Earth’s layers at the same speed, said Ying Zhou, a geoscientist with the Department of Geosciences at the Virginia Tech College of Science.

A recent study indicates the prevalence of brain changes from limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy might be approximately 40% in older adults and as high as 50% in people with Alzheimer’s.

Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that attacks the brain, causing a decline in mental ability that worsens over time. It is the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. There is no current cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but there are medications that can help ease the symptoms.

View insights.

Many technologies popular in speculation and science fiction are so advanced they are indistinguishable from magic. This series looks at if such technologies have any plausible basis in science and what their impact and less obvious implications would be.

Get a free month of Curiosity Stream: http://curiositystream.com/isaacarthur.
The big question of why life exists has challenged minds for countless centuries, but what does science have to say on this matter? Could life arise on other worlds and in other Universes, and what is the reason for it?

Langton’s Ant Simulator: http://www.langtonant.com.
Conway’s Game of Life Simulator: https://playgameoflife.com.
Visit our Website: http://www.isaacarthur.net.
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IsaacArthur.
SFIA Merchandise available: https://www.signil.com/sfia/

Continue reading “Why Life Exists” »

View pictures in App save up to 80% data. An illustration of tiny wedge-shaped robots – collectively known as Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) – deployed into the ocean miles below a lander on the frozen surface of an ocean world data-image-width=982 data-image-height=726 An illustration of tiny wedge-shaped robots – collectively known as Sensing With Independent Micro-Swimmers (SWIM) – deployed into the ocean miles below a lander on the frozen surface of an ocean world NASA has unveiled a plan to unleash swarms of cellphone-sized robots to hunt for alien life on other planets.

BepiColombo’s second Mercury flyby on June 23 takes the probe one step closer to orbiting the closest planet to the Sun.

PHILADELPHIA — In the summer of 2010, Bill Ludwig and Doug Olson were battling an insidious blood cancer called chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). They’d both received numerous treatments, and as remaining options became scarce, they volunteered to become the first participants in a clinical trial of an experimental therapy underway at the Abramson Cancer Center and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The treatment would eradicate their end-stage leukemia, generate headlines across the globe, and usher in a new era of highly personalized medicine. Called Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells, these genetically modified tumor-targeting cells are a living drug made for each patient out of their own cells. Today, an analysis of these two patients published in Nature from the Penn researchers and colleagues from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia explains the longest persistence of CAR T cell therapy recorded to date against CLL, and shows that the CAR T cells remained detectable at least a decade after infusion, with sustained remission in both patients.

“This long-term remission is remarkable, and witnessing patients living cancer-free is a testament to the tremendous potency of this “living drug” that works effectively against cancer cells,” said first author J. Joseph Melenhorst, PhD, a research professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Penn. “Witnessing our patients respond well to this innovative cellular therapy makes all of our efforts so worthwhile. being able to give them more time to live and to spend it with loved ones.”

CLL, the first cancer in which CAR T cells were studied and used at Penn, is the most common type of leukemia in adults. While treatment of the disease has improved, it remains incurable with standard approaches. Eventually, patients can become resistant to most therapies, and many still die of their disease.