Lifeboat Foundation

A new Winows 11 feature that will remember what you did in your PC.

Microsoft has announced a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 called ‘Recall,’ which records everything you do on your PC and lets you search through your historical activities.

Recall works like a photographic memory for your PC, letting you access everything you’ve seen or done on your computer in an organized way using queries in your native language.

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Testing two families of large language models (LLMs) (GPT and LLaMA2) on a battery of measurements spanning different theory of mind abilities, Strachan et al. find that the performance of LLMs can mirror that of humans on most of these tasks. The authors explored potential reasons for this.

A hormone already present in the human body could be used to stop Alzheimer’s disease in its tracks, scientists have announced.

Researchers discovered that a small part of an appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin, which is present in everyone, can have dramatic effects on the brain, including stopping the development of Alzheimer’s disease in its earliest stages.

Their tests have shown that leptin can reduce the effects of two toxic proteins in the brain called amyloid and tau, which build up and lead to memory loss and development of Alzheimer’s disease.

A team led by Chen Xianhui and Professor Xiang Ziji from the CAS Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics and the Department of Physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, uncovered a unique superconducting state characterized by one-dimensional superconducting stripes. This state is induced by the ferromagnetic proximity effect in an oxide heterostructure made up of ferromagnetic EuO and (110)-oriented KTaO3 (KTO). Their findings were published in Nature Physics.

The academic community concurs that the emergence of unconventional superconducting pairings is intricately linked to magnetism, particularly in copper oxides and iron-based high-temperature superconductors. Magnetic fluctuations are deemed pivotal in the genesis of high-temperature superconductivity, where the interplay between superconductivity and magnetism gives rise to superconducting states exhibiting unique spatial modulation. Superconducting oxide heterostructures encompassing magnetic structural units emerge as an optimal platform for investigating such superconducting states.

Building upon their prior achievements, the research team delved deeper into the superconductivity of this system and its relationship with the ferromagnetic proximity effect, meticulously adjusting the carrier concentration of the two-dimensional electron gas residing at the interface. They uncovered an intriguing in-plane anisotropy in superconductivity among samples with low carrier concentrations, which nevertheless vanished in samples exhibiting higher carrier concentrations.

Recent discoveries in quantum physics have revealed simpler atomic structures than hydrogen, involving pure electromagnetic interactions between particles like electrons and their antiparticles. This advancement has significant implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics and fundamental physics, highlighted by new methods for detecting tauonium, which could revolutionize measurements of particle physics.

The hydrogen atom was once considered the simplest atom in nature, composed of a structureless electron and a structured proton. However, as research progressed, scientists discovered a simpler type of atom, consisting of structureless electrons (e-), muons (μ-), or tauons (τ-) and their equally structureless antiparticles. These atoms are bound together solely by electromagnetic interactions, with simpler structures than hydrogen atoms, providing a new perspective on scientific problems such as quantum mechanics, fundamental symmetry, and gravity.

Discovery of Electromagnetic Interaction Atoms.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan is a science writer reporting on physics, materials science and quantum technology. Karmela earned a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics and atomic, molecular and optical physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Their research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including Physical Review Letters and New Journal of Physics.

They studied ultracold atomic systems in novel geometries in microgravity and the interplay of disorder and quasiperiodicity in one-dimensional systems, including metamaterials. During their doctoral training, they also participated in several art-based projects, including co-developing a course on physics and art and serving as a production manager for a devised theatre piece titled Quantum Voyages.

Before joining New Scientist, Karmela was an assistant professor at Bard High School Early College in New York City, where they taught high school and college courses in physics and mathematics. Karmela’s freelance writing has been featured in Wired, Scientific American, Slate, MIT Technology Review, Quanta Magazine and Physics World.

University of Southern California Dornsife molecular biologist John Tower suggests that while living things generally prefer stability to conserve energy and resources, instability may also play a crucial role.

A molecular biologist at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences may have found a new “rule of biology.”

A rule of biology, sometimes called a biological law, describes a recognized pattern or truism among living organisms. Allen’s rule, for example, states that among warm-blooded animals, those found in colder areas have shorter, thicker limbs (to conserve body heat) than those in hotter regions, which need more body surface area to dissipate heat.

“The planet has a hot core, and that heat source is changing the chemistry of the gases deeper down, but it’s also driving this strong, convective mixing bubbling up from the interior,” said Zafar Rustamkulov.

Gas giant planets within our solar system and exoplanets outside our solar system are known to possess large amounts of gas and small cores, but what if an exoplanet was found to exhibit opposite characteristics? This is what a study published today in Nature hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated the physical and atmospheric characteristics of WASP-107 b, which is located just over 200 light-years from Earth and has been found to have unique interior characteristics compared to previously discovered exoplanets. These unique findings hold the potential to challenge our understanding of the formation and evolution of gas giant exoplanets, which continue to demonstrate stark contrasts to planets within our solar system.

For the study, the researchers used NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe WASP-107 b, discovering that while its radius is slightly less than Jupiter, its mass is only 10 percent of the largest planet in our solar system. Additionally, WASP-107 b possesses methane levels that are one thousand times less than what astronomers anticipated finding, along with having a core whose mass is 12 times larger than the Earth.

Continue reading “New Findings on WASP-107 b Challenge Assumptions About Gas Giant Composition” »

Joints are an essential part in robotics, especially those that try to emulate the motion of (human) animals. Unlike the average automaton, animals are not outfitted with bearings and similar types of joints, but rather rely sometimes on ball joints and a lot on rolling contact joints (RCJs). These RCJs have the advantage of being part of the skeletal structure, making them ideal for compact and small joints. This is the conclusion that [Breaking Taps] came to as well while designing the legs for a bird-like automaton.

These RCJs do not just have the surfaces which contact each other while rotating, but also provide the constraints for how far a particular joint is allowed to move, both in the forward and backward directions as well as sideways. In the case of the biological version these contact surfaces are also coated with a constantly renewing surface to prevent direct bone-on-bone contact. The use of RCJs is rather common in robotics, with the humanoid DRACO 3 platform as detailed in a 2023 research article by [Seung Hyeon Bang] and colleagues in Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Continue reading “Emulating Biology For Robots With Rolling Contact Joints” »