The universe is (nearly) 14 billion years old, astronomers confirm.
With looming discrepancies about the true age of the universe, scientists have taken a fresh look at the observable (expanding) universe and have estimated that it is 13.77 billion years old (plus or minus 40 million years).
Drone accidentally hits plane causing major damage.
I wonder if we’re going to see more of these incidents in the future.
Continue reading “Canada: Police drone hits plane approaching runway; ‘major damage’ reported” »
Deforestation is getting worse in the Amazon.
Between August2020and July 2,021 the rainforest lost 10.476 square kilometers – an area nearly seven times bigger than greater London and 13 times the size of New York City, according to data released by Imazon, a Brazilian research institute that has been tracking the Amazon deforestation since 2008. The figure is 57% higher than in the previous year and is the worst since 2012.
Sharp wave-ripples from the hippocampus are shown to modulate peripheral glucose homeostasis in rats, offering insights into the mechanism that links sleep disruption and blood glucose regulation in type 2 diabetes.
Program aims to provide physical systems with ability to adapt to unexpected events in real-time and effectively communicate system changes to human and AI operators.
Many complex, cyber-physical military systems are designed to last for decades but their expected functionality and capabilities will likely evolve over time, prompting a need for modifications and adaptation. High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV), for example, had a design life of 15 years, but are now undergoing modernization to extend the average age of the fleet to 37+ years. At design time, these systems are built to handle a range of expected operating environments and parameters. Adapting them is currently done in an improvisational manner – often involving custom-tailored aftermarket remedies, which are not always commonly available, require a skilled technician to install, and can take months or even years to procure. Further, as they evolve and are placed outside of their original design envelop these systems can fail unexpectedly or become unintentionally dangerous.
“Today, we start with exquisitely built control systems but then someone needs to add something or make a modification – all of which results in changes to the safe operating limits,” said DARPA program manager John-Francis Mergen. “These changes are done in a way that wasn’t anticipated – or more likely couldn’t have been anticipated – by the original designers. Knowing that military systems will undoubtedly need to be altered, we need greater adaptability.”
Continue reading “Enabling Military Systems to Adapt to the Unexpected” »
FENCE program selects researchers to develop low-power, low-latency neuromorphic camera technologies to enable future military applications.
DARPA today announced that three teams of researchers led by Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman have been selected to develop event-based infrared (IR) camera technologies under the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics (FENCE) program. Event-based – or neuromorphic – cameras are an emerging class of sensors with demonstrated advantages relative to traditional imagers. These advanced models operate asynchronously and only transmit information about pixels that have changed. This means they produce significantly less data and operate with much lower latency and power.
“Neuromorphic refers to silicon circuits that mimic brain operation; they offer sparse output, low latency, and high energy efficiency,” said Dr. Whitney Mason, the program manager leading the FENCE program. “Event-based cameras operate under these same principles when dealing with sparse scenes, but currently lack advanced ‘intelligence’ to perform more difficult perception and control tasks.”
Continue reading “DARPA Announces Research Teams to Develop Intelligent Event-Based Imagers” »
Deploying two unrelated CRISPR nucleases in tandem, with multiplexed CRISPR RNAs and a chemically stabilized activator, creates a simple, one-step assay that can rapidly detect attomolar concentrations of RNA without needing target amplification.
Summary: Young people who experienced complex early life trauma as a result of interpersonal violence or child abuse had more severe mental health problems and cognitive impairments than their peers with no exposure to trauma.
Source: King’s College London.
New research from King’s has explored whether different types of trauma confer the same risk of future mental illness, in the first study of its kind.
What do you do at different times in the day? What do you eat? How do you interact with your neighbors? These are some of the questions that biologists would love to ask communities of microbes, from those that live in extreme environments deep in the ocean to those that cause chronic infections in humans. Now, a new technique developed at Caltech can answer these questions by surveying gene expression across a population of millions of bacterial cells while still preserving the cells’ positions relative to one another.
The technique can be used to understand the wide variety of microbial communities on our planet, including the microbes that live within our gut and influence our health as well as those that colonize the roots of plants and contribute to soil health, to name a few.
The technique was developed at Caltech by Daniel Dar, a former postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and executive officer for biology and biological engineering, and by Dr. Nina Dar, a former senior research technician in the laboratory of Long Cai, professor of biology and biological engineering. Daniel Dar is now an assistant professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. A paper describing the research appears on August 12 in the journal Science.
Jackson continues by saying that blue hydrogen is “at best an expensive distraction, and at worst a lock-in for continued fossil fuel use” which would derail goals that the country and the world have set for decarbonizing the economy. He takes particular issue with the fact that oil and gas companies have asked the UK government for decades of subsidies while also claiming that blue hydrogen will be inexpensive to produce. “If the false claims made by oil companies about the cost of blue hydrogen were true, their projects would make a profit by 2030,” he told The Guardian.
Recent studies have questioned blue hydrogen’s low-carbon bona fides.
