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EPFL scientists have developed a digital model of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, that realistically simulates the movements of the animal. The twin is a big step towards reverse engineering the neuromechanical control of animal behavior, and developing bioinspired robots.

“We used two kinds of data to build NeuroMechFly,” says Professor Pavan Ramdya at EPFL’s School of Life Sciences. “First, we took a real fly and performed a CT scan to build a morphologically realistic biomechanical . The second source of data were the real limb movements of the fly, obtained using pose estimation software that we’ve developed in the last couple of years that allow us to precisely track the movements of the animal.”

Ramdya’s group, working with the group of Professor Auke Ijspeert at EPFL’s Biorobotics Laboratory, has published a paper in Nature Methods showcasing the first ever accurate “digital twin” of the fly Drosophila melanogaster, dubbed “NeuroMechFly”.

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Modern computers use electrons to process information, but this design is starting to reach theoretical limits. However, it could be possible to use magnetism instead and thereby keep up the development of both cheaper and more powerful computers, thanks to work by scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) and University of Copenhagen. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

“The function of a computer involves sending electric current through a microchip. While the amount is tiny, the current will not only transport information but also contribute to heating up the chip. When you have a huge number of components tightly packed, the heat becomes a problem. This is one of the reasons why we have reached the limit for how much you can shrink the components. A computer based on magnetism would avoid the problem of overheating,” says Professor Kim Lefmann, Condensed Matter Physics, NBI.

“Our discovery is not a direct recipe for making a computer based on magnetism. Rather we have disclosed a fundamental magnetic property which you need to control, if you want to design a such computer.”

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A revolutionary new DNA detection method has helped rediscover an iconic species of turtle last seen more than 25 years ago in a northern Queensland river.

Water samples taken from the lower Burdekin River by a James Cook University-led team of researchers and analyzed for environmental DNA (eDNA) confirmed the presence of the Irwin’s turtle at many sites along the river, which has not been formally recorded in the area for more than 25 years.

The turtle, first discovered in the Burdekin catchment by the late Steve Irwin and his father Bob in the early 1990s, is among a number of freshwater species that uses its cloaca (equivalent to its bum) to breathe while underwater, which allows it to stay submerged underwater for longer.

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SpaceX COO and President Gwynne Shotwell says that the company now expects Starbase to be ready for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt as early as June or July, pushing the schedule back another month or two.

To accomplish that feat, SpaceX will need to more or less ace a wide range of challenging and unproven tests and pass a series of exhaustive bureaucratic reviews, significantly increasing the odds that Starship’s orbital launch debut is actually closer to 3–6 months away. While SpaceX could technically pull off a miracle or even attempt to launch hardware that has only been partially tested, even the most optimistic of hypothetical scenarios are still contingent upon things largely outside of the company’s control.

Both revolve around the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which – in SpaceX’s case – is responsible for completing a ‘programmatic environmental assessment’ (PEA) of orbital Starship launches out of Boca Chica, Texas and issuing a launch license for the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. In some ways, both tasks are unprecedented, but the bureaucratic processes involved are still largely the same as those SpaceX has successfully navigated over the last two decades.

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Discovery, Development & Delivery Of Safe, Effective & Affordable Vaccines For Global Public Health — Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., Director General, International Vaccine Institute (IVI)

Dr. Jerome H. Kim, M.D., is the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI — https://www.ivi.int/), a nonprofit International Organization established in 1997 as an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), dedicated to the discovery, development and delivery of safe, effective and affordable vaccines for global public health.

IVI is headquartered in Seoul and hosted by the Republic of Korea with 36 member countries and the WHO on its treaty.

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The current state of affairs, however, is a bit more complicated. While quantum computers have officially gone from theory to fact—a remarkable achievement—none are yet practical.

To realize a useful quantum computer, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and others are pouring resources into machines that run on a menagerie of qubits. The most popular approach, favored by Google and IBM, involves tiny loops of superconducting wire. Honeywell and IonQ are pursuing atomic qubits made of trapped ions. Researchers in China are building intricate, Rube-Goldberg-like machines on lab benches to run quantum computations with mirrors and light.

Continue reading “The Ideal Qubit? Future Quantum Computers Could Crunch Data With Single Electrons on Neon Ice” | >

When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, 2022, it sent atmospheric shock waves, sonic booms, and tsunami waves around the world. Now, scientists are finding the volcano’s effects also reached space.

Analyzing data from NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm satellites, scientists found that in the hours after the eruption, hurricane-speed winds and unusual electric currents formed in the —Earth’s electrified upper atmospheric layer at the edge of .

“The volcano created one of the largest disturbances in space we’ve seen in the modern era,” said Brian Harding, a physicist at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author on a new paper discussing the findings. “It is allowing us to test the poorly understood connection between the lower atmosphere and space.”

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Recent technological advances have enabled the creation of increasingly sophisticated sensors that can track movements and changes in real-world environments with remarkable levels of precision. Many engineers are now working to make these sensors thinner so that they can be embedded in a variety of devices, including robotic limbs and wearable devices.

Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have recently developed a thin sensor for computer vision applications, which is based on a micro lens array (MLA). MLAs are 1D or 2D arrays comprising several small lenses, which are generally arranged in either squared or hexagonal patterns.

“In this study, we combined an old technology, a micro array, with vision-based tactile ,” Xia Chen, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “This work builds on the work using the pinhole arrays to capture the image. We wanted to achieve a thin-format vision-based tactile sensor, as few studies so far focused on changing the imaging system of vison-based .”

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