Lifeboat Foundation

It seems everyday more and more information is being uncovered about trees and the many mysteries within them. We know that they are alive, but it seems they are even more alive than we may have thought. Trees are interconnected underground, we also now know that trees can communicate with one another, but recently scientists have discovered that trees actually have a sort of heartbeat, it is just so slow that they’ve never noticed before.

Up until recently scientists had thought that water moved through trees by the process of osmosis, in a sort of continuous matter, but now they’ve discovered that the trunks and branches of the trees are actually contracting and expanding and essentially pumping water up from the roots to the leaves, kind of like how our heart pumps blood throughout our bodies.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover That Trees Have A ‘Heartbeat’ Too” »

Circa 2020 o.o

While some states have partially reopened and loosened restrictions on barber shops and hair salons, not everyone is ready to head out in public for a haircut just yet. That means many people around the world are still sporting shaggy quarantine cuts.

Continue reading “This Guy Didn’t Want to Get a Haircut in Public, So He Built a Robot Barber” »

But start-up Sakuu is tight-lipped on the details.

Saturn’s core is an unexpectedly immense mixture of ice, rock, and gas, surprising scientists who are trying to figure out how the planet formed and evolved to the enigmatic world we see today.

Hidden inside the solar system’s god of plenty is an unexpected bounty: Saturn’s mammoth core, spanning up to 60 percent of the planet’s width. The newly measured core, revealed through subtle waves in Saturn’s rings, appears to be ice, rock, and gas, blended into a soupy mass with blurry edges.

“It’s huge,” says Chris Mankovich of the California Institute of Technology, one of the authors of a new study describing Saturn’s core in the journal Nature Astronomy. “It’s definitely not something we expected to find.”

Continue reading “Ripples in Saturn’s rings reveal the planet’s giant, slushy core” »

Scientists at DESY have built a compact electron camera that can capture the inner, ultrafast dynamics of matter. The system shoots short bunches of electrons at a sample to take snapshots of its current inner structure. It is the first such electron diffractometer that uses Terahertz radiation for pulse compression. The developer team around DESY scientists Dongfang Zhang and Franz Kärtner from the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science CFEL validated their Terahertz-enhanced ultrafast electron diffractometer with the investigation of a silicon sample and present their work in the first issue of the journal Ultrafast Science, a new title in the Science group of scientific journals.

Electron diffraction is one way to investigate the inner structure of matter. However, it does not image the structure directly. Instead, when the electrons hit or traverse a solid sample, they are deflected in a systematic way by the electrons in the solid’s inner lattice. From the pattern of this diffraction, recorded on a detector, the internal lattice structure of the solid can be calculated. To detect dynamic changes in this inner structure, short bunches of sufficiently bright electrons have to be used. “The shorter the bunch, the faster the exposure time,” says Zhang, who is now a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. “Typically, ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) uses bunch lengths, or exposure times, of some 100 femtoseconds, which is 0.1 trillionths of a second.”

Such short electron bunches can be routinely produced with high quality by state-of-the-art particle accelerators. However, these machines are often large and bulky, partly due to the radio frequency radiation used to power them, which operates in the Gigahertz band. The wavelength of the radiation sets the size for the whole device. The DESY team is now using Terahertz radiation instead with roughly a hundred times shorter wavelengths. “This basically means, the accelerator components, here a bunch compressor, can be a hundred times smaller, too,” explains Kärtner, who is also a professor and a member of the cluster of excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” at the University of Hamburg.

Researchers have developed prototype technology that can double the power harvested from ocean waves, in an advance that could finally make wave energy a viable renewable alternative.

The untapped potential of ocean wave energy is vast—it has been estimated that the power of coastal waves around the world each year is equivalent to annual global electricity production.

But the challenges of developing technologies that can efficiently extract that natural power and withstand the harsh ocean environment have kept wave energy stuck at experimental stage.

But one idea that hasn’t gotten enough attention from the AI community is how the brain creates itself, argues Peter Robin Hiesinger, Professor of Neurobiology at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin).

In his book The Self-Assembling Brain, Hiesinger suggests that instead of looking at the brain from an endpoint perspective, we should study how information encoded in the genome is transformed to become the brain as we grow. This line of study might help discover new ideas and directions of research for the AI community.

Continue reading “What AI researchers can learn from the self-assembling brain” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FduP45p-o6k

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has plans for a giant orbital arm that he claimed resembles a character from Godzilla.

A nearby star-forming region may explain the mystery of tiny grains from beyond the solar system.