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This is why physicists are so excited at the moment.

Find any two people with a diagnosis of depression, and there’s more than a fair chance one of them will also experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.

While the triggers for each condition are undoubtedly complex, it’s clear the genes we inherit can play a strong part in setting us up for a lifetime of bad mental health.

A new study led by researchers from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has now identified 509 genes shared by both psychiatric disorders.

A small, flying reptile glides beneath the canopy of an ancient forest, scouring the trees for tasty bugs. She spots a cicada buzzing in the boughs of a ginkgo tree, then swoops down to snatch it up in her beak. The bug flees; the reptile follows, grasping swiftly along the branches with her sharp claws until – snatch! – she grabs the bug with her opposable thumbs.

It’s not your typical picture of a pterosaur – those iconic, winged reptiles that lived through most of the Mesozoic era (from about 252 million to 66 million years ago).

But according to a new study published April 12 in the journal Current Biology, a newly-described Jurassic pterosaur appears to have lived its life among the trees, hunting, and climbing with the help of its two opposable thumbs – one on each of its three-fingered hands.

A decade ago, the artificial-intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton transformed the field with a major breakthrough. Now he’s chasing the next big advance—with an “imaginary system” named GLOM, outlined in a recent paper titled, “How to represent part-whole hierarchies in a neural network.”

When most Americans think of the infrastructure projects the Biden administration is proposing in the American Jobs Plan, they think of concrete, steel, and labor. But what if the biggest predictor of the success of the infrastructure plan is not in the materials but in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)?

Electrek spoke with Monte Zweben, CEO of Splice Machine, a database company that helps utilities and industrial companies implement data, about how AI/ML technologies could determine whether the American Jobs Plan succeeds as the US transitions to clean energy.

A new survey illustrates broad acceptance for robots in retail, including these crucial tasks.

100 million more iot devices are exposed—and they won’t be the last.

The Name: Wreck flaws in TCP/IP are the latest in a series of vulnerabilities with global implications.

Despite artificial intelligence and robotics adapting to many other areas of life and the work force, construction has long remained dominated by humans in neon caps and vests. Now, the robotics company Baubot has developed a Printstones robot, which they hope to supplement human construction workers onsite.

Baubot manufacturers built this robot with the capacity to transport heavy loads, lay bricks and even sand sheetrock. So far, the Austria-based company has come out with two robots – a smaller prototype with a 40-inch arm and a larger robot with an 82-inch arm.

Continue reading “Baubot comes out with two new robots to aid in construction projects” »

Large-scale supercomputer simulations at the atomic level show that the dominant G form variant of the COVID-19-causing virus is more infectious partly because of its greater ability to readily bind to its target host receptor in the body, compared to other variants. These research results from a Los Alamos National Laboratory-led team illuminate the mechanism of both infection by the G form and antibody resistance against it, which could help in future vaccine development.

“We found that the interactions among the basic building blocks of the Spike protein become more symmetrical in the G form, and that gives it more opportunities to bind to the receptors in the host—in us,” said Gnana Gnanakaran, corresponding author of the paper published today in Science Advances. “But at the same time, that means antibodies can more easily neutralize it. In essence, the variant puts its head up to bind to the receptor, which gives antibodies the chance to attack it.”

Researchers knew that the variant, also known as D614G, was more infectious and could be neutralized by antibodies, but they didn’t know how. Simulating more than a million individual atoms and requiring about 24 million CPU hours of supercomputer time, the new work provides molecular-level detail about the behavior of this variant’s Spike.