Lifeboat Foundation

Great new episode with Harvard University geologist Andrew Knoll who chats about the grand sweep of Earth’s history.

Harvard University geologist Andrew H. Knoll takes on the grand sweep of Earth’s formation and evolution in his new book A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters. He succinctly describes Earth from its cosmological beginnings in a molecular cloud on through to the present day. It’s a fine line between the vacuum of space and the planet on which we walk.

Continue reading “Episode 46 – Harvard Geologist Andy Knoll Sums Up The Grand Sweep Of Earth’s History” »

The human brain, just like whatever you’re reading this on, uses electricity to function. Neurons are constantly sending and receiving electrical signals. Everyone’s brain works a bit differently, and scientists are now getting closer to establishing how electrical activity is functioning in individual patients’ brains and how to stimulate it to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders. Some scientists are even using advanced AI predictive technology to enhance their brain stimulation therapy methods.

Sleepy head: Fruit flies with a gene mutation in the gene ISWI have poorly formed sleep circuits in their brains.

A gene that is poorly expressed in people with certain neurodevelopmental conditions is also essential for sleep, according to a new study in fruit flies.

Many people with autism or other neurodevelopmental conditions have trouble falling asleep and slumbering soundly. This difficulty is often viewed as a side effect of a given condition’s core traits, such as heightened sensory sensitivities and repetitive behaviors in autism.

It is an old-standing theory in evolutionary ecology: animal species on islands have the tendency to become either giants or dwarfs in comparison to mainland relatives. Since its formulation in the 1960s, however, the ‘island rule’ has been severely debated by scientists. In a new publication in Nature Ecology and Evolution on April 15, 2021, researchers solved this debate by analyzing thousands of vertebrate species. They show that the island rule effects are widespread in mammals, birds, and reptiles, but less evident in amphibians.

Dwarf hippos and elephants in the Mediterranean islands are examples of large species that exhibited dwarfism. On the other hand, small mainland species may have evolved into giants after colonizing islands, giving rise to such oddities as the St Kilda field mouse (twice the size of its mainland ancestor), the infamous dodo of Mauritius (a giant pigeon), and the Komodo dragon.

In 1973, Leigh van Valen was the first that formulated the theory, based on the study by mammologist J. Bristol Foster in 1964, that animal species follow an evolutionary pattern when it comes to their body sizes. Species on islands have the tendency to become either giants or dwarfs in comparison to mainland relatives. “Species are limited to the environment on an island. The level of threat from predatory animals is much lower or non-existent,” says Ana Benítez-Lopez, who carried out the research at Radboud University, now researcher at Doñana Biological Station (EBD-CSIC, Spain). “But also limited resources are available.” However, until now, many studies showed conflicting results which led to severe debate about this theory: is it really a pattern, or just an evolutionary coincidence?

The new technique, which can easily be added to current membrane-based electrodialysis desalination processes, removes nearly 100% of these toxic metals, producing a pure brine along with pure water and isolating the valuable metals for later use or disposal.

University of California, Berkeley, chemists have discovered a way to simplify the removal of toxic metals. like mercury and boron. during desalination to produce clean water, while at the same time potentially capturing valuable metals, such as gold.

A $75000 robot dog seen leaving a Manhattan housing project has outraged city residents who heard less than a month ago that the pricey Boston Dynamics bots would be banned from being used as weapons.

The dog was seen exiting the housing project on Monday with a group of human police officers, who acted almost subservient to the shiny blue metal creature while escorting it out of the Kips Bay building. While the New York Police Department insisted the faux-canine had not played an “active role” in the operation, which allegedly involved removing an armed man from an apartment belonging to a woman and her baby, its appearance seemed to cast a spell over the assembled residents.

One resident, tenant organization head Melanie Aucello, rushed back home after receiving a handful of calls about “police in the building” and was wildly disturbed by what she saw there – not just the dog, but its effects on people.

AWS researchers have published a new approach to error correction that could pave the way for a fault-tolerant quantum system.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is partnering with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a new quantum computing initiative as part of the company’s efforts, launched in 2019, to explore this area of research. These include a cloud-based quantum computing service Amazon Braket to accelerate research and discovery, the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab to help businesses explore quantum applications, and the AWS Center for Quantum Computing research and development organization.

AWS’ latest collaboration with Hebrew University will fund a team of researchers from the academic institution’s Quantum Information Science Center (QISC), founded in 2013, and the Racah Institute of Physics to advance the understanding of quantum gates – fundamental building blocks of quantum computers, the parties said in a statement on Monday. The collaboration is the first between AWS and any Israeli academic institution in the field.

The university’s Professor Alex Retzker, a researcher of quantum technologies, will lead the research group as part of his role as a Principal Research Scientist at AWS.

Yesterday Nvidia officially dipped a toe into quantum computing with the launch of cuQuantum SDK, a development platform for simulating quantum circuits on GPU-accelerated systems. As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emphasized in his keynote, Nvidia doesn’t plan to build quantum computers, but thinks GPU-accelerated platforms are the best systems for quantum circuit and algorithm development and testing.

As a proof point, Nvidia reported it collaborated with Caltech to develop “a state-of-the-art quantum circuit simulator with cuQuantum running on NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. It generated a sample from a full-circuit simulation of the Google Sycamore circuit in 9.3 minutes on Selene, a task that 18 months ago experts thought would take days using millions of CPU cores.”