A team at Kumamoto University has made a discovery that could help promote healthy aging. As the world’s population ages, Japan’s aging population in particular is growing at an unprecedented rate, making it crucial to extend healthy lifespans rather than just lifespans.
Just as we mimicked birds and fish to model cars and planes, we may gain inspiration for deep dive vehicles.
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine.
The bottom of the ocean is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure. It is not a place suited to the physiology of us surface dwellers: At the deepest point, the pressure of 36,200 feet of seawater is greater than the weight of an elephant on every square inch of your body. Yet Earth’s deepest places are home to life uniquely suited to these challenging conditions. Scientists have studied how the bodies of some large animals, such as anglerfish and blobfish, have adapted to withstand the pressure. But far less is known about how cells and molecules stand up to the squeezing, crushing weight of thousands of feet of seawater.
Understand the levels of large language models that power generative AI and the types of platforms that best support them.
Researcher feeds screen recordings into Gemini to extract accurate information with ease.
Anikeeva added, “Yes, it is a record-breaking particle, but it’s not as record-breaking as it could be.”
Although that is still a work in progress, the team has ideas about how to move forward.
Large-scale safety studies are one of the additional steps that would be necessary to move these nanodiscs from basic research using animal models to clinical use in humans, “which is something academic researchers are not necessarily most well-positioned to do,” according to Anikeeva.
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NASA has selected a new crew of four volunteers to participate in a simulated mission to Mars within a habitat at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Jason Lee, Stephanie Navarro, Shareef Al Romaithi, and Piyumi Wijesekara will step into the agency’s Human Exploration Research Analog, or HERA, on Friday, May 10. Once inside, the team will live and work like astronauts for 45 days. The crew will exit the facility on June 24 after they “return” to Earth. Jose Baca and Brandon Kent are this mission’s alternate crew members.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a series of structural changes and leadership appointments aimed at accelerating the company’s AI initiatives.
The restructuring sees the Gemini app team, led by Sissie Hsiao, joining Google DeepMind under the leadership of Demis Hassabis.
“Bringing the teams closer together will improve feedback loops, enable fast deployment of our new models in the Gemini app, make our post-training work proceed more efficiently and build on our great product momentum,” Pichai explained.
A flow battery, also known as a reduction-oxidation (Redox) flow battery, is an electrochemical cell that uses two moving liquid electrolytes to generate electricity.
Ion transfer occurs across the cell membrane, accompanied by current flow through an external circuit, while the liquids circulate in their respective spaces. The liquids required are stored in separate tanks until required.
Flow batteries have existed for some time, but earlier versions had low energy density, making them impractical for cars. However, recent advancements in the technology have improved energy density, making it increasingly viable for long-duration energy storage and potentially for electric vehicles.
Experts are divided on what it’ll take to achieve artificial general intelligence — a still hypothetical form of robot intelligence that mimics human abilities.
According to Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind and a recently minted Nobel laureate, there isn’t any secret formula to get there.
Astronomers have published a gigantic infrared map of the Milky Way containing more than 1.5 billion objects — the most detailed one ever made. Using the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope, the team monitored the central regions of our Galaxy over more than 13 years. At 500 terabytes of data, this is the largest observational project ever carried out with an ESO telescope.
“We made so many discoveries, we have changed the view of our Galaxy forever,” says Dante Minniti, an astrophysicist at Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile who led the overall project.
This record-breaking map comprises 200,000 images taken by ESO’s VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. Located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, the telescope’s main purpose is to map large areas of the sky. The team used VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, which can peer through the dust and gas that permeates our galaxy. It is therefore able to see the radiation from the Milky Way’s most hidden places, opening a unique window onto our galactic surroundings.
