Lost or abandoned fishing gear is being fished out of the sea. To keep it out of the dump, one company is turning the garbage into synthetic wood with the hope that it has a new role back in the sea.
MIT engineers have designed a “brain-on-a-chip,” smaller than a piece of confetti, that is made from tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses known as memristors — silicon-based components that mimic the information-transmitting synapses in the human brain.
The researchers borrowed from principles of metallurgy to fabricate each memristor from alloys of silver and copper, along with silicon. When they ran the chip through several visual tasks, the chip was able to “remember” stored images and reproduce them many times over, in versions that were crisper and cleaner compared with existing memristor designs made with unalloyed elements.
Their results, published on June 8, 2020, in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, demonstrate a promising new memristor design for neuromorphic devices — electronics that are based on a new type of circuit that processes information in a way that mimics the brain’s neural architecture. Such brain-inspired circuits could be built into small, portable devices, and would carry out complex computational tasks that only today’s supercomputers can handle.
Quantum radar could find it.
For the past few years, the possibility of a new (and big!) planet hanging around in the far outer solar system has tantalized scientists and the public alike. Is “Planet Nine” out there or not?
:oooooo.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary gene-editing technology that offers the potential to treat diseases such as cancer, but the effects of CRISPR in patients are currently unknown. Stadtmauer et al. report a phase 1 clinical trial to assess the safety and feasibility of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in three patients with advanced cancer (see the Perspective by Hamilton and Doudna). They removed immune cells called T lymphocytes from patients and used CRISPR-Cas9 to disrupt three genes (TRAC, TRBC, and PDCD1) with the goal of improving antitumor immunity. A cancer-targeting transgene, NY-ESO-1, was also introduced to recognize tumors. The engineered cells were administered to patients and were well tolerated, with durable engraftment observed for the study duration. These encouraging observations pave the way for future trials to study CRISPR-engineered cancer immunotherapies.
Researchers found that the cephalopod is the only creature that can edit its RNA outside the nucleus. It’s a tool that may one day help genetic medicine.
A new genomics study of shark DNA, including from great white and great hammerhead sharks, reveals unique modifications in their immunity genes that may underlie the rapid wound healing and possibly higher resistance to cancers in these ocean predators. This research brings us a few steps closer to understanding, from a genetic sense, why sharks exhibit some characteristics that are highly desirable by humans.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnfmIkvsDoQ&feature=youtu.be
Liz Parrish and Integrated Health Systems discuss the thymus, an organ that is essential to healthy immune function.
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Continue reading “Master of Your Immune System: The Thymus and Gene Therapy” »
When opportunity knocks, open the door: No one has taken heed of that adage like Nvidia, which has transformed itself from a company focused on catering to the needs of video gamers to one at the heart of the artificial-intelligence revolution. In 2001, no one predicted that the same processor architecture developed to draw realistic explosions in 3D would be just the thing to power a renaissance in deep learning. But when Nvidia realized that academics were gobbling up its graphics cards, it responded, supporting researchers with the launch of the CUDA parallel computing software framework in 2006.
Since then, Nvidia has been a big player in the world of high-end embedded AI applications, where teams of highly trained (and paid) engineers have used its hardware for things like autonomous vehicles. Now the company claims to be making it easy for even hobbyists to use embedded machine learning, with its US $100 Jetson Nano dev kit, which was originally launched in early 2019 and rereleased this March with several upgrades. So, I set out to see just how easy it was: Could I, for example, quickly and cheaply make a camera that could recognize and track chosen objects?
Embedded machine learning is evolving rapidly. In April 2019, Hands On looked at Google’s Coral Dev AI board which incorporates the company’s Edge tensor processing unit (TPU), and in July 2019, IEEE Spectrum featured Adafruit’s software library, which lets even a handheld game device do simple speech recognition. The Jetson Nano is closer to the Coral Dev board: With its 128 parallel processing cores, like the Coral, it’s powerful enough to handle a real-time video feed, and both have Raspberry Pi–style 40-pin GPIO connectors for driving external hardware.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine signaled today that astronauts would soon be cleared to take suborbital spaceflights aboard the commercial rocket ships being tested by Virgin Galactic and by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.
“NASA is developing the process to fly astronauts on commercial suborbital spacecraft,” Bridenstine said in a tweet. “Whether it’s suborbital, orbital or deep space, NASA will utilize our nation’s innovative commercial capabilities.”
This post by Dr. Robert Zubrin originally appeared at National Space Society.
Mars Is The New World
Among extraterrestrial bodies in our solar system, Mars is singular in that it possesses all the raw materials required to support not only life, but a new branch of human civilization. This uniqueness is illustrated most clearly if we contrast Mars with the Earth’s Moon, the most frequently cited alternative location for extraterrestrial human colonization.
