Lifeboat Foundation

Falling drops usually make a splash, but these drops do the twist. Researchers have created surfaces that can make droplets spin and whirl at more than 7300 revolutions per minute when they rebound.

To make the water droplets spin, researchers first had to make sure they didn’t wet the surface they fell on—otherwise, they’d just splash. The researchers did this by coating alumina plates with a fluorinated nonstick coating, similar to those found in nonstick cooking pans. Next, they masked some regions of the surface and shone ultraviolet (UV) light on the entire plate. The regions exposed to the UV became highly “wettable,” meaning water touching those regions spread out immediately rather than bouncing back up. The team created several designs of the wettable regions, including one with spiral arms radiating out from a center, much like a pinwheel.

Continue reading “These falling drops don’t splash—they spin” »

A new, more transmissible variant could devastate countries without vaccines.

Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research and guide research funding allocations.

An artificial intelligence system trained on almost 40 years of the scientific literature correctly identified 19 out of 20 research papers that have had the greatest scientific impact on biotechnology – and has selected 50 recent papers it predicts will be among the ‘top 5%’ of biotechnology papers in the future.¹

Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research overlooked by other methods, and even to guide decisions on funding allocations so that it will be most likely to target promising research.

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The psychological reasons why novelty—from visiting new places to socializing—makes us happier and healthier people.

Scientists have taken a step towards the creation of powerful devices that harness magnetic charge by creating the first ever three-dimensional replica of a material known as a spin-ice.

Spin ice materials are extremely unusual as they possess so-called defects which behave as the single pole of a magnet.

These single pole magnets, also known as magnetic monopoles, do not exist in nature; when every magnetic material is cut into two it will always create a new magnet with a north and south pole.

Between the rolled eyes, shrugged shoulders, jazzed hands and warbling vocal inflection, it’s not hard to tell when someone’s being sarcastic as they’re giving you the business face to face. Online, however, you’re going to need that SpongeBob meme and a liberal application of the shift key to get your contradictory point across. Lucky for us netizens, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida to develop a deep learning AI capable of understanding written sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy.

“With the high velocity and volume of social media data, companies rely on tools to analyze data and to provide customer service. These tools perform tasks such as content management, sentiment analysis, and extraction of relevant messages for the company’s customer service representatives to respond to,” UCF Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Ivan Garibay, told Engadget via email. “However, these tools lack the sophistication to decipher more nuanced forms of language such as sarcasm or humor, in which the meaning of a message is not always obvious and explicit. This imposes an extra burden on the social media team, which is already inundated with customer messages to identify these messages and respond appropriately.”

As they explain in a study published in the journal, Entropy, Garibay and UCF PhD student Ramya Akula have built “an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text.”

As part of preparing for an experiment aboard the International Space Station, researchers explored new ways to culture living heart cells for microgravity research. They found that cryopreservation, a process of storing cells at-80°C, makes it easier to transport these cells to the orbiting lab, providing more flexibility in launch and operations schedules. The process could benefit other biological research in space and on Earth.

The investigation, MVP Cell-03, cultured heart precursor cells on the space station to study how microgravity affects the number of cells produced and how many of them survive. These precursor cells have potential for use in disease modeling, drug development, and regenerative medicine, such as using cultured heart cells to replenish those damaged or lost due to cardiac disease.

Previous studies suggest that culturing such cells in simulated microgravity increases the efficiency of their production. But using live cell cultures in space presents some unique challenges. The MVP Cell-03 experiment, for example, must be conducted within a specific timeframe, when the cells are at just the right stage. Flight changes and crew availability could lead to delays that affect the research.

Amid the rapid digitalisation of China’s economy, the second-biggest in the world, Midea’s factory represents a snapshot of the future – one in which manufacturing processes and employees need to adapt to increased automation and machine-driven learning.

Machines are increasingly taking over China’s assembly lines as manufacturers upgrade and prepare for fewer, higher-skilled workers.

Since the onset of the CRISPR genetic editing revolution, scientists have been working to leverage the technology in the development of gene drives that target pathogen-spreading mosquitoes such as Anopheles and Aedes species, which spread malaria, dengue and other life-threatening diseases.

Much less genetic engineering has been devoted to Culex genus mosquitoes, which spread devastating afflictions stemming from West Nile virus—the leading cause of mosquito-borne disease in the continental United States—as well as other viruses such as the Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and the pathogen causing avian malaria, a threat to Hawaiian birds.

Continue reading “Researchers create new CRISPR tools to help contain mosquito disease transmission” »