Lifeboat Foundation

A new map of dark matter made using artificial intelligence reveals hidden filaments of the invisible stuff bridging galaxies.

The map focuses on the local universe — the neighborhood surrounding the Milky Way. Despite being close by, the local universe is difficult to map because it’s chock full of complex structures made of visible matter, said Donghui Jeong, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University and the lead author of the new research.

“We have to reverse engineer to know where dark matter is by looking at galaxies,” Jeong told Live Science.

We know dark matter exists because we can observe its effects on all the stuff that’s swirling around in the universe. Scientists estimate that about 27% of the universe is made of dark matter (68% is dark energy, and the last 5% is ordinary matter and energy). The questions on everyone’s mind: Where exactly is all that elusive stuff located? And how is it distributed throughout the universe?

An international project of over 400 scientists called the Dark Energy Survey is working on answering them. It has just released the largest and most detailed map of dark matter in the universe—with some unexpected findings that don’t yet neatly align with ideas in physics that date all the way back to Albert Einstein and his theory of general relativity.

I think we should. If it is corrupt or makes mistakes, it will at least be correctable.

LONDON — A study has found that most Europeans would like to see some of their members of parliament replaced by algorithms.

Researchers at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change asked 2769 people from 11 countries worldwide how they would feel about reducing the number of national parliamentarians in their country and giving those seats to an AI that would have access to their data.

Continue reading “More than half of Europeans want to replace lawmakers with AI, study says” »

Everything is weird on the Sun, where things are not where you’d expect.

This spike in temperature, despite the increased distance from the Sun’s main energy source, has been observed in most stars and represents a fundamental puzzle that astrophysicists have mulled over for decades.

Continue reading “Scientists solve an 80-year-old paradox about the Sun” »

One hundred fifty years ago, Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table, a system for classifying atoms based on the properties of their nuclei. This week, a team of biologists studying the tree of life has unveiled a new classification system for cell nuclei, and discovered a method for transmuting one type of cell nucleus into another.

The study, which appears this week in the journal Science, emerged from several once-separate efforts. One centered on the DNA Zoo, an international consortium spanning dozens of institutions including Baylor College of Medicine, the National Science Foundation-supported Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP) at Rice University, the University of Western Australia and SeaWorld.

Scientists on the DNA Zoo team had been working together to classify how chromosomes — which can be several meters long — fold up to fit inside the nuclei of different species from across the tree of life.

Weird now, but i do think most people will want humanoid robots faking emotions, to some degree, and on the far end people who will want them to try and mimic people exactly.

Columbia Engineering researchers use AI to teach robots to make appropriate reactive human facial expressions, an ability that could build trust between humans and their robotic co-workers and care-givers. (See video below.)

Continue reading “The robot smiles back: Columbia scientists teach robot how to respond to human facial expressions” »

When scientists first announced that they had read all of a person’s DNA 20 years ago, they were still missing some bits. Now, with the benefit of far better methods for reading DNA, it has finally been possible to read the whole thing from end to end.

Two decades after the first drafts of the human genome were published, new sequencing technologies mean it is finally complete – and could show us more than ever.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have used Artificial Intelligence to teach robots how to make appropriate reactive human facial expressions.

Summary: Disruptions in how the body converts cholesterol into bile acids may play a key role in the development of dementia.

Source: PLOS

The blood-brain barrier is impermeable to cholesterol, yet high blood cholesterol is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia. However, the underlying mechanisms mediating this relationship are poorly understood.