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Neodymium is critical to making the wheels of a Tesla spin or creating sound in Apple’s Airpods, and China dominates the mining and processing of this rare-earth mineral. So the U.S. and its allies are building their own supply chain. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge/WSJ

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Continue reading “Tech Companies Depend on China for Rare Earths. Can That Change? | WSJ” | >

The current revolution in space flight and other developments for Mars Colonization. See what visionary and lead space activist Dr. Robert ‘Bob’ Zubrin has to say about these and many other driving topics!

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe just took its closest pass to the Sun yet, veering so close that it “touched” the star’s blisteringly hot outer atmosphere — and gave NASA an unprecedented firsthand look at it.

The car-sized spacecraft has zoomed past the Sun a few times now, veering closer and closer each time, according to CNET. Each time, it uses nearby Venus’ gravitational pull as a sort of slingshot that helps it travel closer to the Sun and propels it at higher and higher speeds each time.

The slingshot is working so well that the space probe broke two records during its most recent solar approach last week.

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Mastering meat production in this way will lead to advances in medical science and treatment.

“Cultured meat also ultimately offers the opportunity to create meat products that are more well-defined, tunable, and potentially healthier than meat products today, which are constrained by the biological limitations of the domestic animals from which they are derived.”

Owing to advances in industrial-scale cell culture process, the production of cultured meat has been largely standardized. Typically stem cells are first seeded into extracellular matrix scaffolds usually made of edible biomaterials like collagen and chitin. To support cellular metabolic activities, culture media containing nutrients like glucose and sera are next added to the bioreactor where continual mechanical motion facilitates good diffusion of nutrients and oxygen into and removal of metabolic waste products from the cells. After about 2–8 weeks, the cells grow into tissue layers and can be harvested and packaged.

Several key challenges remain in producing cultured meat including access to (proprietary) cell lines, high raw material cost, animal-source nutrients, and limited manufacturing scale. Despite this, immense progress has been made over the last decade. Here, we discuss the challenges and solutions to deliver cultured meat from a lab bench to a dining table.

Continue reading “Scientific Challenges and Solutions for Cultured Meat Manufacturing” | >

In work that could someday turn cell phones into sensors capable of detecting viruses and other minuscule objects, MIT researchers have built a powerful nanoscale flashlight on a chip.

Their approach to designing the tiny light beam on a chip could also be used to create a variety of other nano flashlights with different beam characteristics for different applications. Think of a wide spotlight versus a beam of light focused on a single point.

For many decades, scientists have used light to identify a material by observing how that light interacts with the material. They do so by essentially shining a beam of light on the material, then analyzing that light after it passes through the material. Because all materials interact with light differently, an analysis of the light that passes through the material provides a kind of “fingerprint” for that material. Imagine doing this for several colors — i.e., several wavelengths of light — and capturing the interaction of light with the material for each color. That would lead to a fingerprint that is even more detailed.

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These findings may have implications for brain disease, disorders.

Scientists at the Krembil Brain Institute, part of University Health Network (UHN), in collaboration with colleagues at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), have used precious and rare access to live human cortical tissue to identify functionally important features that make human neurons unique.

This experimental work is among the first of its kind on live human neurons and one of the largest studies of the diversity of human cortical pyramidal cells to date.

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The human brain has always been under study for inspiration of computing systems. Although there’s a very long way to go until we can achieve a computing system that matches the efficiency of the human brain for cognitive tasks, several brain-inspired computing paradigms are being researched. Convolutional neural networks are a widely used machine learning approach for AI-related applications due to their significant performance relative to rules-based or symbolic approaches. Nonetheless, for many tasks machine learning requires vast amounts of data and training to converge to an acceptable level of performance.

A Ph.D. student from Khalifa University, Eman Hasan, is investigating another AI computation methodology called ‘hyperdimensional computing, which can possibly take AI systems a step closer toward human-like cognition. The work is supervised by Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate Professor and Director of the System on Chip Center (SOCC), and Dr. Yasmin Halawani, Postdoctoral Fellow.

Hasan’s work, which was published recently in the journal IEEE Access, analyzes different models of hyperdimensional computing and highlights the advantages of this computing paradigm. Hyperdimensional computing, or HDC, is a relatively new paradigm for computing using large vectors (like 10000 bits each) and is inspired by patterns of neural activity in the human brain. The means by which can allow AI-based computing systems to retain memory can reduce their computing and power demands.

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Past physics theories introduced several fundamental constants, including Newton’s constant G, which quantifies the strength of the gravitational interaction between two massive objects. Combined, these fundamental constants allow physicists to describe the universe in ways that are straightforward and easier to understand.

In the past, some researchers wondered whether the value of changed over cosmic time. Moreover, some alternative theories of gravity (i.e., adaptations or substitutes of Einstein’s theory of general relativity), predict that the constant G varies in time.

Researchers at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in India recently proposed a method that can be used to place constraints on the variation of G over cosmic time. This method, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, is based on observations of merging binary neutron stars.

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