Lifeboat Foundation

It’s still unclear whether the virus can be sexually transmitted through contact with semen.

Few cases and no deaths. I would listen to those who have success, not those who have failure. Scientists from failing countries have warned not to take just about everything to fight this. The WHO’s abysimal performance shows they are the last people anyone should listen to. Show the efficacy of WHO advice, or even ventilators for that matter vs Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP). If people want to use something to fight this let them, you have the choice of not using it.

Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina tries Covid-Organics at a launch ceremony in Antananarivo on 20 April. Several other African leaders have expressed an interest in the unproven treatment.

DARPA’s NOMARS project could be a giant leap forward for the US Navy’s unmanned aspirations.

Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A) is an international journal which publishes papers on all aspects of astronomy and astrophysics.

Leidos subsidiary Dynetics has won a $12.3m valued phase 1 of the Air Combat Evolution (ACE) programme, Technical Area 3 (TA3).

The ACE TA3 (Alpha Mosaic) contract was awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office (STO).

As an initial challenge scenario, the programme uses aerial dogfighting for implementing artificial intelligence (AI) into high-intensity air conflicts, which increases the soldier’s trust in combat autonomy.

Diagnosing COVID-19 more quickly, easily, and broadly

With COVID-19 rapidly spreading around the planet, the efficient detection of the CoV2 virus is pivotal to isolate infected individuals as early as possible, support them in whatever way possible, and thus prevent the further uncontrolled spread of the disease. Currently, the most-performed tests are detecting snippets of the virus’ genetic material, its RNA, by amplifying them with a technique known as “polymerase chain reaction” (PCR) from nasopharyngeal swabs taken from individuals’ noses and throats.

The tests, however, have severe limitations that stand in the way of effectively deciding whether people in the wider communities are infected or not. Although PCR-based tests can detect the virus’s RNA early on in the disease, test kits are only available for a fraction of people that need to be tested, and they require trained health care workers, specialized laboratory equipment, and significant time to be performed. In addition, health care workers that are carrying out testing are especially prone to being infected by CoV2. To shorten patient-specific and community-wide response times, Wyss Institute researchers are taking different parallel approaches:

Living organisms are capable of sensing and responding to their environment through reflex‐driven pathways. The grand challenge for mimicking such natural intelligence in miniature robots lies in achieving highly integrated body functionality, actuation, and sensing mechanisms. Here, somatosensory light‐driven robots (SLiRs) based on a smart thin‐film composite tightly integrating actuation and multisensing are presented. The SLiR subsumes pyro/piezoelectric responses and piezoresistive strain sensation under a photoactuator transducer, enabling simultaneous yet non‐interfering perception of its body temperature and actuation deformation states. The compact thin film, when combined with kirigami, facilitates rapid customization of low‐profile structures for morphable, mobile, and multiple robotic functionality. For example, an SLiR walker can move forward on different surfaces, while providing feedback on its detailed locomotive gaits and subtle terrain textures, and an SLiR anthropomorphic hand shows bodily senses arising from concerted mechanoreception, thermoreception, proprioception, and photoreception. Untethered operation with an SLiR centipede is also demonstrated, which can execute distinct, localized body functions from directional motility, multisensing, to wireless human and environment interactions. This SLiR, which is capable of integrated perception and motility, offers new opportunities for developing diverse intelligent behaviors in soft robots.

Our brain continuously receives signals from the body and the environment. Although we are mostly unaware of internal bodily processes, such as our heartbeats, they can affect our perception. Here, we show two distinct ways in which the heartbeat modulates conscious perception. First, increased heartbeat-evoked neural activity before stimulation is followed by decreased somatosensory detection. This effect can be explained by subjects adopting a more conservative decision criterion, which is accompanied by changes in early and late somatosensory-evoked responses. Second, stimulus timing during the cardiac cycle affects sensitivity but not criterion for somatosensory stimuli, which is reflected only in late somatosensory-evoked responses. We propose that these heartbeat-related modulations are connected to fluctuations of interoceptive attention and (unconscious) predictive coding mechanisms.

Even though humans are mostly not aware of their heartbeats, several heartbeat-related effects have been reported to influence conscious perception. It is not clear whether these effects are distinct or related phenomena, or whether they are early sensory effects or late decisional processes. Combining electroencephalography and electrocardiography, along with signal detection theory analyses, we identify two distinct heartbeat-related influences on conscious perception differentially related to early vs. late somatosensory processing. First, an effect on early sensory processing was found for the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP), a marker of cardiac interoception. The amplitude of the prestimulus HEP negatively correlated with localization and detection of somatosensory stimuli, reflecting a more conservative detection bias (criterion).

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