Summary: YKL-40 may be a key player in circadian rhythm disruptions associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: WUSTL
Fractured sleep, daytime sleepiness and other signs of disturbance in one’s circadian rhythm are common complaints of people with Alzheimer’s disease, and the problems only get worse as the disease progresses. But the reason for the link between Alzheimer’s and circadian dysfunction is not well understood.
Anyone who has ever worked on a team knows that their strength lies in coordination and a shared vision. However, it is not always easy to provide that coordination and shared vision, and any team that lacks that cohesiveness becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
Science is not immune to the difficulties of running effective teams. There is plenty to be gained from more coordination between differing silos and physical locations. Recently a meeting in Chile prompted a group of scientists to propose a plan to change that. The result is a white paper that points out the potential benefits of coordinating ground, orbital and in situ based observations of objects. But more importantly, it suggests a different path forward where all of the space science community can benefit from the type of coordinated output that can only come from a cohesive team.
The suggested path laid out in the white paper began at the Planets2020 conference in Chile, hosted by the ALMA observatory. The meeting took place back in March, right before the Coronavirus outbreak began to restrict travel. At the conference, there was a significant amount of discussion focused on the capabilities of different Earth and space based observing platforms. The intention was to learn more about missions that coordinated ground and space-based observations, and to flesh out future ideas of how to replicate that coordination with new and existing platforms to make the best of their different capabilities. The lead author of the white paper, Vincent Kofman, a research chemist at Goddard Space Flight Center, took on that the task of coordinating that team and produced a paper that clearly lays out a better way to perform observations.
Summary: When convolutional neural networks are trained under experimental conditions, they are deceived by the brightness and color of a visual image in similar ways to the human visual system.
Source: UPF Barcelona.
A convolutional neural network is a type of artificial neural network in which the neurons are organized into receptive fields in a very similar way to neurons in the visual cortex of a biological brain.
Summary: A new AI model mimics how the prefrontal cortex uses gating to control information flow between different areas of neurons. The system could help in the development of new artificial intelligence technologies that better mimic the human brain.
Source: Salk Institute.
Getting computers to “think” like humans is the holy grail of artificial intelligence, but human brains turn out to be tough acts to follow. The human brain is a master of applying previously learned knowledge to new situations and constantly refining what’s been learned. This ability to be adaptive has been hard to replicate in machines.
Johnson & Johnson said Thursday that late-stage clinical trials for its coronavirus vaccine are now fully enrolled, and expects to release initial data on the shot’s effectiveness by the end of January.
The pharmaceutical company’s single-dose vaccine is in Phase 3 clinical trials that are now fully enrolled, and is already being reviewed by Health Canada.
Sit! Stay! Fetch! Map a Martian cave!
Robotic “Mars Dogs” could use artificial intelligence and sensors to investigate the Martian surface and map hidden lava tunnels.
Electric vehicle start-up Canoo unveiled a new delivery van Thursday ahead of its public debut on the Nasdaq next week.
The futuristic-looking van — known as a multi-purpose delivery vehicle, or MPDV, because of the ways it can be upfitted — is designed for everything from last-mile deliveries to food trucks, according to the California company. It is expected to start at around $33, 000.
“There are many use cases that this vehicle can do,” Canoo Chairman Tony Aquila, a major investor in the company, said during a video unveiling of the MPDV. “We wanted it to look very smart, very modern but at the same time be very affordable.”
The Lightening SuperBike is the fastest production motorcycle in the world, clocking in at 218 MPH. (There are faster bikes, but none of them are street legal.) It recently won the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, beating all competitors, including gasoline-powered bikes. But don’t ask how many cylinders its engine has — this bike is solar powered. Well technically it’s battery-powered, but it charges the batteries with solar energy.
Image: SMA America
The SuperBike sports a liquid-cooled 125 kW electric motor, roughly equivalent to a 167 hp engine. At non-racing speeds, it offers a 100 mile range on the highway and 160 mile range in the city. Wondering why the mileage is higher in the city than on the highway? Two words: regenerative braking. How much will it cost to “fill the tank?” With its 370V 12 kWh battery bank and an electric rate of $0.12 per kWh, you can drive 160 city miles on $1.44 worth of charge, assuming you’re charging it from the grid. If you go solar, it’s free after you recover the investment in the solar panels and inverter.
Quantum computational advantage or supremacy is a long-anticipated milestone toward practical quantum computers. Recent work claimed to have reached this point, but subsequent work managed to speed up the classical simulation and pointed toward a sample size–dependent loophole. Quantum computational advantage, rather than being a one-shot experimental proof, will be the result of a long-term competition between quantum devices and classical simulation. Zhong et al. sent 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer and sampled the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. By obtaining up to 76-photon coincidence, yielding a state space dimension of about 1030, they measured a sampling rate that is about 1014-fold faster than using state-of-the-art classical simulation strategies and supercomputers.
Science, this issue p. 1460
Quantum computers promise to perform certain tasks that are believed to be intractable to classical computers. Boson sampling is such a task and is considered a strong candidate to demonstrate the quantum computational advantage. We performed Gaussian boson sampling by sending 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer with full connectivity and random matrix—the whole optical setup is phase-locked—and sampling the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. The obtained samples were validated against plausible hypotheses exploiting thermal states, distinguishable photons, and uniform distribution. The photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang, generates up to 76 output photon clicks, which yields an output state-space dimension of 1030 and a sampling rate that is faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers by a factor of ~1014.
Similar findings may tell scientists about magnetic fields around exoplanets.
Scientists may have detected radio emissions from a planet orbiting a star beyond our sun for the first time.
The astronomers behind the new research used a radio telescope in the Netherlands to study three different stars known to host exoplanets. The researchers compared what they saw to observations of Jupiter, diluted as if being seen from a star system dozens of light-years away. And one star system stood out: Tau Boötes, which contains at least one exoplanet. If the detection holds up, it could open the door to better understanding the magnetic fields of exoplanets and therefore the exoplanets themselves, the researchers hope.
