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Japanese researches control Gundam robot using their mind.


Japanese scientists have created a device that controls a mini toy Gundam robot using the human mind, turning one of the anime’s most exciting technological concepts into reality.

The researchers customized a Zaku Gundam robot toy available through Bandai’s Zeonic Technics, but buyers have to manually program their robot using a smartphone app.

Superconductivity is a phenomenon where an electric circuit loses its resistance and becomes extremely efficient under certain conditions. There are different ways in which this can happen which were thought to be incompatible. For the first time, researchers discover a bridge between two of these methods to achieve superconductivity. This new knowledge could lead to a more general understanding of the phenomena, and one day to applications.

If you’re like most people, there are three states of matter in your everyday life: solid, liquid, and gas. You might be familiar with a fourth state of matter called plasma, which is like a gas that got so hot all its constituent atoms came apart, leaving behind a super hot mess of subatomic particles. But did you know about a so-called fifth state of matter at the complete opposite end of the thermometer? It’s known as a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

“A BEC is a unique state of matter as it is not made from particles, but rather waves,” said Associate Professor Kozo Okazaki from the Institute for Solid State Physics at the University of Tokyo. “As they cool down to near absolute zero, the atoms of certain materials become smeared out over space. This smearing increases until the atoms — now more like waves than particles — overlap, becoming indistinguishable from one another. The resulting matter behaves like it’s one single entity with new properties the preceding solid, liquid or gas states lacked, such as superconduction. Until recently superconducting BECs were purely theoretical, but we have now demonstrated this in the lab with a novel material based on iron and selenium (a nonmetallic element).”

Ryu kidding?


Earlier this week it emerged that third-party giant Capcom’s internal systems had been hacked, though the company claimed that no customer data was affected. It has now emerged that the publisher was targeted by the Ragnar Locker ransomware, software designed to exfiltrate information from internal networks before encrypting the lot: at which point the victim is locked-out, contacted, and extorted.

Bleeping Computer broke the story, and managed to access the Ragnar Locker sample (a ‘proof’ provided to the victim by the hackers), which contains the ransom note allegedly delivered to Capcom. It reads as follows.

Summary: Researchers have discovered a two-pronged approach to restore myelin on regenerated axons in a mouse model of optic nerve damage. The findings have positive implications for the treatment of multiple sclerosis.

Source: Children’s Hospital of Boston

Loss of myelin—the fatty substance that surrounds the axons of nerve cells—is one of the reasons nerve cells fail to recover after injury and in some diseases. Myelin acts like insulation, covering the long axon threads that enable high-speed communication between neurons. Without myelin, the neurons may not be able to coordinate well, leading to less than optimal function.

Neuroscientists at University College London (UCL) have used laser beams to “switch on” neurons in mice, providing new insight into the hidden workings of memory and showing how memories underpin the brain’s inner GPS system.

The study, published in the journal Cell, explains how researchers harnessed an ‘all-optical’ approach using twin lasers to simultaneously read and write the activity of ‘place cells’ (a type of neuron) in mice, as they navigated a virtual reality environment.

Remarkably, by stimulating the place cells, scientists were able to reactivate (or retrieve) the memory of a location where the mice obtained a reward, which in turn “mentally teleported” the mice, causing them to act as if they were in the rewarded place.

Last week, SpaceX has launched the Beta for its Starlink internet program. This space-based internet is turning out to be faster than expected, thus having the potential to give many people around the world opportunities to do things that their socio-economic situations would have never allowed them to have.

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The gravitational force in the Universe under which it has evolved from a state almost uniform at the Big Bang until now, when matter is concentrated in galaxies, stars and planets, is provided by what is termed ‘dark matter.’ But in spite of the essential role that this extra material plays, we know almost nothing about its nature, behavior and composition, which is one of the basic problems of modern physics. In a recent article in Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters, scientists at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC)/University of La Laguna (ULL) and of the National University of the North-West of the Province of Buenos Aires (Junín, Argentina) have shown that the dark matter in galaxies follows a ‘maximum entropy’ distribution, which sheds light on its nature.

Dark matter makes up 85% of the matter of the Universe, but its existence shows up only on astronomical scales. That is to say, due to its weak interaction, the net effect can only be noticed when it is present in huge quantities. As it cools down only with difficulty, the structures it forms are generally much bigger than planets and stars. As the presence of dark matter shows up only on large scales the discovery of its nature probably has to be made by astrophysical studies.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but some of Earth’s finest gemstones were, according to new research from Rice University.

Aquamarine, emerald, garnet, zircon and topaz are but a few of the crystalline minerals found mostly in pegmatites, veinlike formations that commonly contain both large crystals and hard-to-find elements like tantalum and niobium. Another common find is lithium, a vital component of electric car batteries.

“This is one step towards understanding how Earth concentrates lithium in certain places and minerals,” said Rice graduate student Patrick Phelps, co-author of a study published online in Nature Communications. “If we can understand the basics of pegmatite growth rates, it’s one step in the direction of understanding the whole picture of how and where they form.”