Lifeboat Foundation

A recent international scientific study published in the journal PLOS ONE has shown that the way the brain stores temporary information is different depending on the use one might give to that information in the future.

The research analysed the brain activity of 14 participants through functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were performing simple visual memory tasks on a computer screen. Differences in their brain activity patterns were found between participants who had to answer by communicating verbally or by pressing a button.

The memory that is under study is designated “working memory” and is used at all times. It is the type of memory that allows us to memorise a phone number or a license plate and use that information after (or not). This information is used and processed and, if it proves to be important, stored in the long-term memory.

ESA Astronaut Pesquet revealed Crew-2 has been actively training for “Mission Alpha” aboard Crew Dragon. He shared photographs via Twitter of him training on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon simulator which involves learning how to control the spacecraft’s functions via a trio of touchscreen displays. – “Here’s the posse together, training on @SpaceX crew dragon. @Aki_Hoshide looking like a boss, and all of us wishing we had as cool socks as our awesome pilot @Astro_Megan. #MissionAlpha,” he wrote. During training, all astronauts are wearing face masks to protect each other from the coronavirus respiratory illness, pictured below.

Here’s the posse together, training on @SpaceX crew dragon. @Aki_Hoshide looking like a boss, and all of us wishing we had as cool socks as our awesome pilot @Astro_Megan. #MissionAlpha pic.twitter.com/UCDJvTcRgp— Thomas Pesquet (@Thom_astro) September 23, 2020

To familiarize with the spacecraft, the astronauts train with an interactive simulator and touchscreen interface that is a replica of Dragon’s cockpit. Earlier this year, SpaceX released an online game that allows players to try to dock the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the Space Station, using similar controls the astronauts will use during their voyage in space. You can play the online game on SpaceX’s website: Crew Dragon Simulator.

According to Blue Origin, the launch is now set for Friday, Sept. 25 at 10 a.m. central time. You can watch the launch live here.

Boeing to Face Independent Ethics Probe Over Lunar Lander Bid

According to a press release, the New Shepard will fly 12 commercial payloads to space and back, including a demonstration of a lunar landing sensor that will test technologies for future missions to the Moon in support of NASA’s Artemis program.

Researchers took a silica nanoparticle designated as ‘Generally Recognized As Safe’ by the US Food and Drug Administration and coated it with L-phenylalanine, and found that in lab tests with mice it killed cancer cells effectively and very specifically, by causing them to self-destruct.

Cancer cells are killed in lab experiments and tumor growth reduced in mice, using a new approach that turns a nanoparticle into a ‘Trojan horse’ that causes cancer cells to self-destruct, a research team at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has found.

The researchers created their ‘Trojan horse’ nanoparticle by coating it with a specific amino acid — L-phenylalanine — that cancer cells rely on, along with other similar amino acids, to survive and grow. L-phenylalanine is known as an ‘essential’ amino acid as it cannot be made by the body and must be absorbed from food, typically from meat and dairy products.

Continue reading “Researchers develop ‘Trojan horse’ approach to destroy cancer cells” »

Of all the AI models in the world, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has most captured the public’s imagination. It can spew poems, short stories, and songs with little prompting, and has been demonstrated to fool people into thinking its outputs were written by a human. But its eloquence is more of a parlor trick, not to be confused with realintelligence.

Nonetheless, researchers believe that the techniques used to create GPT-3 could contain the secret to more advanced AI. GPT-3 trained on an enormous amount of text data. What if the same methods were trained on both text and images?

Now new research from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2, has taken this idea to the next level. The researchers have developed a new text-and-image model, otherwise known as a visual-language model, that can generate images given a caption. The images look unsettling and freakish—nothing like the hyperrealistic deepfakes generated by GANs —but they might demonstrate a promising new direction for achieving more generalizable intelligence, and perhaps smarter robots as well.

Very interesting!

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“The plan was to scan patients’ genomes—in particular, a set of 13 genes involved in interferon immunity against influenza. In healthy people, interferon molecules act as the body’s security system. They detect invading viruses and bacteria and sound the alarm, which brings other immune defenders to the scene.

Continue reading “Some severe COVID-19 cases linked to genetic mutations or antibodies that attack the body” »

They’re not just for supervillains anymore.

Scientists in Japan and Germany have made a breakthrough in the field of solar lasers—and they’ve changed the game completely.

🤯 You like badass science. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.

A Gundam doesn’t take baby steps.

The Navy has fielded a 650-round ammo backpack nicknamed ‘Avenger’ to troops at some point in the last two years.

Daimler has unveiled an electric bus equipped with a solid-state battery pack — probably becoming the first planned production EV with a solid-state battery.

The German automaker has been aggressively electrifying its deep lineup of big vehicles from buses to commercial trucks.

Continue reading “Daimler unveils electric bus with 441 kWh solid-state battery pack” »