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Jul 24, 2020

Moderna loses challenge to Arbutus patent on vaccine technology

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

(Reuters) — Shares of Moderna Inc fell nearly 10% after it lost a bid to invalidate a U.S. patent owned by Arbutus Biopharma that poses a potential obstacle to Moderna’s efforts to develop next-generation vaccines, including a coronavirus vaccine.

Jul 24, 2020

Deep learning, neural networks and the future of AI

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Facebook, helped develop the deep learning algorithms that power many artificial intelligence systems today. In conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, LeCun discusses his current research into self-supervised machine learning, how he’s trying to build machines that learn with common sense (like humans) and his hopes for the next conceptual breakthrough in AI.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

Jul 24, 2020

Researchers Examine Age Differences in How the Brain Perceives, Remembers

Posted by in categories: life extension, neuroscience

Even healthy brains become less efficient as they age, but they do so at different rates for different tasks in different people. Understanding what contributes to this decline, and the ways in which that decline varies, can provide significant insight into the function of the brain.

In a new study, researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas documented how some parts of the brain perform differently over time in response to various kinds of visual input.

A team from the Center for Vital Longevity (CVL) analyzed a phenomenon called neural dedifferentiation, in which regions of the brain that normally are specialized to perform distinct tasks become less selective in their responses to stimulus types.

Jul 23, 2020

Physicists Have Figured Out How to Create Matter And Antimatter Using Light

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

A team of researchers from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS) has just announced that they managed to calculate how to create matter and antimatter using lasers.

This means that, by focusing high-powered laser pulses, we might soon be able to create matter and antimatter using light.

To break this down a bit, light is made of high-energy photons. When high-energy photons go through strong electric fields, they lose enough radiation that they become gamma rays and create electron-positron pairs, thus creating a new state of matter.

Jul 23, 2020

Antimatter Atoms Successfully Stored for the First Time

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics

Atoms of antimatter have been trapped and stored for the first time by the ALPHA collaboration, an international team of scientists working at CERN in Switzerland. Berkeley Lab researchers made key contributions to the effort, including the design of the trap’s crucial component—an octupole magnet—and computer simulations needed to identify real antihydrogen annihilation events against a noisy background.

Jul 23, 2020

Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN

Posted by in categories: materials, particle physics

Physics Girl is on Patreon! ►► https://www.patreon.com/physicsgirl

There’s a factory in Europe that makes antimatter! It’s the rarest, most expensive, and potentially the most dangerous material on earth. Scientists don’t know why this material is so rare. Anti-atoms took 72 years after we discovered antimatter to make. Why?

Continue reading “Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN” »

Jul 23, 2020

Charging hundreds of EVs parked at a condo is a solvable problem, here’s how

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Skeptics like to point out that most EV drivers live in single-family homes that make charging easy. And they point to the current lack of charging stations at condos as an impenetrable obstacle to EV adoption. But this viewpoint reflects a lack of understanding of how daily EV charging works. I recently chatted with Jason Appelbaum, chief executive of EverCharge — the biggest EV charging network you never heard of.


Several hundred electric cars, all parked in the same condo garage, can easily get their daily dose of electricity. It requires a smart load-balancing system.

Jul 23, 2020

Creating Water From Thin Air

Posted by in categories: business, sustainability

About 2.1 billion people around the world do not have immediate access to clean drinking water.

The Water Abundance XPrize competition rewards innovators who come up with new ways to harvest clean water from the atmosphere.

This year, the winning design can produce at least 2,000 litres of water per day, which would satisfy the needs of 100 people.… See More.

Continue reading “Creating Water From Thin Air” »

Jul 23, 2020

Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Talks to Raise Funds at $44 Billion Valuation

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

Billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is in talks to raise new capital at a valuation of about $44 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Jul 23, 2020

Two distinct circuits drive inhibition in the sensory thalamus of the brain, study finds

Posted by in categories: genetics, neuroscience

The thalamus is a “Grand Central Station” for sensory information coming to our brains. Almost every sight, sound, taste and touch we perceive travels to our brain’s cortex via the thalamus. It is theorized that the thalamus plays a major role in consciousness itself. Not only does sensory information pass through the thalamus, it is also processed and transformed by the thalamus so our cortex can better understand and interpret these signals from the world around us.

One powerful type of transformation comes from interactions between excitatory neurons that carry data to the neocortex and inhibitory neurons of the thalamic reticular nucleus, or TRN, that regulate flow of that data. Although the TRN has long been recognized as important, much less has been known about what kinds of cells are in the TRN, how they are organized and how they function.

Now a paper published in the journal Nature addresses those questions. Researchers led by corresponding author Scott Cruikshank, Ph.D., and co-authors Rosa I. Martinez-Garcia, Ph.D., Bettina Voelcker, Ph.D., and Barry Connors, Ph.D., show that the somatosensory part of the TRN is divided into two functionally distinct sub-circuits. Each has its own types of genetically defined neurons that are topographically segregated, are physiologically distinct and connect reciprocally with independent thalamocortical nuclei via dynamically divergent synapses.