Menu

Blog

Page 7401

Jul 14, 2020

A Giant ‘Wall’ of Galaxies Has Been Found Stretching Across The Universe

Posted by in category: space

The Universe isn’t just a random scattering of galaxies sprinkled throughout an expanding void. The closer we look, the more we see that there are structures — some of which are incomprehensibly vast groupings and clusters of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together.

Such a structure has just been discovered arcing across the southern edge of the sky, and it’s a colossus, spanning an immense 1.37 billion light-years from end to end. Its discoverers have named it the South Pole Wall.

Continue reading “A Giant ‘Wall’ of Galaxies Has Been Found Stretching Across The Universe” »

Jul 14, 2020

Humanity on Mars? Technically possible, but no voyage on horizon

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space travel

Robotic landers and rovers have been touching down on Mars since the 1970s, but when will humanity finally set foot on the Red Planet?

Experts believe the technical challenges are nearly resolved, but political considerations make the future of any crewed mission uncertain.

NASA’s human lunar exploration program, Artemis, envisions sending people back to the Moon by 2024 and using the experience gained there to prepare for Mars.

Jul 14, 2020

An argument for gene drive technology to genetically control insects like mosquitoes and locusts

Posted by in category: genetics

Gene drive guarantees that a trait will be passed to the next generation. But should society use this tool to control insect populations?

Jul 14, 2020

Why Tesla Invented A New Neural Network

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Recently, Tesla filed a patent called ‘Systems and methods for adapting a neural network on a hardware platform.’ In the patent, they described the systems and methods to select a neural network model configuration that satisfies all constraints.

According to the patent, the constraints mainly include an embodiment that computes a list of valid configurations and a constraint satisfaction solver to classify valid configurations for the particular platform, where the neural network model will run efficiently.

The Reason Behind the Patent.

Jul 14, 2020

This Robotic Chemist Does Over 600 Experiments a Week and Learns From Its Own Work

Posted by in categories: chemistry, information science, robotics/AI

The 400 kilogram wheeled system moves about the lab guided by LIDAR laser scanners and has an industrial robotic arm made by German firm Kuka that it uses to carry out tasks like weighing out solids, dispensing liquids, removing air from the vessel, and interacting with other pieces of equipment.

In a paper in Nature, the team describes how they put the device to work trying to find catalysts that speed up reactions that use light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. To do this, the robot used a search algorithm to decide how to combine a variety of different chemicals and updated its plans based on the results of previous experiments.

Continue reading “This Robotic Chemist Does Over 600 Experiments a Week and Learns From Its Own Work” »

Jul 14, 2020

Scientists see ‘incredibly fast and faint’ afterglow coming from deep in space

Posted by in categories: futurism, space

“We believe we are uncovering the tip of the iceberg in terms of distant SGRBs,” said Kerry Paterson, the study’s first author. “That motivates us to further study past events and intensely examine future ones.”

Jul 14, 2020

Study shows how our brains remain active during familiar, repetitive tasks

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, neuroscience

New research, based on earlier results in mice, suggests that our brains are never at rest, even when we are not learning anything about the world around us.

Our brains are often likened to computers, with learned skills and memories stored in the of billions of . However, new research shows that memories of specific events and experiences may never settle down. Instead, the activity patterns that store information can continually change, even when we are not learning anything new.

Why does this not cause the to forget what it has learned? The study, from the University of Cambridge, Harvard Medical School and Stanford University, reveals how the brain can reliably access stored information despite drastic changes in the brain signals that represent it.

Jul 14, 2020

New way of studying genomics makes deep learning a breeze

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, robotics/AI

Researchers from the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine have developed a new tool that makes it easier to maximize the power of deep learning for studying genomics. They describe the new approach, Janggu, in the journal Nature Communications.

Imagine that before you could make dinner, you first had to rebuild the kitchen, specifically designed for each recipe. You’d spend way more time on preparation, than actually cooking. For computational biologists, it’s been a similar time-consuming process for analyzing . Before they can even begin their analysis, they spend a lot of valuable time formatting and preparing huge data sets to feed into deep learning models.

To streamline this process, researchers from MDC developed a universal programming tool that converts a wide variety of genomics data into the required format for analysis by deep learning models. “Before, you ended up wasting a lot of time on the technical aspect, rather than focusing on the biological question you were trying to answer,” says Dr. Wolfgang Kopp, a scientist in the Bioinformatics and Omics Data Science research group at MDC’s Berlin Institute of Medical Systems Biology (BIMSB), and first author of the paper. “With Janggu, we are aiming to relieve some of that technical burden and make it accessible to as many people as possible.”

Jul 14, 2020

Scientists Trace the Origin of Our Teeth to Primitive Fish More Than 400 Million Years Back in Time

Posted by in category: futurism

The origin of our teeth goes back more than 400 million years back in time, to the period when strange armored fish first developed jaws and began to catch live prey. We are the descendants of these fish, as are all the other 60,000 living species of jawed vertebrates — sharks, bony fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. An international team of scientists led by Uppsala University (Sweden), in collaboration with the ESRF, the European Synchrotron (France), the brightest X-ray source, has digitally ‘dissected’, for the first time, the most primitive jawed fish fossils with teeth found near Prague more than 100 years ago. The results, published recently in Science, show that their teeth have surprisingly modern features.

Teeth in current jawed vertebrates reveal some consistent patterns: for example, new teeth usually develop on the inner side of the old ones and then move outwards to replace them (in humans this pattern has been modified so that new teeth develop below the old ones, deep inside the jawbone). There are, however, several differences between bony fish (and their descendants the land animals) and sharks; for example the fact that sharks have no bones at all, their skeleton is made of cartilage, and neither the dentine scales nor the true teeth in the mouth attach to it; they simply sit in the skin. In bony fish and land animals, the teeth are always attached to jawbones. In addition, whilst sharks shed their worn-out teeth entire, simply by detaching them from the skin, bony fish and land animals shed theirs by dissolving away the tooth bases.

Jul 14, 2020

7 Things to Know About the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission

Posted by in category: space

NASA’s most advanced Mars rover, Perseverance, will launch from Earth on 30 July on a mission to seek out signs of ancient microbial life on what was once a river delta three-and-a-half billion years ago.


NASA’s next rover to the Red Planet is slated to launch no earlier than July 30. These highlights will get you up to speed on the ambitious mission.

Continue reading “7 Things to Know About the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission” »