Lifeboat Foundation

By Donna Lu

A trippy maths program that visualises the inside of strange 3D spaces could help us figure out the shape of the universe.

Henry Segerman at Oklahoma State University and his colleagues have been working to interactively map the inside of mathematical spaces known as 3-manifolds using a program called SnapPy.

Published today in Science, the research team from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute and CSL Limited say this breakthrough of discovering how gamma-delta T cells become activated addresses a question that has baffled scientists for 25 years.

The study by University of Melbourne’s Marc Rigau, Ph.D. student at the Doherty Institute, was co-led by Dr. Adam Uldrich, a Senior Research Fellow at the Doherty Institute, Professor Dale Godfrey a laboratory head at the Doherty Institute, and Dr. Andreas Behren, a Laboratory Head from the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute.

Dr. Uldrich explained that gamma-delta T cells are known to respond to the presence of small molecules, known as phosphoantigens, that are produced by bacteria and cancer cells.

The year of treating the untreatable: 2019 breakthroughs that could transform medicine.

The challenge is to build an airplane without moving control surfaces.

Originally a bunch of children’s toys, then comic books, cartoons and movies, robot action figures than morph into vehicles and back again have proved immensely popular over the years. After a successful Kickstarter last year, Robosen Robotics has launched the T9, a robot that transforms into a vehicle through voice commands or via an app.

There are many Transformer-like robot toys already available, but most require the user to manually change the thing from action figure to vehicle, animal, device or whatever, and back again. Like the bots from the cartoons and movies, the T9 is an actual transforming robot designed to stimulate a child’s interest in programming, robotics and artificial intelligence.

The T9 is claimed to be the first robot in the consumer space that can automatically move from vehicle to robot and back again, can walk on two legs when in robot form, race on its wheels when in vehicle form, involves coding and program development, and can be controlled by voice commands or through a mobile app. It can even bust some funky dance moves if you want it to.

Fossils discovered in Nevada contain preserved guts from a mysterious creature that lived 550 million years ago.

During Intel’s keynote at the 2020 Consumer Electroncics Show, the chip giant gave an update on its various AI and machine learning ventures.

China has connected the world’s first portable ground station for quantum communication to the Mozi satellite, and has plans to launch another quantum satellite soon.

A multibillion-dollar high-speed atom smasher — an electron-ion collider that is capable of dissecting the mysterious subatomic material that forms the basis of everything in the universe — will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, federal authorities announced Thursday.

The collider will be the first of its kind in the United States. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said it would create about 4,000 construction jobs, retain 1,000 existing jobs at the lab and generate billions of dollars in economic activity for Long Island.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Energy said construction of the federally funded collider — which would be 2.4 miles in circumference, or 60% larger than the 1.5-mile Belmont Park horse race track, and one story underground — would cost $1.6 billion to $2.6 billion and take about a decade.