Happy Bicycle Day!
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After consuming magic mushrooms in Basel, Switzerland, I ran into Albert Hofmann, the chemist who catalyzed the psychedelic era.
Continue reading “Tripping in LSD’s Birthplace: A Story for ‘Bicycle Day’” »
Algae biofuel certainly faces an uphill battle these days, what with the global oil price crash and competition from electric vehicles. Nevertheless, there may be a glimmer of hope for algae biofuel fans, in the form of an ultra-fast 3D printer housed in a California laboratory. In an interesting sustainability twofer, the same machine might also spit out an assist for the world’s ailing coral reefs.
Inspired by how human bone and colorful coral reefs adjust mineral deposits in response to their surrounding environments, Johns Hopkins researchers have created a self-adapting material that can change its stiffness in response to the applied force. This advancement can someday open the doors for materials that can self-reinforce to prepare for increased force or stop further damage. A report of the findings was published today in Advanced Materials.
“Imagine a bone implant or a bridge that can self-reinforce where a high force is applied without inspection and maintenance. It will allow safer implants and bridges with minimal complication, cost and downtime,” says Sung Hoon Kang, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, and Institute for NanoBioTechnology at The Johns Hopkins University and the study’s senior author.
While other researchers have attempted to create similar synthetic materials before, doing so has been challenging because such materials are difficult and expensive to create, or require active maintenance when they are created and are limited in how much stress they can bear. Having materials with adaptable properties, like those of wood and bone, can provide safer structures, save money and resources, and reduce harmful environmental impact.
Fabio Martin’s Tesla Pod Level 5 autonomous platform can accommodate various modules for transporting passengers and goods.
Why is Alcor in Arizona? The main reason is that the risk of earthquakes and other natural disasters is fairly low. People opting for cryonics expect that their bodies might be in stasis for timescales measured in centuries.
As far as financial matters go, many of Alcor’s clients use life insurance policies to cover the cost of preservation and maintenance ($200,000 for a whole body or $80,000 for just the head). People use trust funds if they have net worth they want to recover when revived in the future.
A pattern is emerging among COVID-19 patients arriving at hospitals in New York: Beyond fever, cough and shortness of breath, some are deeply disoriented to the point of not knowing where they are or what year it is.
At times this is linked to low oxygen levels in their blood, but in certain patients the confusion appears disproportionate to how their lungs are faring.
Jennifer Frontera, a neurologist at NYU Langone Brooklyn hospital seeing these patients, told AFP the findings were raising concerns about the impact of the coronavirus on the brain and nervous system.
Researchers with the world’s gravitational wave detectors said today they had picked up vibrations from a cosmic collision that harmonized with the opening notes of an Elvis Presley hit. The source was the most exotic merger of two black holes detected yet—a pair in which one weighed more than three times as much as the other. Because of the stark mass imbalance, the collision generated gravitational waves at multiple frequencies, in a harmony Elvis fans would recognize. The chord also confirms a prediction of Einstein’s theory of gravity, or general relativity.
Such mismatched mass events could help theorists figure out how pairs of black holes form in the first place. “Anything that seems to be at the edge of our predictions is most interesting,” says Chris Belczynski, a gravitational theorist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who was not involved in the observation. But the one event is “not quite in the regime where you can tell the different formation [routes] apart.”
Physicists first detected gravitational waves in 2015, when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a pair of detectors in Washington and Louisiana, spotted two black holes spiraling into each other, generating infinitesimal ripples in spacetime. Two years later, the Virgo detector near Pisa, Italy, joined the hunt, and by August 2017, the detectors had bagged a total of 10 black hole mergers.
For the last couple of years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been changing many fields and increasing efficiency by using improved datasets. One of those areas where AI has accelerated evolution is the robo-advisory, which is a field having extensive financial big data to analyze.
Robo-advisors are the systems that use algorithms to automatically perform investment decisions or tasks which are mostly done by human advisors. “Robo advisors are a potential solution to the complexities of financial decision making,” said Jill E. Fisch, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania at a conference of Pension Research Council.
In the main scheme, robo-advisors are merging customers’ information such as their financial goals, risk tolerances, timeframes, with the right asset allocation that qualifies customer’s needs. While making this merge, they use many algorithms including machine learning models to create the best fit for the customer. In the process of timeframe, they take lots of actions as well such as rebalancing the portfolio or performing tax-loss harvesting. This automatically increases efficiency while taking decisions at the right time for the portfolio.
“People usually say they want a human element to their interactions but Covid-19 has changed that,” says Martin Ford, a futurist who has written about the ways robots will be integrated into the economy in the coming decades.
“[Covid-19] is going to change consumer preference and really open up new opportunities for automation.”
Robot workers can help us keep social distance but once machines take over it will be hard to go back.
