Lifeboat Foundation

The fine art of adding impurities to silicon wafers lies at the heart of semiconductor engineering and, with it, much of the computer industry. But this fine art isn’t yet so finely tuned that engineers can manipulate impurities down to the level of individual atoms.

As technology scales down to the nanometer size and smaller, though, the placement of individual impurities will become increasingly significant. Which makes interesting the announcement last month that scientists can now rearrange individual impurities (in this case, single phosphorous atoms) in a sheet of graphene by using electron beams to knock them around like croquet balls on a field of grass.

The finding suggests a new vanguard of single-atom electronic engineering. Says research team member Ju Li, professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT, gone are the days when individual atoms can only be moved around mechanically—often clumsily on the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope.

A partnership with Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s OpenAI looks to be a win-win for both companies. But a “holy grail” breakthrough is likely decades away.

They’re known as deepfakes – photos or videos that have been very convincingly manipulated to depict people saying or doing things that they never actually said or did. They’re potentially quite the problem, so an experimental new deep neural network has been designed to spot them.

Today, we want to highlight a recent human trial of the popular supplement nicotinamide riboside, a compound that has been shown in mice to restore NAD+ levels. The compound has had impressive results against some aspects of aging in mouse studies, and there is now some more data for NR in humans [1].

What is nicotinamide riboside?

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is a chemical that facilitates the production of energy from sugar and is present in every cell in our body. As well as being important in energy production, it is also involved in DNA repair, cellular signaling, and many other cell functions.

Consciousness is a famously hard problem, so Hod Lipson is starting from the basics: with self-aware robots that can help us understand how we think.

Three experiments have vetted quantum Darwinism, a theory that explains how quantum possibilities can give rise to objective, classical reality.

Brain cells called microglia serve as the brain’s garbage crew, scarfing up bits of cellular debris. But their underperformance in aging brains contributes to neurodegeneration. Now, a possible workaround?

When one atom emits light, they do so in a separate package called a photon. When this light is measured, this discrete or granular nature leads to small brightness fluctuations because two or more photons never emit simultaneously.

Scientists from the University of Exeter believe it may be possible to avoid developing dementia, and there are 5 ways that can help to reduce the risk, findings were presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

As published in the journal JAMA living a healthy lifestyle may help reduce the risk of dementia even if you have a genetic risk; risk of dementia in those with a higher genetic risk who followed a healthy lifestyle were found to be at 32% lower risk than those with an unhealthy lifestyle.

Data was studied from 196,383 adults of European ancestry who were 60+ years old; 1,769 cases of dementia were identified over an 8 years follow up period; those with high genetic risk and an unhealthy lifestyle were found to be almost 3 times more likely to develop dementia.