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Blog – Page 7724

While so many of us are working at home during the coronavirus pandemic, we do worry that serendipitous hallway conversations aren’t happening.

Last year, before the pandemic, it was one of those conversations that led researchers at ETH Zurich to develop a way of making chocolates shimmer with color—without any coloring agents or other additives.

The project, announced in December, involves what the scientists call “structural color”. The team indicated that it creates colors in a way similar to what a chameleon does—that is, using the structure of its skin to scatter a particular wavelength of light. The researchers have yet to release details, but Alissa M. Fitzgerald, founder of MEMS product development firm AMFitzgerald, has a pretty good guess.

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Featured image source: spacex / NASA

SpaceX performed its first crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 30th. The Demo-2 mission launched NASA Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft, atop a Falcon 9 rocket, from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The astronaut duo arrived at the station on May 31st. They have been performing vital tasks since, while Dragon remains docked to the ISS Harmony module. Dragon is actively monitored from SpaceX’s mission control station and also by the astronauts.

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The decision to invest in a company can rely on a lot of guesswork, but Kim Polese, co-founder and chairman of CrowdSmart, is using artificial intelligence to turn qualitative information into quantitative data—and reduce bias along the way.

“When we’re talking about using collective intelligence, augmented collective intelligence, what we’re really talking about is using a combination of human and machine intelligence to improve the way that diligence is done,” Polese said this past Wednesday at a Barron’sInvesting in Tech panel. The founder of an artificial-intelligence platform designed to predict a company’s potential for success, Polese detailed how the CrowdSmart platform works, and how it could help remove bias from the diligence process.

The system draws on the insights of a group of 25 or more people, selected for their different levels of expertise, to evaluate prospective investments, explained Polese, who said her career in Silicon Valley began 30 years ago at the first artificial-intelligence company to go public.

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Summary: Targeted deep brain stimulation may help treat obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Source: Charite

A group of researchers from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin have further refined the use of deep brain stimulation in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder. By accurately localizing electrode placement in the brains of patients, the researchers were able to identify a fiber tract which is associated with the best clinical outcomes following deep brain stimulation. The researchers’ findings, which have been published in Nature Communications, may be used to improve the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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An international team led by physicists from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universitaet (LMU) in Munich realized a novel genuine time-dependent topological system with ultracold atoms in periodically-driven optical honeycomb lattices.

Topological phases of matter have attracted a lot of interest due to their unique electronic properties that often result in exotic surface or boundary modes, whose existence is rooted in the non-trivial topological properties of the underlying system. In particular, the robustness of these properties makes them interesting for applications.

Periodic driving has emerged as an important technique to emulate the physics of undriven topological solid-state systems. The properties of driven topological systems, however, transcend those of their static counterparts. Using a BEC of 39K loaded into a periodically-modulated optical honeycomb lattice, we could generate such a time-dependent topological system.

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