Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 8039

Computer systems that can automatically generate image captions have been around for several years. While many of these techniques perform considerably well, the captions they produce are typically generic and somewhat uninteresting, containing simple descriptions such as “a dog is barking” or “a man is sitting on a bench.”

Alasdair Tran, Alexander Mathews and Lexing Xie at the Australian National University have been trying to develop new systems that can generate more sophisticated and descriptive image captions. In a paper recently pre-published on arXiv, they introduced an automatic captioning system for news images that takes the general context behind an image into account while generating new captions. The goal of their study was to enable the creation of captions that are more detailed and more closely resemble those written by humans.

“We want to go beyond merely describing the obvious and boring visual details of an image,” Xie told TechXplore. “Our lab has already done work that makes image captions sentimental and romantic, and this work is a continuation on a different dimension. In this new direction, we wanted to focus on the context.”

Read more | >

A team of researchers with members from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Barnes Group Advisors found that controlling spatter during laser-powder bed fusion can reduce defects in metal-based 3D printing. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes studying the additive manufacturing printing methodology and what they learned about it. Andrew Polonsky and Tresa Pollock with the University of California, Santa Barbara have published a Perspective piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

As additive manufacturing printing methodologies mature, are being tested to find out if they might be used in 3D printers to create new products. In recent years, this has extended to metals. One such technique is called laser-powder bed fusion (L-PBF). It involves the use of a high-powered laser to melt and fuse metallic powders layer by layer to produce a 3D part. It has been hoped that the technique could eventually be used for aerospace and biomedical applications. But thus far, such efforts have fallen short due to the large number of defects that occur with the process. In this new effort, the researchers have discovered a way to reduce such defects, perhaps paving the way for the technique to finally fulfill its promise.

To better understand why the L-PBF process leads to so many defects (such as undesired pores) the researchers conducted X-ray synchrotron experiments and built predictive multi-physics models to gain a better understanding of what occurs during printing. One of their goals was to better understand how energy is absorbed during with powder layers that are only a few particles thick.

Read more | >

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals’ sense of pain.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this center turns off, not on. It’s also located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.

“People do believe there is a central place to relieve pain, that’s why placebos work,” said senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N. Broad Distinguished Professor of neurobiology in the School of Medicine. “The question is where in the brain is the center that can turn off pain.”

Read more | >

As people get older, they often feel less energetic, mobile or active. This may be due in part to a decline in mitochondria, the tiny powerhouses inside of our cells, which provide energy and regulate metabolism. In fact, mitochondria decline with age not only in humans, but in many species. Why they do so is not well understood. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne set out to understand how mitochondrial function is diminished with age and to find factors that prevent this process. They found that communication between mitochondria and other parts of the cell plays a key role.

For their studies, the scientists used the simple roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, an important model system for aging research. Over half the genes of this animal are similar to those found in humans, and their also decline with age. From their research, the scientists found a called NFYB-1 that switches on and off genes affecting mitochondrial activity, and which itself goes down during aging. In mutant worms lacking this protein, mitochondria don’t work as well and worms don’t live as long.

Unexpectedly, the scientists discovered that NFYB-1 steers the activity of mitochondria through another part of the cell called the lysosome, a place where basic molecules are broken down and recycled as nutrients. “We think the lysosome talks with the mitochondria through special fats called cardiolipins and ceramides, which are essential to ,” says Max Planck Director, Adam Antebi, whose laboratory spearheaded the study. Remarkably, simply feeding the NFYB-1 mutant worms cardiolipin restored and worm health in these strains.

Read more | >

Patients recovering from severe lung infections develop “immunological scars” that stifle their body’s immune response and heighten their risk of contracting pneumonia, a common killer of COVID-19 sufferers, researchers said Monday.

Studies in both humans and mice showed that the body’s is temporarily switched off after some severe infections, rendering more vulnerable to new bacterial or viral diseases.

A team of researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity and the University Hospital of Nantes found that the cells that form the ’s first line of defence—macrophages—were “paralysed” after severe .

Read more | >

We read about different innovations in clean technology almost on a daily basis. A small Massachusetts-based start-up, FloDesign Wind Turbine, has created a wind turbine design based on jet engine technology. This revolutionary wind turbine can generate much more electricity at half the cost than today’s traditional wind turbines. It has also won two clean-energy competitions for its amazing innovation.

A traditional wind turbine can extract just 50% of the available wind energy in the given area it occupies. However, the Wind Jet by FloDesign uses blades covered in shrouds to direct the air through the turbine blades. This results in increased flow of air. As the airflow through the blades increases, the higher the speed of the turbines and ultimately the more power that is generated. The energy generated by this new wind turbine matches that of a traditional turbine with blades that are half the size.

FloDesign boasts that its turbines are 3–4 times more efficient than traditional open-fan turbines and they can be placed much closer together than conventional wind turbines while aligning themselves with the wind like a kite on a string. Not only that, FloDesign wind turbines require much smaller blades which occupy less space, are much easier to manufacture, and easier to ship.

Read more | >

An element which could hold the key to the long-standing mystery around why there is much more matter than antimatter in our Universe has been discovered by a University of the West of Scotland (UWS)-led team of physicists.

The UWS and University of Strathclyde academics have discovered, in research published in the journal Nature Physics, that one of the isotopes of the element thorium possesses the most pear-shaped nucleus yet to be discovered. Nuclei similar to thorium-228 may now be able to be used to perform new tests to try find the answer to the mystery surrounding matter and antimatter.

UWS’s Dr. David O’Donnell, who led the project, said: Our research shows that, with good ideas, world-leading nuclear physics experiments can be performed in university laboratories.

Read more | >