Lifeboat Foundation

Western diets that are high in sugars, fats, and processed foods have been linked to a wide variety of health ailments. Now, researchers have determined that Western diets can also disrupt the crucial barrier in the gastrointestinal tract known as the gut mucosa. This disruption can raise an individual’s risk of inflammation and infectious disease. Scientists have also identified a gut microbe called Blautia that has an important role in shielding the gut mucosa. The findings have been reported in Nature Communications.

“Our results contribute to an increased understanding of how the intestinal bacteria and the mucus layer work together, which may eventually lead to new treatment strategies for diseases linked to the Western diet such as the inflammatory bowel disease ulcerative colitis,” said first study author Sandra Holmberg, a graduate student at Umeå University.

Researchers used X-ray diagnostics for deeper plasma temperature insights.

The fusion reaction plasma carried 15 percent more energy and had twice the density than before, the researchers said.

What’s old is new again.

Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar sensors that often act as these vehicles’ “eyes” have difficulty detecting dark-colored objects. Research published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces describes a highly reflective black paint that could help these cars see dark objects and make autonomous driving safer.

Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is a system used in a variety of applications, including geologic mapping and self-driving vehicles. The system works like echolocation, but instead of emitting sound waves, lidar emits tiny pulses of near-infrared light. The light pulses bounce off objects and back to the sensor, allowing the system to map the 3D environment it’s in. But lidar falls short when objects absorb more of that near-infrared light than they reflect, which can occur on black-painted surfaces. Lidar can’t detect these dark objects on its own, so one common solution is to have the system rely on other sensors or software to fill in the information gaps. However, this solution could still lead to accidents in some situations. Rather than reinventing the lidar sensors, though, Chang-Min Yoon and colleagues wanted to make dark objects easier to detect with existing technology by developing a specially formulated, highly reflective black paint.

Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.

Microsoft is developing a new generative AI model that will take lots of data and energy to train, according to a new report from The Information published Monday.

Two Microsoft employees tell the outlet that the model has been dubbed MAI-1 internally and is being developed by a team led by Mustafa Suleyman. The ex-Google AI executive worked at AI firm Inflection before Microsoft bought Inflection’s IP and poached most of its staff, including Suleyman, who joined the tech giant in March. The employees say that MAI-1 is separate from Inflection’s Pi models.

Microsoft is reportedly reserving lots of servers with Nvidia graphics cards to train MAI-1, which is expected to be bigger than Microsoft’s previous open-source AI models. This means it will consume tons of electricity during its training phase—a broader issue researchers flag as harmful to the environment. Microsoft declined to comment on MAI-1, but linked to a Monday post from CTO Kevin Scott which states that Microsoft is and will continue to build AI models, some of which “have names like Turing, and MAI.”

String theory could provide a theory of everything for our universe—but it entails 10⁵⁰⁰ (more than a centillion) possible solutions. AI models could help to find the right one.

By Manon Bischoff

Tiny little threads whizzing through spacetime and vibrating incessantly: this is roughly how you can imagine the universe, according to string theory. The various vibrations of the threads generate the elementary particles, such as electrons and quarks, and the forces acting among them.

Researchers at the Universities of Melbourne and Manchester have invented a breakthrough technique for manufacturing highly purified silicon that brings powerful quantum computers a big step closer.

A new study led by University of Pittsburgh and UPMC Hillman Cancer Center researchers shows that an enzyme called PARP1 is involved in repair of telomeres, the lengths of DNA that protect the tips of chromosomes, and that impairing this process can lead to telomere shortening and genomic instability that can cause cancer.