Lifeboat Foundation

Google has open-sourced TensorNetwork, a tensor network library designed in collaboration with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and X.

How do you get rid of a giant pest like Godzilla, King Kong, or any of the other assorted kaiju (Japanese for “strange beast”)? Evidence from films suggests that these monsters are highly destructive and tremendously difficult to kill.

To a mathematician, however, this situation is nothing more than a predator-prey interaction problem. By accurately simulating the properties of the species we want to eradicate, we can predict the required properties of the predators we would need to create. If we look to the movies that made them famous, we find two alternative strategies for dealing with an invasion of multiple monsters. We could build our own mechanical monsters, or create a kaiju of our own.

Biology professor and researcher Christopher Cullis said he pondered two big questions when he first caught sight of the wild marama bean plant, its definitive patches of green leaves standing out in contrast from among an otherwise parched and brown Namibian landscape.

“Why isn’t this plant affected by the lack of water like everything else—and why isn’t it being eaten by any wildlife?” Cullis said, turning one of the walnut-sized beans over in his fingers and recalling his first trip to the coastal southwest African country about a decade ago. “The answers to those questions make this a very interesting and important legume.”

Continue reading “A bean for all seasons?” »

How do we manage our complex, multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructures? Seth Vargo maps the operations tooling ecosystem you need to know in order to maintain your sanity, but he also looks into the future of infrastructure as code tools and what cool innovations we can expect.

And it wants everyone to be able to afford the weird vehicle.

SCIENTISTS are uncovering what underlies the universe and what makes up spacetime.

Physicists have long sought to find one final theory that would unify all of physics. Instead they may have to settle for several.

• By Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow on October 1, 2010

A team of researchers affiliated with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, MIT and the National Institutes of Health has found that CRISPR-associated transposons can be used to insert custom genes into DNA without cutting it. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their new gene-editing technique and how well it worked when tested in a bacterial genome.

The CRISPR gene editing technique has made headlines in recent years due to its potential for treating hereditary diseases. Unfortunately, despite much research surrounding the technique, it is still not a viable option for use on human patients. This is because the technique is error-prone—when snipping strands of DNA, CRISPR sometimes cuts off-target DNA as well, leading to unintended and unpredictable consequences (and sometimes cancerous tumors). In this new effort, the researchers have found a way to use CRISPR in conjunction with another protein to edit a strand of DNA without cutting it—they are calling it CRISPR-associated transposase (CAST).

Prior research has shown that certain pieces of DNA called transposons are, for unknown reasons, able to reposition themselves in a genome spontaneously—for this reason, they have come to be known as jumping genes. Not long after they were discovered, researchers noted that they might be used for gene editing. This is what the researchers did in the new study. They associated a transposon called Tn7 with the Cas12 enzyme used with CRISPR to edit a section of a bacterial genome. In practice, CRISPR led the Tn7 transposon to the target location in the genome—at that point, the transposon inserted itself into the genome without cutting it.

Continue reading “CRISPR-associated transposons able to insert custom genes into DNA without cutting it” »

Researchers at the University of Chicago (UChicago) have recently reported an experimental observation of a matter field with thermal fluctuations that is in accordance with Unruh’s radiation predictions. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, could open up new possibilities for research exploring the dynamics of quantum systems in a curved spacetime.

“Our team at UChicago has been investigating a new quantum phenomena called Bose fireworks that we discovered two years ago,” Cheng Chin, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “Our paper reports its hidden connection to a gravitational phenomenon called Unruh radiation.”

The Unruh effect, or Unruh radiation, is closely connected to Hawking radiation. In 1974, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking predicted that the strong gravitational force near black holes leads to the emission of a thermal radiation of particles, which resembles the heat wave emitted by an oven. This phenomenon remains speculative with no direct experimental confirmation.

Continue reading “A quantum simulation of Unruh radiation” »