Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a native OneNote app for visionOS, showing the company’s commitment to its customers who use Apple Vision Pro. This comes after the company released Microsoft Office apps for Apple’s mixed reality headset.

A Product Manager from the company confirmed the news in a blog post. According to Microsoft, “OneNote will make use of the infinite canvas of spatial computing and can appear side-by-side with other great Microsoft apps” already available for Apple Vision Pro. For those unfamiliar, OneNote is Microsoft’s note-taking software.

Microsoft says that the visionOS version has “many of the features available on OneNote for iPad.” This includes the ability to write notes, make a digital notebook, highlight important notes, create To Do tags, lock notes with a password, synchronize with OneDrive, and share with other people.

Atlas lies motionless in a prone position atop interlocking gym mats. The only soundtrack is the whirring of an electric motor. It’s not quiet, exactly, but it’s nothing compared to the hydraulic jerks of its ancestors.

As the camera pans around the robot’s back, its legs bend at the knees. It’s a natural movement, at first, before crossing into an uncanny realm, like something out of a Sam Raimi movie. The robot, which appeared to be lying on its back, has effectively switched positions with this clever bit of leg rotation.

Continue reading “Boston Dynamics’ Atlas humanoid robot goes electric” »

Meta announces MA-LMM

Memory-augmented large multimodal model for long-term video understanding.

With the success of large language models (#LLMs), integrating the vision model into LLMs to build vision-language #foundation models has gained much more interest…

Continue reading “Paper page — MA-LMM: Memory-Augmented Large Multimodal Model for Long-Term Video Understanding” »

Humpback whales have very complicated vocalizing behaviors, but scientists were able to call an adult female over and have a short convo.

The role of the spinal cord is often simplified to that of a simple relay station, carrying messages between the brain and the body.

New research unveils how spinal cord nerve cells can learn and remember—completely independent of the brain.

An innovative programmable tool for targeting nucleic acids has been created, utilizing a prokaryotic immune defense system—and it is not CRISPR-Cas. Russian Academy of Sciences researchers have successfully re-engineered prokaryotic Argonautes (pAgos) to utilize RNA guides for locating nucleic acid sequences. These systems have been modified to form a complex with effector nucleases.

The researchers employed a two-component system known as SPARDA (short prokaryotic Argonaute, DNase, and RNase-associated) to effectively identify DNA sequences with a notable level of sensitivity and induce collateral nuclease activity. SPARDA and other concise pAgos systems that encode diverse effectors have the potential to offer a novel programmable tool for the field of biotechnology.

The research article “DNA-targeting short Argonautes complex with effector proteins for collateral nuclease activity and bacterial population immunity” was published in Nature Microbiology.

An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has demonstrated experimentally that electrons in naturally occurring double-layer graphene move like particles without any mass, in the same way that light travels. Furthermore, they have shown that the current can be “switched” on and off, which has potential for developing tiny, energy-efficient transistors—like the light switch in your house but at a nanoscale.

Tim Cook said Apple will “look at” manufacturing in Indonesia following a meeting with its president in Jakarta.

A recent USC study provides new information about why SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, may elicit mild symptoms at first but then, for a subset of patients, turn potentially fatal a week or so after infection. The researchers showed that distinct stages of illness correspond with the coronavirus acting differently in two different populations of cells.

The study, published in Nature Cell Biology, may provide a roadmap for addressing cytokine storms and other excessive immune reactions that drive serious COVID-19.

The team found that when SARS-CoV-2 infects its first-phase targets, cells in the lining of the lung, two viral proteins circulate within those cells—one that works to activate the immune system and a second that, paradoxically, blocks that signal, resulting in little or no inflammation.