Lifeboat Foundation

Venki Ramakrishnan’s is the real-deal ‘pivot story’ — ‘pivoting’ being quite the fancy thing to do today. Born in Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu in 1952, Venki wanted to be a physicist, and by the time he decided to do something about his passion for Biology, he was already a PhD in Physics from Ohio University, USA. He then ‘pivoted’ and studied Biology at the University of California, San Diego, before he began his post-doctoral work at Yale University.

He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 for his work on cellular particles called ribosomes. His first book, Gene Machine, captures this journey with the kind of honesty and self-deprecation one does not expect from an award-winning scientist.

With similar candour, in his second book, he examines recent scientific breakthroughs in longevity and ageing and raises uncomfortable questions about the ethical aspects of the research as well as the biological purpose of death.

Summary: Researchers discovered that pupil dilation can indicate levels of working memory. In a study, researchers observed that individuals whose pupils dilated more while performing memory tasks tended to have better working memory.

This relationship between pupil dilation and memory performance suggests that pupil metrics could potentially serve as non-invasive indicators of cognitive load and memory capacity. The study involved 179 undergraduate students who performed various working memory tasks while their pupil responses were monitored.

Humans have left evidence of their passing through America’s great rift for more than 10 millennia.

“Io is simply littered with volcanoes, and we caught a few of them in action,” said Dr. Scott Bolton, who is the principal investigator of Juno. “We also got some great close-ups and other data on a 200-kilometer-long (127-mile-long) lava lake called Loki Patera. There is amazing detail showing these crazy islands embedded in the middle of a potentially magma lake rimmed with hot lava. The specular reflection our instruments recorded of the lake suggests parts of Io’s surface are as smooth as glass, reminiscent of volcanically created obsidian glass on Earth.”

Loki Patera was first imaged by NASA’s Voyager 1 in 1979, revealing a very active surface and the most active of the four Galilean moons. The reason for Io’s immense volcanic activity is due to tidal heating, which occurs from Io’s somewhat elliptical orbit around the much larger Jupiter, which causes Io to orbit closer and farther away to Jupiter throughout its small orbit. This results in Jupiter’s massive gravity stretching and expanding the small moon, leading to friction within Io’s core, and eventually to heat. Since this process is ongoing, this means Io has been volcanically active for eons and could be volcanically active eons from now, as well.

From UC santa barbara & caltech towards large language models as copilots for theorem proving in lean.

From UC santa barbara & caltech.

Towards large language models as copilots for theorem proving in lean.

Continue reading “Lean-dojo/LeanCopilot: LLMs as Copilots for Theorem Proving in Lean” »

Mathematicians have the tools to explore worlds of 2, 3 and 5+ dimensions. But the fourth dimension remains mysterious and elusive. Topologists are trying to change that, one problem at a time.

Topologists prove two new results that bring some order to the confoundingly difficult study of four-dimensional shapes.

In the 1920s, Erwin Schrödinger wrote an equation that predicts how particles-turned-waves should behave. Now, researchers are perfectly recreating those predictions in the lab.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

Cutting-edge research introduces ultra-light, flexible solar cells for sustainable, long-term energy independence.