Lifeboat Foundation

Structures could have applications in future electronic devices.

Every year, beer breweries generate and discard thousands of tons of surplus yeast. Researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech have now come up with a way to repurpose that yeast to absorb lead from contaminated water.

Through a process called biosorption, yeast can quickly absorb even trace amounts of lead and other heavy metals from water. The researchers showed that they could package the yeast inside hydrogel capsules to create a filter that removes lead from water. Because the yeast cells are encapsulated, they can be easily removed from the water once it’s ready to drink.

“We have the hydrogel surrounding the free yeast that exists in the center, and this is porous enough to let water come in, interact with yeast as if they were freely moving in water, and then come out clean,” says Patricia Stathatou, a former postdoc at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, who is now a research scientist at Georgia Tech and an incoming assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

Researchers have leveraged deep learning techniques to enhance the image quality of a metalens camera. The new approach uses artificial intelligence to turn low-quality images into high-quality ones, which could make these cameras viable for a multitude of imaging tasks including intricate microscopy applications and mobile devices.

It’ll be the first manned flight for Bezos’ company since a 2022 malfunction grounded Blue Origin’s New Shepard rockets.

Genetic analysis of 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeletons has uncovered the remnants of three viruses related to modern human pathogens, and the researchers think they could be recreated.

By James Woodford

The search for the origin of life on earth goes on.

Simulations of the crust of early Earth show that cycles of pressure caused by geysers or tidal forces could have generated cell-like structures and even very simple proteins.

By Michael Le Page

Continue reading “Protocells on early Earth may have been formed by squeezing geysers” »

Most alcohol enters the bloodstream via the mucous membrane layer of the stomach and the intestines. These days, the consequences of this are undisputed: even small amounts of alcohol impair people’s ability to concentrate and to react, increasing the risk of accidents.

“It is nonsensical to say that an LLM has feelings,” Hagendorff says. “It is nonsensical to say that it is self-aware or that it has intentions. But I don’t think it is nonsensical to say that these machines are able to learn or to deceive.”

Brain scans

Other researchers are taking tips from neuroscience to explore the inner workings of LLMs. To examine how chatbots deceive, Andy Zou, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his collaborators interrogated LLMs and looked at the activation of their ‘neurons’. “What we do here is similar to performing a neuroimaging scan for humans,” Zou says. It’s also a bit like designing a lie detector.

For decades, philosopher Nick Bostrom (director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford) has led the conversation around technology and human experience (and grabbed the attention of the tech titans who are developing AI – Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman).

Now, a decade after his NY Times bestseller S uperintelligence warned us of what could go wrong with AI development, he flips the script in his new book Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World (March 27), asking us to instead consider “What could go well?”

Ronan recently spoke to Professor Nick Bostrom.