Friday - May 26 2023, 07:11 UTC - 1 year ago

NASA’s Cassini mission data suggests that Saturn’s rings are young, possibly only a few hundred million years old, and could disappear in a similar timescale. Three studies provide evidence to this conclusion, that the rings could not have been exposed to cosmic hailstorm for more than a few hundred million years, and they most likely formed when unstable gravitational forces within Saturn’s system destroyed some of its icy moons. The third study predicts the rings will disappear within the next few hundred million years.

Friday - May 26 2023, 05:02 UTC - 1 year ago

In a paper recently published in The Astronomical Journal, researchers studied the Helix Nebula to understand its peculiar infrared radiation. Observations from SOFIA and ALMA, as well as the Herschel and Spitzer Space Telescope, suggest that dust grains from the destroyed planetary systems are returning towards the Helix Nebula's core to cause the infrared excess, with around 500 million grains present over the lifetime of the planetary nebula.

Friday - May 26 2023, 03:07 UTC - 1 year ago

IBM made an announcement on May 22 at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan about their plans to build a 100,000-qubit machine within the next 10 years. It will partner with the University of Tokyo and the University of Chicago in a $100 million dollar initiative to push quantum computing into the realm of full-scale operation. Building a quantum computer of that size will require advances in error correction, qubit performance, and software-led error mitigation.

Friday - May 26 2023, 01:05 UTC - 1 year ago

Developers of the 5G mobile network can now get support from AI-based machine learning methods that provide faster and more efficient troubleshooting and better understanding of the mobile network. The methods developed by industrial doctoral student Tobias Sundqvist can quickly identify errors in the Radio Access Network (RAN) system and accelerate the development of 5G mobile networks.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 23:02 UTC - 1 year ago

An entomologist from UC Berkeley discovered a rare beetle species on Jerry Brown's ranch in Colusa County, CA, which had not been observed by scientists since 1966. The species will be named Bembidion brownorum, in honor of Governor Brown and his wife. Rapid urbanization during the 20th century likely caused the species' 70% decline.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 21:23 UTC - 1 year ago

ICON is launching Initiative 99, a competition for disruptive designs of 3D-printed homes that can be built for under $99,000. The competition seeks to create a new approach to the design of affordable housing units and aims to address the problem of housing shortage in the US. The winning entry will be fully built onsite in Austin.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 19:56 UTC - 1 year ago

Rita Leggett was an Australian woman whose experimental brain implant caused a significant shift in her sense of agency and self. She signed up for a clinical trial in 2010 and had four electrodes implanted on her brain to monitor her activity. The device was successful in helping Leggett predict and prevent her epilectic seizures. However, in 2013 the company who made the device went out of business and Leggett had to have the implant removed, leaving her with a reminder of the ethical implications of increasingly intimate technology.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 17:41 UTC - 1 year ago

Environmental and wildlife nonprofit groups have filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration(FAA), accusing the agency of failing in its duty of properly assessing the potential environmental impact of SpaceX's Starship rocket launch. SpaceX has filed a motion in court requesting to be allowed to join the FAA as a defendant, citing the substantial national interest their contractual obligations with NASA must fulfill. Despite the ongoing lawsuit, SpaceX continues to prepare for the second launch of its massive Starship rocket.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 16:18 UTC - 1 year ago

Recent research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) identifies an abnormality in the serotonin 2A/C receptor, often seen in SIDS cases and linked to protective sleep functions. The study suggests that a mix of developmental timing, external stressors, and these biological abnormalities can lead to SIDS, although the cause-effect relationship is unclear. Safe-sleep practices remain critical.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 12:06 UTC - 1 year ago

Submarine cables have become a lifeline of global communication, connecting the world. Scientists are now exploring the possibility of utilizing them to serve a dual purpose: using advanced sensors to detect seismic activity, temperature changes, and more. Interesting Engineering talked to Brian Lavallée of Ciena to explore the concept in more details. Elements for the construction of these cables include optical transmission technology, specialized optical amplifiers, surge protection devices and fiber-glass strengthened cables.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 09:26 UTC - 1 year ago

FluidLab is a new simulation tool developed by researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to enhance robot learning for complex fluid manipulation tasks. It provides a collection of intricate fluid handling tasks involving multiple fluid and materials. FluidEngine is an easy-to-use physics simulator at the heart of FluidLab and supports a wider range of materials and couplings while being fully differentiable. FluidLab helps robots master various tasks related to fluid manipulation, such as making coffee or ice cream, which could benefits households and workplaces in the future.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 06:41 UTC - 1 year ago

This study introduces a state-of-the-art equivariant deep learning system designed to simulate dynamics of matter at the atomic scale.The system achieves an unprecedented level of accuracy and scalability demonstrated with weak and strong scalability up to 1280 nodes and 100 million atoms, respectively.This system bridges the gap between computationally expensive electronic structure methods and uncontrolled approximations by combining machine learning and physical-based models.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 03:36 UTC - 1 year ago

The researchers connected a SPAD sensor array to an FPGA, upon which they implemented an autocorrelation algorithm to calculate 12,288 autocorrelations in real time, from the SPAD array output. This development promises multispeckle DCS instruments with much higher sensitivity, and could be used for a variety of medical applications including clinical diagnoses and monitoring neurological diseases.

Thursday - May 25 2023, 01:39 UTC - 1 year ago

A recent study led by UC Davis has challenged the notion of human exceptionalism in societal behaviors, arguing that humans resemble mammals living in monogamous partnerships and cooperative breeders, while monogamy can cause significant inequalities among women. Furthermore, women tend to have more equal access to resources in polygynous systems, and reproductive inequality falls along the lines of gender, race, class, ethnicity, or age.

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 23:43 UTC - 1 year ago

G7 Leaders have called for urgent assessment on the impact of generative artificial intelligence (AI), and said they will launch discussions on the "responsible" use of the technology. A working group will be established to tackle topics such as governance, intellectual property rights, and response to foreign information manipulation. European Parliament has also taken a first step towards EU-wide regulation of AI.

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 22:20 UTC - 1 year ago

A team of researchers have created bacteria capable of synthesizing an amino acid, called para-nitro-L-phenylalanine (pN-Phe), that has never been observed in nature before. This amino acid has the amazing ability to help the immune system respond to and neutralize proteins that it would typically ignore. This breakthrough was achieved by combining two powerful techniques- genetic code expansion and metabolic engineering- and planning to refine the platform for vaccines and immunotherapies applications, for which Dr. Kunjapur received some awards. They have also co-founded a company, Nitro Biosciences, leveraging the potential of bacteria as drug delivery vehicles.

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 20:50 UTC - 1 year ago

Virtual Reality experiences are becoming more realistic by introducing a sense of smell into its haptic devices. A team at Beihang University in China published a paper in Nature Communications this month describing a system to integrate odors with VR experiences. Their wearable interface uses an odor generator to produce scents, and a copper coil kicks a magnet to cool down the wax and control the mixtures of scents. The researchers claim it only takes 1.44 seconds for a scent to be generated and reach the device wearer's nose.

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 19:29 UTC - 1 year ago

At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, it has been shown that the Higgs boson can decay in a characteristic way, involving exotic particles which may be observable in successors to the LHC. Tests for potential detections of Higgs boson decays to exotic particles consist of retrieving the jets of particles the decaying particles create, and then reconstructing the track of the jets from the decay vertices.

Wednesday - May 24 2023, 17:44 UTC - 1 year ago

Meta has built AI models that can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages—a tenfold increase on what’s currently available. It’s a significant step toward preserving languages that are at risk of disappearing, the company says. The models have been released to the public and compared with models from rival companies, with the Meta models found to have half the error rate while covering 11 times more languages. However, the use of religious texts to train AI models could be controversial due to the bias it might introduce.