Lifeboat Foundation

Are you ready for a cell phone with a medium-format-sized sensor?

It’s science time. New research tells us how, with the help of metalenses and spaceplates, we don’t need conventional lenses anymore. Furthermore, that will allow manufacturers to develop tiny cameras with bigger sensors. Read the highlights of the research below.

New research has found a solution for reducing the size of cameras, by combining both metalenses and spaceplates. That combination allows a significant reduction of the glass and the length from the camera sensor. The result can be a lens-free camera and a bigger sensor. Furthermore, it’s a whole new approach for how light can be focused, and utilized, that can result in manufacturing facilitation of both cameras and lenses.

Continue reading “The Future of Imaging? Metalenses and Spaceplates Allow Lens-Free Cameras and With Bigger Sensors” »

It replaces the idle fee where available.

The extinct arthropods date back at least 490 million years.

British architecture studio Foster + Partners has released visuals of its design for the Saudi Arabia pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, which will be modelled on the kingdom’s traditional villages.

It will be among the national pavilions at the upcoming World Expo, for which Sou Fujimoto Architects is developing the masterplan on the artificial island Yumeshima in Osaka Bay, Japan.

Foster + Partners said its aim for the pavilion is to offer visitors “a spatial experience that echoes the exploration of Saudi Arabian towns and cities”

When speaking to one another, much of the communication occurs nonverbally – through body posture, hand gestures, and the eyes. Our eye gaze during conversations therefore reveals a wealth of information about our attention, intention, or psychological states. But, there remains little scientific knowledge about the information that human eyes convey in interactions – is looking at others’ faces enough, or does our communication require eye-to-eye contact?

Researchers from McGill University and Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) have studied the prevalence of eye contact by recording the eye gazing behavior in face-to-face dyadic interactions and found that although eye-to-eye contact occurred rarely, it communicated important messages which are vital for subsequent successful social behavior.

The study participants, who did not know each other beforehand, were paired and presented with an imaginary survival scenario which required the pairs to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. The researchers analyzed how often the participants looked at each other’s eye and mouth regions. The researchers also tested each participant individually for gaze following and linked the prevalence of different types of mutual looks during the interaction (i.e., eye-to-eye vs. eye-to-mouth) with the tendency to follow their partner’s gaze.

Ex-OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in 2019 that “almost too much self-belief” was a key to success. That presents problems, says a UC Berkeley leadership expert.

Last year, Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) started sending random data back to Earth, and it took NASA engineers months to figure out why. It turns out the AACS had entered an incorrect mode, but it’s unclear why the mode switch happened in the first place. This software patch is meant to stop the same thing happening to Voyager 2 (and to Voyager 1 again).

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, explains “this patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible … These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

As Voyager 2 is over 12 billion miles away, it took over 18 hours to send the software patch to the probe on Friday. There is a risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have unintended consequences, so a readout of AACS memory is being carried out to make sure it’s in the right place. If no anomalies are found, the update will be triggered on Oct. 28.

Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases.

The study found that bacterial cells store memory in the guise of cellular iron levels.

Artur Plawgo/iStock.

While humans accumulate countless memories over the years, bacterial memories are limited to certain factors, such as iron levels. This aids the bacteria’s adaptation to their surroundings.