Lifeboat Foundation

The key is an innovation that’s being called ‘light beads microscopy’. It improves on current two-photon microscopy, using lasers to trigger introduced fluorescence in living cells. As the cells are lit up, scientists can see how they’re moving and interacting.

With light beads microscopy, scientists can get the speed, scale, and resolution required to map a mouse brain in detail as its neural activity changes. The near-simultaneous tracking can last for as long as the light beads are able to stay illuminated.

CRISPR is the genius behind innovations that seemed impossible a decade ago. Could you grow tomatoes with the kick of hot sauce or ferment wine that doesn’t cause a hangover? That’s just two of the things scientists are looking into.

Welcome to AI book reviews, a series of posts that explore the latest literature on artificial intelligence.

Recent advances in deep learning have rekindled interest in the imminence of machines that can think and act like humans, or artificial general intelligence. By following the path of building bigger and better neural networks, the thinking goes, we will be able to get closer and closer to creating a digital version of the human brain.

Continue reading “Abductive inference: The blind spot of artificial intelligence” »

A clinical trial is beginning tomorrow to discover if it is safe to give radiotherapy in two large doses.

If successful, it would mean treatment for prostate cancer could take days instead of weeks.

Prof. Chuanfeng Li and Prof. Zongquan Zhou from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) innovatively raised and realized noiseless photon echo (NLPE) protocol. The research of entire originality reduced the noise by 670 times compared with previous strategies and achieved solid quantum memory with high fidelity. The results were published in Nature Communications.

First observed by Erwin Hahn in 1,950 photon echo is a fundamental physical interaction between light and matter as well as an essential tool for the manipulation of electromagnetic fields. However, the intense spontaneous noise emission generated has the same frequency as the signal, it is impossible to separate them in principle. Previous protocols, such as atomic frequency comb and the revival of silenced echo, failed to eliminate the spontaneous noise emission as much as needed.

In this study, the researchers implemented NLPE protocol in Eu3+:Y2SiO5 crystal to serve as an optical quantum memory and applied a four-level aromic system to suppress the noise.

Reinforcement learning is an interesting area of machine learning (ML) that has advanced rapidly in recent years. AlphaGo is one such RL-based computer program that has defeated a professional human Go player, a breakthrough that experts feel was a decade ahead of its time.

Reinforcement learning differs from supervised learning because it does not need the labelled input/output pairings for training or the explicit correction of sub-optimal actions. Instead, it investigates how intelligent agents should behave in a particular situation to maximize the concept of cumulative reward.

This is a huge plus when working with real-world applications that don’t come with a tonne of highly curated observations. Furthermore, when confronted with a new circumstance, RL agents can acquire methods that allow them to behave even in an unclear and changing environment, relying on their best estimates at the proper action.

The story illuminates the way that many scientific discoveries become life-changing innovations: with decades of dead ends, rejections and battles over potential profits, but also generosity, curiosity and dogged persistence against scepticism and doubt. “It’s a long series of steps,” says Paul Krieg, a developmental biologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who made his own contribution in the mid-1980s, “and you never know what’s going to be useful”.

Hundreds of scientists had worked on mRNA vaccines for decades before the coronavirus pandemic brought a breakthrough.

Simple creation of a super multi-element catalyst homogeneously containing 14 elements.

A research group in Japan has successfully developed a “nanoporous super multi-element catalyst”^[1] that contains 14 elements^[2] which are mixed uniformly at the atomic level and used as a catalyst. A high-entropy alloy.

A mixture of two metallic elements typically used to give greater strength or higher resistance to corrosion.

That successful demonstration paves the way for practical, commercial, carbon-free power.