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Aug 28, 2024

Scientists discover a long-sought global electric field on Earth

Posted by in category: space

Using observations from a NASA suborbital rocket, an international team of scientists, for the first time, has successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields.

Aug 28, 2024

Solid-state electrolyte advance could double energy storage for next-gen vehicles

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, sustainability, transportation

Using a polymer to make a strong yet springy thin film, scientists led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are speeding the arrival of next-generation solid-state batteries. This effort advances the development of electric vehicle power enabled by flexible, durable sheets of solid-state electrolytes.

The sheets may allow scalable production of future solid-state batteries with higher energy density electrodes. By separating negative and positive electrodes, they would prevent dangerous electrical shorts while providing high-conduction paths for ion movement.

These achievements foreshadow greater safety, performance and compared to current batteries that use liquid electrolytes, which are flammable, chemically reactive, thermally unstable and prone to leakage.

Aug 28, 2024

Mind-Reading chip turns thoughts into text — A game changer

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a revolutionary miniaturized brain-machine interface (MiBMI) that converts brain activity directly into text. This breakthrough technology, housed on silicon chips with a total area of just 8mm², marks a significant advancement in brain-computer interface technology.

The study, published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits and presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, highlights a device that could dramatically improve communication for individuals with severe motor impairments.

Aug 28, 2024

How AI Is Deciphering Lost Scrolls From the Roman Empire

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Scrolls found in the shadow of Vesuvius and libraries of ancient texts besides are being illuminated by machine learning and computer vision.

Aug 28, 2024

Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 prototype aces 2nd test flight (photos)

Posted by in category: transportation

The flight tested the vehicle’s landing gear and roll damper for improved handling.

Aug 28, 2024

2 Hidden Issues to Avoid if you’re over 60 to stop early Death (and what to do)

Posted by in category: media & arts

Good channel here.


Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Aug 28, 2024

The quest to show that biological sex matters in the immune system

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience, sex

During her PhD research at Johns Hopkins University, Klein learned how sex hormones can influence the brain and behavior.


A handful of immunologists are pushing the field to take attributes such as sex chromosomes, sex hormones, and reproductive tissues into account.

Aug 28, 2024

GameNGen: Imagine playing a video game where every frame and action is generated by a neural network, not a traditional game engine

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

We present GameNGen, the first game engine powered entirely by a neural model that enables real-time interaction with a complex environment over long trajectories at high quality. GameNGen can interactively simulate the classic game DOOM at over 20 frames per second on a single TPU. Next frame prediction achieves a PSNR of 29.4, comparable to lossy JPEG compression. Human raters are only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the simulation. GameNGen is trained in two phases: an RL-agent learns to play the game and the training sessions are recorded, and a diffusion model is trained to produce the next frame, conditioned on the sequence of past frames and actions. Conditioning augmentations enable stable auto-regressive generation over long trajectories.

Aug 28, 2024

From Abyssal Depths to Astrobiology: How Dark Oxygen Is Shaping Our Understanding of Life

Posted by in category: alien life

“For the most part, we think of the deep sea as a place where decaying material falls down and animals eat the remnants. But this finding is recalibrating that dynamic,” said Dr. Jeffrey Marlow.


What can deep ocean life teach us about finding life on other worlds? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how “dark oxygen” —which is oxygen produced without sunlight—is produced by deep sea creatures that reside within the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) which is approximately 12,000 to 18,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface and completely dark. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the conditions for life and where else we might find these conditions on worlds outside Earth.

For the study, the researchers used deep-sea chambers on the seafloor to measure changes in oxygen levels, which the team initially hypothesized was caused by the microbial life and other creatures living between the rocks, the latter of which are millions of years old. Along with thinking the local life produced the oxygen, the team also hypothesized the life consumed it, as well, resulting decreased oxygen levels. However, after 48 hours of collecting data, the researchers the oxygen levels increased, indicating that something else was producing oxygen at these extreme depths so far from the Sun.

Continue reading “From Abyssal Depths to Astrobiology: How Dark Oxygen Is Shaping Our Understanding of Life” »

Aug 28, 2024

Revising the Early Universe: Black Holes and Bright Galaxies Unraveled

Posted by in categories: alien life, evolution

What were galaxies like in the early universe? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of galaxies in the early universe, as recent studies have suggested they were much larger than cosmology models had simulated. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the conditions in the early universe and how life came to be.

“We are still seeing more galaxies than predicted, although none of them are so massive that they ‘break’ the universe,” said Katherine Chworowsky, who is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study.

For the study, the researchers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to peer deep into the universe’s past and observe some of the earliest galaxies to ascertain their sizes and whether they are as massive as recent studies have suggested. After analyzing the data, the researchers discovered that black holes residing at the center of these galaxies are creating false brightness and sizes, meaning these galaxies are much smaller than previously thought, thus reducing the panic within the scientific community regarding cosmological models. However, this study does suggest further research is necessary regarding star formation and evolution within these galaxies.

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