Lifeboat Foundation

While everyone knows that a good night’s sleep restores energy, a new Cornell University study finds it resets another vital function: memory.

Learning or experiencing new things activates neurons in the hippocampus, a region of the brain vital for memory. Later, while we sleep, those same neurons repeat the same pattern of activity, which is how the brain consolidates those memories that are then stored in a large area called the cortex. But how is it that we can keep learning new things for a lifetime without using up all of our neurons?

A study, “A Hippocampal Circuit Mechanism to Balance Memory Reactivation During Sleep,” published in Science, finds at certain times during deep sleep, certain parts of the hippocampus go silent, allowing those neurons to reset.

A new study now published in Science reveals that the memory for a specific experience is stored in multiple parallel “copies.” These are preserved for varying durations, modified to certain degrees, and sometimes deleted over time, report researchers at the University of Basel.

The ability to turn experiences into memories allows us to learn from the past and use what we learned as a model to respond appropriately to new situations. For this reason, as the world around us changes, this memory model cannot simply be a fixed archive of the good old days.

Rather, it must be dynamic, changing over time and adapting to new circumstances to better help us predict the future and select the best course of action. How the brain could regulate a memory’s dynamics was a mystery—until multiple memory copies were discovered.

Right off the bat, one of the biggest improvements is the weight of the 4,680 shell itself – down to 49g from the 70g weight of a gen 1 cell. Tesla has essentially optimized the shell, making it thinner, and reducing its internal complexity. They do this by welding the tabless electrode to the cell cap.

That weight reduction is significant – at the battery pack level, the Cybertruck has 1,344 cells – which means that it reduces 28.2kg or 62.1lb of the overall pack weight. But rather than leaving that space empty, Tesla has instead filled that weight with more battery material. Calculated, that’s about a 10% increase in overall pack energy density.

Continue reading “A Look at Tesla’s 4680 Gen 2 Battery Cell” »

Scientists have successfully recovered the first long section of rocks originating from the Earth’s mantle, the layer beneath the crust and the planet’s largest component. These rocks are expected to shed light on the mantle’s role in the origins of life on Earth, the volcanic activity that occurs when it melts, and its influence on the global cycles of crucial elements like carbon and hydrogen, according to the research team.

The nearly continuous 1,268 meters (4160 feet) of mantle rock was recovered from a “tectonic window,” a section of the seabed where rocks from the mantle were exposed along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, during Expedition 399 “Building Blocks of Life, Atlantis Massif” of the ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution in Spring 2023.

With attempts dating back to the early 1960s, the recovery was a record-breaking achievement led by the International Ocean Discovery Program, an international marine research consortium of more than 20 countries that retrieves cores—cylindrical samples of sediment and rock—from the ocean floor to study Earth’s history.

Bowhead whales, the silent giants of the Arctic, play a crucial role in the ocean’s ecosystem. These amazing creatures can grow up to 60 feet long and have fascinated scientists for years with their unique behaviors and impressive lifespans.

A recent study has shed light on their lives, uncovering patterns that boost our understanding of marine life and shake up some of our old ideas.

Bowhead whales are truly amazing creatures. Known for their massive size and sturdy build, they have the largest mouth of any animal, which they use to filter-feed on tiny organisms like zooplankton.

“By measuring sound travel time differences both forward and backward, we can accurately measure wind in three dimensions,” said Dr. Robert White.

The planet Mars has several similarities with Earth, including extinct volcanoes, dry lake beds, and active dust storms, the last of which is governed by the Red Planet’s prevailing winds. However, given the average surface pressure of Mars is 0.6 percent of Earth’s due to Mars’ paper-thin atmosphere, which means the wind speeds are far smaller than on Earth. But can we accurately measure this wind speed and how will it contribute to future missions to the Red Planet?

This is what a recent study published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated using sound to measure wind speeds on Mars, which holds the potential to help scientists better understand the various processes that comprise the Red Planet and how these processes could influence future missions, as well.

Continue reading “Using sound to measure wind speeds on Mars” »

Could food delivery robots with zero carbon emissions influence a customer’s decision to buy food using them instead of robot vehicles that emit carbon into the atmosphere? This is what a recent study published in the International Journal of Hospitality Management hopes to address as a tea of researchers from Washington State University (WSU) investigated how a customer’s knowledge of an automatic delivery robot’s (ADR) environment impact influences their choice regarding which type of robot they want delivering their food. This study holds the potential to help scientists, environmental conservationists, and the public better understand the benefits of eco-friendly delivery robots for both the short and long term.

“Much of the marketing focus has been on the functionality and the convenience of these automatic delivery robots, which is really important, but it would enhance these efforts to promote their green aspects as well,” said Jennifer Han, who is a doctoral student in WSU’s Carson College of Business and lead author of the study.

For the study, the researchers used the Amazon crowdsourcing platform, MTurk, to conduct an online survey comprised of 418 adults who were instructed to watch videos about ADRs followed by a questionnaire regarding the environmental impact and the risk of using ADRs for their food delivery service. In the end, the team discovered a connection between participants who found ADRs were less risky and wanted an eco-friendly ADR compared to participants who thought ADRs were riskier but weren’t concerned about the environmental consequences.

Inspired by biology we 1) get adversarial robustness + interpretability for free, 2) turn classifiers into generators & 3) design attacks on vLLMs.

Stanislav Fort, Balaji Lakshminarayanan August 2024 https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2408.

Adversarial examples pose a significant challenge to the robustness, reliability and alignment of deep neural networks. We propose a novel, easy-to-use approach to achieving high-quality representations that lead to adversarial robustness through the use of multi-resolution input representations and dynamic self-ensembling of intermediate layer predictions. We demonstrate that intermediate layer predictions exhibit inherent robustness to adversarial attacks crafted to fool the full classifier, and propose a robust aggregation mechanism based on Vickrey auction that we call \textit{CrossMax} to dynamically ensemble them.

At the risk of sounding a bit woo-woo, as any speculation about the “hard problem” of the unknowns of consciousness does, can’t both be true? In other words, is it possible that Schrödinger’s “total mind” is a kind of quantum reserve downloaded and differentially phased into qualia through the materialist medium of natural selection, which Edelman calls “neural Darwinism”? Is it the embodied human sensory organs interacting with their environment in feedback loops that unveils the unformed wave of fundamental consciousness through the particle of particular experience?

The correct answer is: Who knows?

“Who Knows?” would be an apt title for the best inventory to date of the myriad views on consciousness, from the metaphysical to the materialist, compiled by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and titled “A landscape of consciousness: toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications,” recently published in the journal “Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.”