Lifeboat Foundation

From repairing deadly brain bleeds to tackling tumors with precise chemotherapy, micro/nano-robots (MNRs) are a promising, up-and-coming tool that have the power to substantially advance health care. However, this tool still has difficulty navigating within the human body—a limitation that has prevented it from entering clinical trials.

Mathematical models are crucial to the optimal design and navigation of MNRs, but the current models are inadequate. Now, new, promising research from the University of Saskatchewan (USask) may allow MNRs to overcome the limitations that previously prevented their widespread use.

USask College of Engineering professor Dr. Chris Zhang (Ph. D.) and two Ph.D. students (Lujia Ding, N.N Hu) along with two USask alumni (Dr. Bing Zhang (Ph. D.), Dr. R. Y. Yin (Ph. D.)) are the first team to develop a highly accurate mathematical model that optimizes the design of MNRs which improves their navigation, allowing them to travel efficiently through the bloodstream. Their work was recently published in Nature Communications.

Scientists are combining AI machine learning with mechanical testing to improve plant-based meat.

By Adam Protz

Okay everyone is stressing about filing taxes. However new tools to help you have been developed. Artificial Intelligence is one. There are many tools out there. Here is one. Just do some research and pick the best tool for you.

AI-powered tax assistant for accountants & tax pros. TaxGPT co-pilot boosts productivity by 10x. Secure & accurate. Save time and streamline operations.

Gravity has shaped our cosmos. Its attractive influence turned tiny differences in the amount of matter present in the early universe into the sprawling strands of galaxies we see today. A new study using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has traced how this cosmic structure grew over the past 11 billion years, providing the most precise test to date of gravity at very large scales.

DESI is an international collaboration of more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Continue reading “New DESI data shed light on gravity’s pull in the universe” »

MIT physicists have taken a key step toward solving the puzzle of what leads electrons to split into fractions of themselves. Their solution sheds light on the conditions that give rise to exotic electronic states in graphene and other two-dimensional systems.

The new work is an effort to make sense of a discovery that was reported earlier this year by a different group of physicists at MIT, led by Assistant Professor Long Ju. Ju’s team found that electrons appear to exhibit “fractional charge” in pentalayer graphene—a configuration of five graphene layers that are stacked atop a similarly structured sheet of boron nitride.

Ju discovered that when he sent an electric current through the pentalayer structure, the electrons seemed to pass through as fractions of their total charge, even in the absence of a magnetic field.

Flying with Photons: Rendering Novel Views of Propagating Light https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.

Close your eyes and picture the iconic “bullet time” scene from “The Matrix”—the one where Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, dodges bullets in slow motion. Now imagine being able to witness the same effect, but instead of speeding bullets, you’re watching something that moves one million times faster: light itself.

Continue reading “Novel AI algorithm captures photons in motion” »

Astronomers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have discovered the first pairs of white dwarf and main sequence stars—” dead” remnants and “living” stars—in young star clusters. Described in a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, this breakthrough offers new insights into an extreme phase of stellar evolution, and one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics.

Scientists can now begin to bridge the gap between the earliest and final stages of binary star systems—two stars that orbit a shared center of gravity—to further our understanding of how stars form, how galaxies evolve, and how most elements on the periodic table were created. This discovery could also help explain cosmic events like supernova explosions and gravitational waves, since binaries containing one or more of these compact dead stars are thought to be the origin of such phenomena.

Most stars exist in binary systems. In fact, nearly half of all stars similar to our sun have at least one companion star. These paired stars usually differ in size, with one star often being more massive than the other. Though one might be tempted to assume that these stars evolve at the same rate, more massive stars tend to live shorter lives and go through the stages of stellar evolution much faster than their lower mass companions.

Cognitive neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin have published new research describing a brand new approach to making habit change achievable and lasting.

This innovative framework has the potential to significantly improve approaches to personal development, as well as the clinical treatment of compulsive disorders (for example obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and eating disorders).

The research was led by Dr. Eike Buabang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the lab of Professor Claire Gillan in the School of Psychology, has been published as a paper titled “Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits” in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Life is a series of small events: making morning coffee, letting the dog out, opening a laptop, letting the dog back in. Add them all up and you have a full day. Our brains are committed to observing and processing the events that make up our daily lives, said Jeff Zacks, the Edgar James Swift Professor in Arts & Sciences and chair of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. “Knowing where events begin and where they end is crucial to understanding the world,” Zacks said.

In a pair of new papers, Zacks and other researchers in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering explore this key process of human cognition.

Zacks led a study that trained computer models to observe more than 25 hours of video of people performing simple, everyday tasks such as cleaning a kitchen or cooking a meal before making predictions about what happens next. The study came to a surprising conclusion: The computer models were most accurate when they responded to uncertainty. When the model was especially unsure about what would happen next, it would reset and reassess the scene, an approach that improved its overall comprehension.