Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers mapped neural activity in an octopus’s visual system, revealing striking similarities to humans.

The team observed neural responses to light and dark spots, thereby creating a map resembling the organization of the human brain. Interestingly, octopuses and humans last shared a common ancestor around 500 million years ago, suggesting independent evolution of such complex visual systems.

These findings contribute greatly to our understanding of cephalopod vision and brain structure.

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.

Humane, the top-secret tech startup founded by ex-Apple vets Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, just showed off the first demo for its projector-based wearable at a TED talk. Axios’ Ina Fried broke the news, and Inverse has seen a recording of the full TED talk given by Chaudhri.

Humane founder and ex-Apple designer Imran Chaudhri shared the first look at the company’s AI-powered wearable projector. Here’s an exclusive first glimpse of Humane’s screen-less iPhone killer in action and details on its many functions including making and receiving phone calls, summarizing notifications, and translating your voice in real-time.

Director and oceanographer James Cameron said Friday that the design of the imploded Titan submersible was “critically flawed,” calling the construction of the vessel an “insidious” mistake.

Perovskite solar cells designed by a team of scientists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have attained a world record efficiency of 24.35% with an active area of 1 cm². This achievement paves the way for cheaper, more efficient and durable solar cells.

To facilitate consistent comparisons and benchmarking of different solar cell technologies, the photovoltaic (PV) community uses a standard size of at least 1 cm² to report the efficiency of one-sun solar cells in the “Solar cell efficiency tables.” Prior to the record-breaking feat by the NUS team, the best 1 cm² perovskite solar cell recorded a power conversion efficiency of 23.7%. This ground-breaking achievement in maximizing power generation from next-generation renewable energy sources will be crucial to securing the world’s energy future.

Perovskites are a class of materials that exhibit high light absorption efficiency and ease of fabrication, making them promising for solar cell applications. In the past decade, perovskite solar cell technology has achieved several breakthroughs, and the technology continues to evolve.

Chapter I. Why you should learn about non-Euclidean ML. “Machine Learning in a Non-Euclidean Space” is published by Mastafa Foufa in Towards Data Science.

Using data from the Spitzer space observatory, Dr. Susana Iglesias-Groth, a researcher from The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), has found evidence for the existence of the amino acid tryptophan in the interstellar material in a nearby star-forming region. The research is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

High amounts of tryptophan were detected in the Perseus molecular complex, specifically in the IC348 star system, a star-forming region that lies 1,000 light years away from Earth—relatively close in astronomical terms. The region is generally invisible to the naked eye, but shines brightly when viewed in infrared wavelengths.

Tryptophan is one of the 20 amino acids essential for the formation of key proteins for life on Earth, and produces one of the richest pattern of spectral lines in the infrared. It was therefore an obvious candidate to be explored using the extensive spectroscopic database of the Spitzer satellite, a space-based infrared telescope.

The European Space Agency said on Wednesday its space telescope Euclid is scheduled to launch on July 1, blasting off on a mission to shed light on the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

The mission will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with the broadcast beginning at 1,430 GMT, the ESA said in a tweet.

Euclid was originally planned to ride into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but last year Moscow withdrew its launchers in response to sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine.

Intel – the world’s biggest computer-chip maker – has released its newest quantum chip and has begun shipping it to quantum scientists and engineers to use in their research. Dubbed Tunnel Falls, the chip contains a 12-qubit array and is based on silicon spin-qubit technology.

The distribution of the quantum chip to the quantum community is part of Intel’s plan to let researchers gain hands-on experience with the technology, while at the same time enabling new quantum research.

The first quantum labs to get access to the chip include the University of Maryland, Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Rochester and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.