Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers leveraged a tracking algorithm from video games to study molecules’ behavior within live brain cells.

They adapted the fast and accurate algorithm used to track bullets in combat games for use in super-resolution microscopy. The innovative approach enables scientists to observe how molecules cluster together to perform specific functions in space and time within the brain cells.

The data obtained could shed light on molecular functions’ disruption during aging and disease.

For only the second time, astronomers have discovered multiple “Tatooine worlds,” or circumbinary planets, in the same star system.

A recent study suggests that an ancient, virus-like protein may play a key role in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal and incurable condition. The finding may lead to new research avenues for ALS treatments.

The smaller black hole, with a mass of about 150 million suns, orbits its larger companion, with a mass of 18 billion suns, at near the speed of light.

It’s this rapid dance that sparked the bright flare from this system, according to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in March.

The recorded burst, which astronomers observed in February 2022, occurred when the smaller black hole crashed into a disk of gas surrounding the larger black hole, the study’s scientists said.

AMD breaks records by launching a 128-core server CPU, a chip with 1GB of L3 cache, and a GPU with 192GB of VRAM.

Ultra-high pressure can have strange effects in physics and chemistry, and in a new study, high-pressure modeling has led to the prediction of four new compounds: compounds that don’t form in normal ways, have crystal structures we’ve never seen before, and can even act as superconductors in certain temperatures.

Those compounds are Li₁₄ Cs, Li₈Cs, Li₇Cs, and Li₆Cs, and they’re all formed from lithium (Li) and cesium (Cs) – though not in a conventional way. All four are superconductors, which means electricity can flow through them without resistance or energy loss.

The scientists behind the study used a special crystal structure prediction algorithm called USPEX (Universal Structure Predictor: Evolutionary Xtallography) to find these new compounds. It’s known as an evolutionary algorithm, using a range of methods to figure out the probability of how atoms will link together.

A first-of-its-kind robot which gives clinicians the ability to ‘feel’ patients remotely has been launched as part of a Finnish hospital pilot by deep tech robotics company Touchlab, a new tenant of the world-leading centre for robotics and artificial intelligence the National Robotarium.

Controlled by operators wearing an electronic haptic glove, the Välkky telerobot is equipped with the most advanced electronic skin (e-skin) technology ever developed to transfer a sense of touch from its robotic hand to users. E-skin is a material which is made up of single or multiple ultra-thin force sensors to transmit tactile sensations like pressure, vibration or motion from one source to another in real-time.

The 3-month pilot at Laakso Hospital in Helsinki, Finland will see a team of purpose-trained nurses explore how robotics systems can help deliver care, reduce workload and prevent the spread of infections or diseases. The pilot at Laakso Hospital is coordinated by Forum Virium Helsinki, an innovation company for the City of Helsinki. The research is part of a wider €7 billion project aimed at developing the most advanced hospital in Europe, due to be completed in 2028.

A study, published in PNAS Nexus, describes a fabric that can be modulated between two different states to stabilize radiative heat loss and keep the wearer comfortable across a range of temperatures.

Po-Chun Hsu, Jie Yin, and colleagues designed a fabric made of a layered semi-solid electrochemical cell deployed on nylon cut in a kirigami pattern to allow it to stretch and move with the wearer’s body. Modern clothes are made with a variety of insulating or breathable fabrics, but each fabric offers only one thermal mode, determined by the fabric’s emissivity: the rate at which it emits thermal energy.

The active material in the fabric can be electrically switched between two states—a transmissive dielectric state and a lossy metallic state—each with different emissivity. The fabric can thus keep the wearer comfortable by adjusting how much body heat is retained and how much is radiated away. A user would feel the same skin temperature whether the external temperature was 22.0°C (71.6°F) or 17.1°C (62.8°F). The authors call this fabric a “wearable variable-emittance device,” or WeaVE, and have configured it to be controlled with a smartphone app.

Alongside their EPYC server CPU updates, as part of today’s AMD Data Center event, the company is also offering an update on the status of their nearly-finished AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator family. The company’s next-generation HPC-class processors, which use both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on a single package, have now become a multi-SKU family of XPUs.

Joining the previously announced 128GB MI300 APU, which is now being called the MI300A, AMD is also producing a pure GPU part using the same design. This chip, dubbed the MI300X, uses just CDNA 3 GPU tiles rather than a mix of CPU and GPU tiles in the MI300A, making it a pure, high-performance GPU that gets paired with 192GB of HBM3 memory. Aimed squarely at the large language model market, the MI300X is designed for customers who need all the memory capacity they can get to run the largest of models.

First announced back in June of last year, and detailed in greater depth back at CES 2023, the AMD Instinct MI300 is AMD’s big play into the AI and HPC market. The unique, server-grade APU packs both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on to a single, chiplet-based chip. None of AMD’s competitors have (or will have) a combined CPU+GPU product like the MI300 series this year, so it gives AMD an interesting solution with a truly united memory architecture, and plenty of bandwidth between the CPU and GPU tiles.