Lifeboat Foundation

In the current issue of Nature Photonics, Prof. Dr. Oliver G. Schmidt, Dr. Libo Ma and partners present a strategy for observing and manipulating the optical Berry phase in Möbius ring microcavities. In their research paper, they discuss how an optical Berry phase can be generated and measured in dielectric Möbius rings. Furthermore, they present the first experimental proof of the existence of a variable Berry phase for linearly or elliptically polarized resonant light.

A Möbius strip is a fascinating object. You can easily create a Möbius strip when twisting the two ends of a strip of paper by 180 degrees and connecting them together. Upon closer inspection, you realize that this ribbon has only one surface that cannot be distinguished between inside and outside or below and above. Because of this special topological property, the Möbius strip has become an object of countless mathematical discourses, artistic representations and practical applications, for example, in paintings by M.C. Escher, as a wedding ring, or as a drive belt to wear both sides of the belt equally.

EEG hyperscanning during multiuser gaming offers opportunities to study brain characteristics of social interaction under various paradigms. In this study, we aimed to characterize neural signatures and phase-based functional connectivity patterns of gaming strategies during collaborative and competitive alpha neurofeedback games. Twenty pairs of participants with no close relationship took part in three sessions of collaborative or competitive multiuser neurofeedback (NF), with identical graphical user interface, using Relative Alpha (RA) power as a control signal. Collaborating dyads had to keep their RA within 5% of each other for the team to be awarded a point, while members of competitive dyads scored points if their RA was 10% above their opponent’s. Interbrain synchrony existed only during gaming but not during baseline in either collaborative or competitive gaming. Spectral analysis and interbrain connectivity showed that in collaborative gaming, players with higher resting state alpha content were more active in regulating their RA to match those of their partner. Moreover, interconnectivity was the strongest between homologous brain structures of the dyad in theta and alpha bands, indicating a similar degree of planning and social exchange. Competitive gaming emphasized the difference between participants who were able to relax and, in this way, maintain RA, and those who had an unsuccessful approach. Analysis of interbrain connections shows engagement of frontal areas in losers, but not in winners, indicating the formers’ attempt to mentalise and apply strategies that might be suitable for conventional gaming, but inappropriate for the alpha neurofeedback-based game. We show that in gaming based on multiplayer non-verbalized NF, the winning strategy is dependent on the rules of the game and on the behavior of the opponent. Mental strategies that characterize successful gaming in the physical world might not be adequate for NF-based gaming.

Humans are social creatures whose behavior and consciousness are heavily shaped by their environment. Hence, it is natural that hyperscanning, a technique which involves simultaneous recording of physiological activity from more than one subject, is used to deepen our understanding of human interaction. In recent years, hyperscanning has been applied to brain activity to shed light on the neurophysiological representation of various types of interpersonal communication. These range from verbal interaction (Pérez et al., 2017; Ahn et al., 2018), leader-imitator (Dumas et al., 2010; Yun et al., 2012), joint attention and joint decision-making (Toppi et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2018), to teaching or playing music in a duet (Sänger et al., 2012; Müller et al., 2013). Moreover, the neurological coupling of mothers and their infants was investigated for positive and negative emotions and their regulation (Reindl et al., 2018; Santamaria et al., 2020).

DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

It appears that most IT environments have not connected the dots when it comes to ransomware and the importance of a good protection system. It’s easy to infer this when reading a recent IDC survey of more than 500 CIOs from 20-plus industries around the world.

The most headline-grabbing statistic from IDC’s report is that 46% of respondents were successfully attacked by ransomware in the last three years. That means that ransomware has leaped past natural disasters to become the primary reason one must be good at performing large data restores. Many years ago, the main reason for such restores was hardware failure because the failure of a disk system often meant a complete restore from scratch.

It’s easy to think of Earth’s geomagnetic poles as features that are set in stone (or ice), but both poles are not stationary and remain in a permanent state of flux. Since it was first documented by scientists in the 1830s, the North Magnetic Pole has wandered some 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) across the upper stretches of the Northern Hemisphere from Canada towards Siberia. Between 1990 and 2005, the rate of this movement accelerated from less than 15 kilometers per year to around 50 to 60 kilometers per year.

A study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, argues the changes could be explained by the to-ing and fro-ing between two magnetic “blobs” of molten material in the planet’s interior, causing a titanic shift of its magnetic field.

The North Magnetic Pole is the point at which Earth’s magnetic field points vertically downwards, dictated by molten iron that’s sloshing around Earth’s interior through convection currents. The recent shift towards Siberia, it seems, is caused by a blip in the pattern of flow in Earth’s interior that occurred between 1970 and 1999. The change resulted in the Canadian blob becoming elongated and losing its influence on the magnetosphere, causing the pole to zoom toward Siberia.

A new law in NYC will come into effect on April 15, 2023, requiring companies using automated employment decision tools to pass an audit for bias. AI ethicist Merve Hickok explains everything about it here.

Europe has an energy crisis. Factories are halting operations in the face of soaring energy prices; families are paying 50% more for heating (or opting to freeze in their homes), and Europe as a whole continues to destabilize its political position by making itself more dependent on Russia for natural gas.

Almost every patient who gets myeloma and is treated with a standard therapy also experiences relapse. But researchers have developed an antibody therapy that triggers the immune system to destroy these cancer cells. The bispecific antibody can bind to T cells and multiple myeloma cells at once, to kill the cancer. This immunotherapy, called talquetamab, was astonishingly effective, and worked in about 73 percent of patients who were treated with the drug in two clinical trials. The treatment even helped for a patient who had a cancer that resisted all therapies that have been approved for multiple myeloma.

Talquetamab takes advantage of a receptor on myeloma cells called GPRC5D, and CD3, a complex and co-receptor on the surface of T cells. Anti-CD3 antibodies have long been known to cause the activation of T cells. Mouse studies showed that talquetamab can recruit and activate CD3-positive T-cells, which inhibits the formation and growth of tumors.

The explanation of inertia based on “Mach’s principle” is briefly revisited and an experiment whereby the gravitational origin of inertia can be tested is described. The test consists of detecting a small stationary force with a sensitive force sensor. The force is presumably induced when a periodic transient Mach effect mass fluctuation is driven in high voltage, high energy density capacitors that are subjected to 50 kHz, 1.3 kV amplitude voltage signal, and threaded by an alternating magnetic flux of the same frequency. An effect of the sort predicted is shown to be present in the device tested. It has the expected magnitude and depends on the relative phase of the Mach effect mass fluctuation and the alternating magnetic flux as expected. The observed effect also displays scaling behaviors that are unique to Mach effects.