Lifeboat Foundation

Chemical reactions that are driven by light offer a powerful tool for chemists who are designing new ways to manufacture pharmaceuticals and other useful compounds. Harnessing this light energy requires photoredox catalysts, which can absorb light and transfer the energy to a chemical reaction.

MIT chemists have now designed a new type of photoredox catalyst that could make it easier to incorporate light-driven reactions into manufacturing processes. Unlike most existing photoredox catalysts, the new class of materials is insoluble, so it can be used over and over again. Such catalysts could be used to coat tubing and perform chemical transformations on reactants as they flow through the tube.

“Being able to recycle the catalyst is one of the biggest challenges to overcome in terms of being able to use photoredox catalysis in manufacturing. We hope that by being able to do flow chemistry with an immobilized catalyst, we can provide a new way to do photoredox catalysis on larger scales,” says Richard Liu, an MIT postdoc and the joint lead author of the new study.

We find that a uniform scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates and photon-electron scattering rate leaves most dimensionless cosmological observables nearly invariant. This result opens up a new approach to reconciling cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure observations with high values of the Hubble constant $H_0$: Find a cosmological model in which the scaling transformation can be realized without violating any measurements of quantities not protected by the symmetry. A “mirror world” dark sector allows for effective scaling of the gravitational free-fall rates while respecting the measured mean photon density today. Further model building might bring consistency with the two constraints not yet satisfied: the inferred primordial abundances of deuterium and helium.

Lack of a robotic hand that can match a human hand will continue to delay full automation.

SINGAPORE, May 30 (Reuters) — After struggling to find staff during the pandemic, businesses in Singapore have increasingly turned to deploying robots to help carry out a range of tasks, from surveying construction sites to scanning library bookshelves.

The city-state relies on foreign workers, but their number fell by 235,700 between December 2019 and September 2021, according to the manpower ministry, which notes how COVID-19 curbs have sped up “the pace of technology adoption and automation” by companies.

Continue reading “From baristas to inspectors: Singapore’s robot workforce plugs labour gaps” »

No, the patterns computers create are not an inherent property of data, they are an emergent property of the structure of the program itself.

While volcanic eruptions and earthquakes serve as immediate reminders that Earth’s interior is anything but peaceful, there are also other, more elusive, dynamic processes taking place deep down below our feet. Using information from ESA’s Swarm satellite mission, scientists have discovered a completely new type of magnetic wave that sweeps across the outermost part of Earth’s outer core every seven years. This fascinating finding, presented today at ESA’s Living Planet Symposium, opens a new window into a world we can never see.

Earth’s magnetic field is like a huge bubble protecting us from the onslaught of cosmic radiation and charged particles carried by powerful winds that escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and stream across the Solar System. Without our magnetic field, life as we know it could not exist.

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[Alexander] created codex_py2cpp as a way of experimenting with Codex, an AI intended to translate natural language into code. [Alexander] had slightly different ideas, however, and created codex_py2cpp as a way to play with the idea of automagically converting Python into C++. It’s not really intended to create robust code conversions, but as far as experiments go, it’s pretty neat.

Biodiversity is on the verge of being devastated due to the inclination towards deforestation these days. The adverse climatic conditions that our Earth is facing nowadays are also the result of this pressing concern. However, to mitigate this climatic distress caused by deforestation, a team of researchers at the MIT Institute has come up with a novel technique to artificially grow wood in a controlled environment in the lab, which can then be used for making furniture and other wooden houses, which are now being made from cutting trees, thereby posing a threat to our natural habitat. Apart from the amazing growth, we can also print “3D custom-designed wooden structures” out of the replicas, which can considerably reduce wood waste as well.

Prior to discussing the mechanism of wood production, an interesting thing to note is that we can easily change the shape and structure of these artificially produced woods according to our requirements. The researchers have demonstrated the whole process through an experiment in which a flowering plant known as “Common zinnia (Zinnia Elegans)” would be taken and the cells are then extracted from its leaves which can then be conserved in a liquid mixture for several days. After it becomes nutritionally embellished, a gel-based material would be utilized to further refine the mixture.

However, these cells would then give birth to new plant cells which will then be treated accordingly as per the lab conditions. Moreover, we can also reform the physical and mechanical properties of the cells by increasing or decreasing the hormonal concentrations as per the needs.

Spike-based neuromorphic hardware holds the promise to provide more energy efficient implementations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) than standard hardware such as GPUs. But this requires to understand how DNNs can be emulated in an event-based sparse firing regime, since otherwise the energy-advantage gets lost. In particular, DNNs that solve sequence processing tasks typically employ Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units that are hard to emulate with few spikes. We show that a facet of many biological neurons, slow after-hyperpolarizing (AHP) currents after each spike, provides an efficient solution. AHP-currents can easily be implemented in neuromorphic hardware that supports multi-compartment neuron models, such as Intel’s Loihi chip. Filter approximation theory explains why AHP-neurons can emulate the function of LSTM units.

A small spacecraft will wade the gravitational tides between Earth and the Moon.