Lifeboat Foundation

Labeling data can be a chore. It’s the main source of sustenance for computer-vision models; without it, they’d have a lot of difficulty identifying objects, people, and other important image characteristics. Yet producing just an hour of tagged and labeled data can take a whopping 800 hours of human time. Our high-fidelity understanding of the world develops as machines can better perceive and interact with our surroundings. But they need more help.

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Microsoft, and Cornell University have attempted to solve this problem plaguing vision models by creating “STEGO,” an algorithm that can jointly discover and segment objects without any human labels at all, down to the pixel.

Continue reading “Scientists create algorithm to assign a label to every pixel in the world, without human supervision” »

Polaritons are quasiparticles that are formed when photons couple strongly with excitations of matter. These quasi-particles, which are half-light and half-matter, underpin the functioning of a wide range of emergent photonic quantum systems, including semiconductor-based nanophotonic devices and circuit quantum electrodynamic systems.

Researchers at Stony Brook University have recently introduced a novel polariton system in which the matter excitation is replaced by an atom in an optical lattice and the photon by an atomic matter wave. This system, introduced in a paper published in Nature Physics, results in matter-wave polaritons, and could open interesting possibilities for the study of polaritonic quantum matter.

“A few years ago, we became interested in the idea of using ultracold atoms to simulate the dynamical behavior of quantum emitters,” Dr. Dominik Schneble, head of the team of researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “It turns out that it is possible to build an artificial atom that spontaneously emits matter waves, in much the same way as an atom spontaneously emits a photon (as described by the so-called Weisskopf-Wigner model).”

Thoughts, memories, sensations — why are we still in the dark about how they work?

The Aptera solar car is expected to hit roads in 2021, but even if it’s not the next big thing in transportation, its design elements could be.

Josh SeehermanI don’t think he’s wrong.

Walter Lynsdale” agreeing with a Twitter user who said the “Woke mind virus is the biggest threat to civilization,”

Continue reading “The art of Aphantasia: How ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise” »

This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler.

Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way.

Continue reading “Celebrating Hubble’s 32nd Birthday: A Magnificent View of an Unusual Collection of Five Galaxies” »

Traditionally, research showed tumor tissue to be free of microbes. In recent years, however, technology has advanced, allowing scientists to detect tiny numbers of bacteria that have taken up residence inside tumor tissue. For example, Shang Cai and his team detected 135,000 microorganisms in a gram of mouse breast tumor tissue, almost ten times more than in healthy tissue. (By comparison, a gram of feces has roughly 300 billion microbes.) Furthermore, nearly all the bacteria were living inside the mouse cells.

The biological significance of the intratumor microbiota remains largely unknown. However, scientists have found that the gut microbiota contributes to tumor progression. Cai wanted to know if these tumor-infesting intracellular bacteria are also involved in cancer progression.

The latest Planetary Science Decadal Survey has been published. The future mission recommendations include a Uranus orbiter in the mid-2040s (the first visit to the planet since 1986) and the Enceladus Orbilander (landing in the early 2050s).

Oxford University researchers have developed a sensor made of sapphire fiber that can tolerate extreme temperatures, with the potential to enable significant improvements in efficiency and emission reduction in aerospace and power generation.

The work, published in the journal Optics Express, uses a sapphire optical fiber —a thread of industrially grown sapphire less than half a millimeter thick—which can withstand temperatures over 2000°C. When light is injected onto one end of the sapphire fiber, some is reflected back from a point along the fiber which has been modified to be sensitive to temperature (known as a Bragg grating). The wavelength (color) of this reflected light is a measure of the temperature at that point.

The research resolves a 20-year-old problem with existing sensors—while the sapphire fiber seems very thin, in comparison to the wavelength of light it is huge. This means that the light can take many different paths along the sapphire fiber, which results in many different wavelengths being reflected at once. The researchers overcame this problem by writing a channel along the length of the fiber, such that the light is contained within a tiny cross-section, one-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. With this approach, they were able to make a sensor that predominantly reflects a single wavelength of light.