Lifeboat Foundation

Professor theorises electrical impulses sent by mycological organisms could be similar to human language.

Summary: Researchers have identified how working memory is formatted, revealing visual memory can be flexible.

Source: NYU

A team of scientists has discovered how working memory is “formatted”—a finding that enhances our understanding of how visual memories are stored.

Researchers have developed a new fabrication process that allows infrared (IR) glass to be combined with another glass and formed into complex miniature shapes. The technique can be used to create complex infrared optics that could make IR imaging and sensing more broadly accessible.

“Glass that transmits IR wavelengths is essential for many applications, including spectroscopy techniques used to identify various materials and substances,” said research team leader Yves Bellouard from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. “However, infrared glasses are difficult to manufacture, fragile and degrade easily in the presence of moisture.”

In the journal Optics Express, the researchers describe their new technique, which can be used to embed fragile IR glasses inside a durable silica matrix. The process can be used to create virtually any interconnected 3D shape with features measuring a micron or less. It works with a wide variety of glasses, offering a new way to fine-tune the properties of 3D optics with subtle combinations of glass.

A powerful radio-wave laser, called a “megamaser”, has been observed by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. The record-breaking find is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected, at about five billion light years from Earth.

The light from the megamaser has traveled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers to Earth. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Dr. Marcin Glowacki, who previously worked at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Dr. Glowacki, who is now based at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, said megamasers are usually created when two galaxies violently collide in the Universe.

Scientists find a sub-atomic particle’s mass is at odds with one a theory underpinning modern physics.

Physicists are using quantum math to understand what happens when black holes collide. In a surprise, they’ve shown that a single particle can describe a collision’s entire gravitational wave.

A pair of researchers working in the Personal Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College London has taught a robot to put a surgical gown on a supine mannequin. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Fan Zhang and Yiannis Demiris described the approach they used to teach the robot to partially dress the mannequin. Júlia Borràs, with Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, has published a Focus piece in the same journal issue outlining the difficulties in getting robots to handle soft material and the work done by the researchers on this new effort.

As researchers and engineers continue to improve the state of robotics, one area has garnered a lot of attention—using robots to assist with health care. In this instance, the focus was on assisting patients in a hospital setting who have lost the use of their limbs. In such cases, dressing and undressing falls to healthcare workers. Teaching a robot to dress patients has proven to be challenging due to the nature of the soft materials used to make clothes. They change in a near infinite number of ways, making it difficult to teach a robot how to deal with them. To overcome this problem in a clearly defined setting, Zhang and Demiris used a new approach.

The setting was a simulated hospital room with a mannequin lying face up on a bed. Nearby was a hook affixed to the wall holding a surgical gown that is worn by pushing arms forward through sleeves and tying in the back. The task for the robot was to remove the gown from the hook, maneuver it to an optimal position, move to the bedside, identify the “patient” and its orientation and then place the gown on the patient by lifting each arm one at a time and pulling the gown over each in a natural way.

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a “simple but efficient” persistence mechanism adopted by a relatively nascent malware loader called Colibri, which has been observed deploying a Windows information stealer known as Vidar as part of a new campaign.

“The attack starts with a malicious Word document deploying a Colibri bot that then delivers the Vidar Stealer,” Malwarebytes Labs said in an analysis. “The document contacts a remote server at (securetunnel[.]co) to load a remote template named ‘trkal0.dot’ that contacts a malicious macro,” the researchers added.

First documented by FR3D.HK and Indian cybersecurity company CloudSEK earlier this year, Colibri is a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform that’s engineered to drop additional payloads onto compromised systems. Early signs of the loader appeared on Russian underground forums in August 2021.

The night sky has been a source of information and wonder since the dawn of humankind — and it looks almost the same now as it did then.

But the night sky as we know it is on the precipice of changing dramatically due to the proliferation of satellites just a few hundred miles above Earth.

“For the first time in human history, we’re not going to have access to the night sky in the way that we’ve seen it,” Samantha Lawler, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada, said.