Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A new theory suggests consciousness is a state tied to complex cognitive operations, and not a passive basic state that automatically prevails when we are awake.

Source: RUB

Two researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have come up with a new theory of consciousness. They have long been exploring the nature of consciousness, the question of how and where the brain generates consciousness, and whether animals also have consciousness.

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. The battery could enable a wide variety of wearable electronic devices, and might even be used to make 3D-printed batteries in virtually any shape.

The researchers envision new possibilities for self-powered communications, sensing, and computational devices that could be worn like ordinary clothing, as well as devices whose batteries could also double as structural parts.

In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world’s longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today. MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev (now an assistant professor at National University of Singapore), former MIT postdoc Jung Tae Lee (now a professor at Kyung Hee University), and Benjamin Grena SM ‘13, Ph.D. ‘17 (currently at Apple) are the lead authors on the paper. Other co-authors are MIT professors Yoel Fink, Ju Li, and John Joannopoulos, and seven others at MIT and elsewhere.

NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on February 18 and Zhurong arrived a bit later on May 14. UAE’s Hope orbiter entered Martian orbit on February 9. Although all three of these missions were launched in 2020, their arrival is too significant not to count in this year’s achievements.

Billionaires, Private Space Flights

2021 could also appear as a year when you could finally believe that certain someone selling you a ticket to space is not a scam. Do not forget to fact-check their claims with the celebrity physicist Neil Tyson though. In July, when commercial spaceflight company Virgin Galactic’s top management including the company’s founder Richard Branson flew to a height of 86 kilometres, Tyson contested Virgin Galactic’s space travel claim by saying it was a suborbital flight.

During a summer storm in 2018, a momentous lightning bolt flashed above a network of radio telescopes in the Netherlands. The telescopes’ detailed recordings, which were processed only recently, reveal something no one has seen before: lightning actually starting up inside a thundercloud.

In a new paper that will soon be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, researchers used the observations to settle a long-standing debate about what triggers lightning — the first step in the mysterious process by which bolts arise, grow and propagate to the ground. “It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s the most energetic process on the planet, we have religions centered around this thing, and we have no idea how it works,” said Brian Hare, a lightning researcher at the University of Groningen and a co-author of the new paper.

The schoolbook picture is that, inside a thundercloud, hail falls as lighter ice crystals rise. The hail rubs off the ice crystals’ negatively charged electrons, leading the top of the cloud to become positively charged while the bottom becomes negatively charged. This creates an electric field that grows until a gigantic spark jumps across the sky.

Israel’s National Drone Initiative has launched the fourth phase of its pilot program, which this time will include night operations as well as flights in which cargo will be delivered directly via winches to the end customer.

NDI began flights over urban areas in January 2021, resumed trial flights on Sunday, involving several companies that manage and operate autonomous drone networks.

For the next two weeks, flights will take place day and night above Gush Dan and Yerucham, in order to integrate the use of drones in routine activities such as transportation of basic products, first aid; deploying a drone attached to a vehicle for real-time monitoring of traffic movement with AI-based elements that can provide forecasts, and much more.

General anesthesia doesn’t just work on your brain or on your mind. It works on your consciousness. By altering the delicate electrochemical balance within the neural circuitry inside your head, the basic ground state of what it is to “be” is — temporarily — abolished. In this process lies one of the greatest remaining mysteries in science, and in philosophy too.

Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is giving rise to a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience, right here, right now.

After analyzing the data, researchers found that participants who underwent cataract surgery had nearly 30 percent lower risk of developing dementia compared with those who did not have the procedure. The study also found that the reduction of risk continued for at least a decade following surgery and was associated specifically with the lower risk of Alzheimer’s.

“This is really exciting because no other medical intervention has shown such a strong association with lessening dementia risk in older individuals,” Cecilia S. Lee, ophthalmologist and the study’s lead author, said in a statement.

Thyme and oregano possess an anti-cancer compound that suppresses tumor development, but adding more to your tomato sauce isn’t enough to gain significant benefit. The key to unlocking the power of these plants is in amplifying the amount of the compound created or synthesizing the compound for drug development.

Researchers at Purdue University achieved the first step toward using the compound in pharmaceuticals by mapping its biosynthetic pathway, a sort of molecular recipe of the ingredients and steps needed.

“These plants contain important compounds, but the amount is very low and extraction won’t be enough,” said Natalia Dudareva, a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry in Purdue’s College of Agriculture, who co-led the project. “By understanding how these compounds are formed, we open a path to engineering plants with higher levels of them or to synthesizing the compounds in microorganisms for medical use.

“Today’s technology announcement is about challenging convention and rethinking how we continue to advance society and deliver new innovations that improve life, business and reduce our environmental impact,” said Dr. Mukesh Khare, Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Systems, IBM Research. “Given the constraints the industry is currently facing along multiple fronts, IBM and Samsung are demonstrating our commitment to joint innovation in semiconductor design and a shared pursuit of what we call ‘hard tech.’”

Moore’s Law – an ongoing trend that shows the number of transistors on a computer chip doubling every two years or so – is now approaching what are considered fundamental barriers. Simply put, as more and more transistors are crammed into a finite area, engineers are running out of space.

Historically, transistors have been built to lie flat upon the surface of a semiconductor, with the electric current flowing laterally, or side-to-side, through them. Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET), by contrast, are built perpendicular to the surface of the chip with a vertical, or up-and-down, current flow.