Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine a simple and effective treatment for restoring the sense of smell in people who have lost it or never had it in the first place – that could one day be possible as a result of early stage research on mice, in which olfactory nerves were replenished using stem cells.

Using droplets of globose basal cells – the same cells that naturally replace damaged and ageing neurons related to smell – scientists were able to get them to develop into full nerve cells, stretching right into the brain.

Ultimately a few squirts of stem cells were able to reconnect the axons leading to the olfactory signalling in the brains of the mice. Scientists are still a long way from repeating the trick with human beings, but it’s a very promising start.

Continue reading “Spraying Stem Cells Up The Noses of Mice Has Restored Their Sense of Smell” »

A laser-driven technique for creating fusion that dispenses with the need for radioactive fuel elements and leaves no toxic radioactive waste is now within reach, say researchers.

Dramatic advances in powerful, high-intensity lasers are making it viable for scientists to pursue what was once thought impossible: creating fusion energy based on hydrogen-boron reactions. And an Australian physicist is in the lead, armed with a patented design and working with international collaborators on the remaining scientific challenges.

In a paper in the scientific journal Laser and Particle Beams today, lead author Heinrich Hora from the University of New South Wales in Sydney and international colleagues argue that the path to hydrogen-boron fusion is now viable, and may be closer to realization than other approaches, such as the deuterium-tritium fusion approach being pursued by U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor under construction in France.

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Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical.

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has adapted laser-induced graphene (LIG) into small, metal-free devices that generate electricity. Like rubbing a balloon on hair, putting LIG composites in contact with other surfaces produces static electricity that can be used to power devices.

Continue reading “Flexible generators turn movement into energy” »

D-Wave Systems today unveiled the roadmap for its 5,000-qubit quantum computer. Components of D-Wave’s next-generation quantum computing platform will come to market between now and mid-2020 via ongoing quantum processing unit (QPU) and cloud-delivered software updates. The complete system will be available through cloud access and for on-premise installation in mid-2020.

Binary digits (bits) are the basic units of information in classical computing while quantum bits (qubits) make up quantum computing. Bits are always in a state of 0 or 1, while qubits can be in a state of 0, 1, or a superposition of the two. Quantum computing leverages qubits to perform computations that would be much more difficult for a classical computer. Based in Burnaby, Canada, D-Wave has been developing its own quantum computers that use quantum annealing.

D-Wave is mainly focused on solving optimization problems, so its quantum computers can’t be directly compared to the competition. Indeed, many have questioned whether D-Wave’s systems have quantum properties, and thus performance that classical computers can’t match. In the meantime, D-Wave continues to improve and sell its systems.

Continue reading “D-Wave previews quantum computing platform with over 5,000 qubits” »

The techniques of microwave quantum optics are applied to collective spin excitations in a macroscopic sphere of ferromagnetic insulator. We demonstrate.

In the single-magnon limit, strong coupling between a magnetostatic mode in the sphere and a microwave cavity mode. Moreover, we introduce a superconducting qubit in the cavity and couple the qubit with the magnon excitation via the virtual photon excitation. We observe the magnon-vacuum-induced Rabi splitting.

The hybrid quantum system enables generation and characterization of non-classical quantum states of magnons.

The sense of smell has been restored to mice suffering olfactory problems with the aid of stem cell therapies. The findings provide the basis for transitional research to see whether intranasal stem cell treatments can be beneficial for those who have lost their sense of smell.

Amazing…

Oww.

What an incredible design.

Continue reading “Is your food fake or real?” »

DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program aims to find out — and so shape America’s future arsenal.

A U.S. military research program is advancing the study of humans and machines working together by testing how well pilots and artificially intelligent entities trust each other in one of the most challenging of tasks: aerial combat, or dogfighting.

The idea behind DARPAs Air Combat Evolution, or ACE, program, is that human fighter pilots will soon be flying alongside increasingly capable drones — dubbed “Loyal Wingmen” — that will help evade other fighters and air defenses. Military leaders often describe the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter as a kind of flying command center, with the human operator working less like a traditional pilot and more like a team captain. The craft is loaded with AI features that pilots say make it easier to fly than traditional fighters. That enables the pilot to digest and put to use the immense amount of data the F-35 pulls in.

Continue reading “US Military Testing Whether Human Pilots Can Trust Robot Wingmen in a Dogfight” »