Lifeboat Foundation

After training to hand-write Japanese characters, the robot could then copy words in Hindi, Greek, and English just by looking at examples.

Some research topics, says conventional wisdom, a physics PhD student shouldn’t touch with an iron-tipped medieval lance: sinkholes in the foundations of quantum theory. Problems so hard, you’d have a snowball’s chance of achieving progress. Problems so obscure, you’d have a snowball’s chance of convincing anyone to care about progress. Whether quantum physics could influence cognition much.

Quantum physics influences cognition insofar as (i) quantum physics prevents atoms from imploding and (ii) implosion inhabits atoms from contributing to cognition. But most physicists believe that useful entanglement can’t survive in brains. Entanglement consists of correlations shareable by quantum systems and stronger than any achievable by classical systems. Useful entanglement dies quickly in hot, wet, random environments.

Brains form such environments. Imagine injecting entangled molecules A and B into someone’s brain. Water, ions, and other particles would bombard the molecules. The higher the temperature, the heavier the bombardment. The bombardiers would entangle with the molecules via electric and magnetic fields. Each molecule can share only so much entanglement. The more A entangled with the environment, the less A could remain entangled with B. A would come to share a tiny amount of entanglement with each of many particles. Such tiny amounts couldn’t accomplish much. So quantum physics seems unlikely to affect cognition significantly.

Continue reading “Quantum information in quantum cognition” »

Beijing team believes it has solved problem of powering tens of billions of nanometre-sized transistors without burning out the chip.

Humans may not be able to burp properly in space, but we can now edit a genome. For the first time, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of brewer’s yeast.

The goal wasn’t to create super space yeast. The astronauts were studying how DNA repair mechanisms work in space, so they snipped through strands of the fungus’s genetic code in a number of places to mimic radiation damage.

“The damage actually happens on the space station and the analysis also happens in space,” said Emily Gleason of miniPCR Bio, the company that designed the DNA lab aboard the ISS. “We want to understand if DNA repair methods are different in space than on Earth.”

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The science exhibition, which goes by the name “Vigyan Samagam”, will highlight India’s contributions to some of the world’s biggest science projects. It is a jointly-funded effort by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and the Department of Science & Technology (DST).

While in India, the CERN exhibit will be bilingual — in English and Hindi for the public to make the most of.

Continue reading “CERN travelling science exhibit comes to India: Here’s when and where you can catch it” »

A volcano erupted on the Indonesian island of Bali Saturday, sending ash into the sky over surrounding villages and lava pouring down its sides.

The island’s Mount Agung put national agencies on notice, causing some flight cancellations but no reported casualties with the eruption, which reportedly spread lava and incandescent rocks over about two miles.

The national disaster agency said Mount Agung’s eruption lasted four minutes and 30 seconds, according to multiple reports.

Continue reading “A Volcano in Bali Along The ‘Ring of Fire’ Erupted on Saturday, And It Looks Terrifying” »

The idea that science skills are innate and great discoveries are made only by “lone geniuses” is losing traction in STEM.

Brain cancer kills more Australian children than other cancers; University of Melbourne research finds genetically engineered killer T-cells could change that.

Geologists first noticed something unusual in the Indian Ocean in November last year, when they detected a massive seismic event originating from a spot near to the French island of Mayotte. Now further research has revealed that the source of the seismic activity is an enormous underwater volcano.

The people living on Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique off the coast of Africa, had been worried by seismic tremors for months. They were experiencing small earthquakes daily, Laure Fallou, a sociologist with the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre in Bruyères-le-Ch tel, France, told Science. People “needed information,” she said. “They were getting very stressed, and were losing sleep.”

Maps of the seafloor showed a dramatic and recent change: a structure 800 meters high and 5 kilometers (3 miles) across had appeared on the ocean floor where there had been nothing before. A research team from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) were dispatched to investigate and placed six seismometers near the area of activity on the ocean floor, 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) beneath the surface.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover Unexpected Underwater Volcano off the Coast of Africa” »