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A chemistry collaboration has led to a creative way to put carbon dioxide to good—and even healthy—use: by incorporating it, via electrosynthesis, into a series of organic molecules that are vital to pharmaceutical development.

In the process, the research team made an innovative discovery. By changing the type of electrochemical reactor, they could produce two completely different products, both of which are useful in medicinal chemistry.

The team’s paper, “Electrochemical Reactor Dictates Site Selectivity in N-Heteroarene Carboxylations,” published Jan 5 in Nature. The paper’s co-lead authors are postdoctoral researchers Peng Yu and Wen Zhang, and Guo-Quan Sun of Sichuan University in China.

Our DNA is made up of genes that vary drastically in size. In humans, genes can be as short as a few hundred molecules known as bases or as long as two million bases. These genes carry instructions for constructing proteins and other information crucial to keeping the body running. Now a new study suggests that longer genes become less active than shorter genes as we grow older. And understanding this phenomenon could reveal new ways of countering the aging process.

Luís Amaral, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University, says he and his colleagues did not initially set out to examine gene length. Some of Amaral’s collaborators at Northwestern had been trying to pinpoint alterations in gene expression—the process through which the information in a piece of DNA is used to form a functional product, such as a protein or piece of genetic material called RNA—as mice aged. But they were struggling to identify consistent changes. “It seemed like almost everything was random,” Amaral says.

Then, at the suggestion of Thomas Stoeger, a postdoctoral scholar In Amaral’s lab, the team decided to consider shifts in gene length. Prior studies had hinted that there might be such a large-scale change in gene activity with age—showing, for example, that the amount of RNA declines over time and that disruptions to transcription (the process through which RNA copies, or transcripts, are formed from DNA templates) can have a greater impact on longer genes than shorter ones.

A two-dimensional crystalline polymer of C60, termed graphullerene, is synthesized by chemical vapour transport, and mechanically exfoliated to produce molecularly thin flakes with clean interfaces for potential optoelectronic applications.

What it means to be conscious is more than just a philosophical question. Researchers continue to investigate how conscious experience arises from the electrochemical activity of the human brain. The answer has important implications for the way brain health is understood—from coma, wherein a person is alive but unable to move or respond to his or her environment, to surgical anesthesia, to the altered thought processes of schizophrenia.

Recent research suggests that there’s no one location in the brain that causes consciousness, pointing to a network phenomenon. However, tracing the various linkages between regions in the brain networks that give rise to awareness and wakefulness has been elusive.

A new approach using functional MRI, an imaging technique that allows you to see and measure brain activity through changes in blood flow over time, provides new insight into how we describe and study conscious states.

Quantum computers hold the promise of performing certain tasks that are intractable even on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. In the future, scientists anticipate using quantum computing to emulate materials systems, simulate quantum chemistry, and optimize hard tasks, with impacts potentially spanning finance to pharmaceuticals.

However, realizing this promise requires resilient and extensible hardware. One challenge in building a large-scale quantum computer is that researchers must find an effective way to interconnect quantum information nodes—smaller-scale processing nodes separated across a computer chip. Because quantum computers are fundamentally different from classical computers, conventional techniques used to communicate electronic information do not directly translate to quantum devices. However, one requirement is certain: Whether via a classical or a quantum interconnect, the carried information must be transmitted and received.

To this end, MIT researchers have developed a quantum computing architecture that will enable extensible, high-fidelity communication between superconducting quantum processors. In work published in Nature Physics, MIT researchers demonstrate step one, the deterministic emission of single photons—information carriers—in a user-specified direction. Their method ensures quantum information flows in the correct direction more than 96 percent of the time.

Is the Director General of the Pacific Community (SPC — https://www.spc.int/about-us/director-general) which is the largest intergovernmental organization in the Pacific and serves as a science and technology for development organization owned by the 26 Member countries and territories in the Pacific region.

SPC’s 650 member staff deliver services and scientific advice to the Pacific across the domains of Oceans, Islands and People, and has deep expertise in food security, water resources, fisheries, disasters, energy, maritime, health, statistics, education, human rights, social development and natural resources.

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What is the Drake Equation? We are talking about The Odds of ALIEN LIFE.
Is there life out there in the Universe?
How are the chances to find Extraterrestrial life?

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The so-called “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer was once described as “a genius of the nuclear age and also the walking, talking conscience of science and civilization”. Born at the outset of the 20th century, his early interests in chemistry and physics would in the 1920s bring him to Göttingen University, where he worked alongside his doctoral supervisor Max Born (1882−1970), close lifelong friend Paul Dirac (1902−84) and eventual adversary Werner Heisenberg (1901−76). This despite the fact that even as early as in his youth, Oppenheimer was singled out as both gifted and odd, at times even unstable. As a child he collected rocks, wrote poetry and studied French literature. Never weighing more than 130 pounds, throughout his life he was a “tall and thin chainsmoker” who once stated that he “needed physics more than friends” who at Cambridge University was nearly charged with attempted murder after leaving a poisoned apple on the desk of one of his tutors. Notoriously abrupt and impatient, at Göttingen his classmates once gave their professor Born an ultimatum: “either the ‘child prodigy’ is reigned in, or his fellow students will boycott the class”. Following the successful defense of his doctoral dissertation, the professor administering the examination, Nobel Laureate James Franck (1882−1964) reportedly left the room stating.

“I’m glad that’s over. He was at the point of questioning me”

From his time as student at Harvard, to becoming a postgraduate researcher in Cambridge and Göttingen, a professor at UC Berkeley, the scientific head of the Manhattan project and after the war, the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, wherever Oppenheimer went he could hold his own with the greatest minds of his age. Max Born, Paul Dirac, John von Neumann, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Richard Feynman, they all admired “Oppie”. When he died in 1967, his published articles in physics totaled 73, ranging from topics in quantum field theory, particle physics, the theory of cosmic radiations to nuclear physics and cosmology. His funeral was attended by over 600 people, and included numerous associates from academia and research as well as government officials, heads of military, even the director of the New York City Ballet.

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Irina Rish is a world-renowned professor of computer science and operations research at the Université de Montréal and a core member of the prestigious Mila organisation. She is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina holds an MSc and PhD in AI from the University of California, Irvine as well as an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Gubkin Institute. Her research focuses on machine learning, neural data analysis, and neuroscience-inspired AI. In particular, she is exploring continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modelling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis. Prof. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modelling. She has served as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML. Irina’s research is focussed on taking us closer to the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. She continues to push the boundaries of machine learning, continually striving to make advancements in neuroscience-inspired AI.

Continue reading “Prof. IRINA RISH — AGI, Complex Systems, Transhumanism #NeurIPS” »