Lifeboat Foundation

Caltech engineers have made a significant breakthrough in the field of nano-and micro-architected materials by creating a novel material composed of multiple interconnected microscale knots.

Compared to structurally identical but unknotted materials, the presence of knots in this new material significantly enhances its toughness by enabling it to absorb more energy and deform more before returning to its original shape without any damage. These new knotted materials may find applications in biomedicine as well as in aerospace applications due to their durability, possible biocompatibility, and extreme deformability.

“The capability to overcome the general trade-off between material deformability and tensile toughness [the ability to be stretched without breaking] offers new ways to design devices that are extremely flexible, durable, and can operate in extreme conditions,” says former Caltech graduate student Widianto P. Moestopo (MS ‘19, Ph.D. ’22), now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Moestopo is the lead author of a paper on the nanoscale.

FallenKingdomReads’ list of five must-read science fiction books for fans of The Matrix.

This dystopian novel is the basis for the classic film Blade Runner, and it explores a world devastated by nuclear war where bounty hunter Rick Deckard must retire six rogue androids.

In this novel, human consciousness is digitized and can be transferred between bodies, leading to an interstellar conspiracy that draws the protagonist Takeshi into a thrilling adventure.

Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at Duke University, has written a new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (Macmillan), which explores how our lives may be impacted by the use of brain-computer interfaces and neural monitoring devices.

Farahany argues that the development and use of neurotech presents a challenge to our current understanding of human rights. Devices designed to measure, record, and influence our mental processes—used by us or on us—may infringe on our rights to mental privacy, freedom of thought, and mental self-determination. She calls this collection of freedoms the right to cognitive liberty. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Farahany recently about the future and present of neurotech and how to weigh its promises—enhanced capabilities, for instance, including bionics and prosthetics and even a third arm —against its potential to interfere with people’s mental sovereignty.

Author, Nita FarahanyMerritt Chesson.

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Eukaryotes generate the energy for survival through cellular respiration in mitochondria by a process known as the oxidative phosphorylation. In this process, nutrients and oxygen are converted into a chemical form of energy: ATP. This is achieved with a proton gradient built up by the electron transport chain inside mitochondria.

Continue reading “Exploring a massive supercomplex in mitochondria comprising all four respiratory complexes” »

A study finds that fruit from the cocklebur plant, an invasive weed, may have anti-aging and anti-inflammatory capabilities and could potentially be used in skin care.

Using NASA’s Chandra spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has performed X-ray observations of the Cigar Galaxy. Results of the observational campaign, presented March 16 on the pre-print repository arXiv, deliver crucial information regarding diffuse emission from this galaxy.

Discovered in 1,774, Cigar Galaxy (Messier 82, or M82) is a starburst galaxy located some 11.73 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It has a size of about 40,800 light years and is one of the closest starburst galaxies to Earth.

Observations of the Cigar Galaxy have found that it experiences a large-scale galactic wind at various wavelengths, for instance, in hard X-rays above a few keV. This superwind appears to be concentrated in the galaxy’s two high surface brightness regions or clumps, and is fueled by energy released by supernovae within the clumps that occur at a rate of about one every ten years. Previous Chandra studies of this galaxy have detected bright X-ray binaries that dominate the hard X-ray band and revealed that there is residual diffuse emission surrounding the starburst disk.

Chatbots are all the rage right now, and everyone wants a piece of the action. Google has Bard, Microsoft has Bing Chat, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is practically synonymous with AI at this point. But what if you don’t want to rely on a cloud service for your chatbot? We’ve got a ChatGPT-like AI you can download — an Alpaca.

AI can now generate videos simply from your description of what you want to see. It’s like Dall-E or Stable Diffusion for video.

A new study finds that AI tools could more quickly handle at least half of the tasks that auditors, interpreters and writers do now.