Lifeboat Foundation

Interesting discovery! I’d love to see it in action.

A new ferroelectric polymer that efficiently converts electrical energy into mechanical strain has been developed by Penn State researchers. This material, showing potential for use in medical devices and robotics, overcomes traditional piezoelectric limitations. Researchers improved performance by creating a polymer nanocomposite, significantly reducing the necessary driving field strength, expanding potential applications.

A new type of ferroelectric polymer that is exceptionally good at converting electrical energy into mechanical strain holds promise as a high-performance motion controller or “actuator” with great potential for applications in medical devices, advanced robotics, and precision positioning systems, according to a team of international researchers led by Penn State.

Continue reading “Artificial Muscles Flex for the First Time: Ferroelectric Polymer Innovation in Robotics” »

Notpla has been announced as the winner of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, in the category of ‘Build a Waste-Free World’!

https://www.notpla.com/

Continue reading “Seaweed to Replace Plastic | Edible & Biodegradable Packaging | Notpla” »

Italian architect Gae Avitabile has designed the interior of Civico 29, a sea-inspired cocktail bar in an Italian coastal town.

FRO is effective against acne

The disc diffusion experiment results indicated that 20 μL FRO successfully suppressed CA growth, producing distinct 13 mm inhibition zones at a concentration of 100 mg/mL. FRO significantly suppressed CA-induced increases in sebum production, thereby slowing or reversing acne onset.

FRO was found to be rich in phenolic compounds, including gallic acid, kaempferol, quercetin, and fisetin. The concentration of total phenolic compounds (TPCs) averaged 118.2 mg gallic acid equivalents (GAEs) for every gram of FRO.

388 likes, — AI-GPT Insights (@aigptinsights) on Instagram: The future of Al Automations is here.

#chatgptinsights #aigpt #ai #artificialintelligence #chatgpt

Reservoir computing is a promising computational framework based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which essentially maps input data onto a high-dimensional computational space, keeping some parameters of artificial neural networks (ANNs) fixed while updating others. This framework could help to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms, while also reducing the amount of data required to adequately train them.

RNNs essentially leverage recurrent connections between their different processing units to process sequential data and make accurate predictions. While RNNs have been found to perform well on numerous tasks, optimizing their performance by identifying parameters that are most relevant to the task they will be tackling can be challenging and time-consuming.

Jason Kim and Dani S. Bassett, two researchers at University of Pennsylvania, recently introduced an alternative approach to design and program RNN-based reservoir computers, which is inspired by how programming languages work on computer hardware. This approach, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, can identify the appropriate parameters for a given network, programming its computations to optimize its performance on target problems.

That was fast.

We’ve heard plenty of rumors about Windows 12 this year. While Microsoft has yet to officially confirm it is in the works, there have been several hints pointing to its existence. One of these came at the Build 2023 developer conference in the form of a video screenshot that referred to a “next generation” of Windows. That presumably refers to Windows 12 and hopefully not a fully cloud-based Windows 11.

Microsoft has also referred to a “Next Valley Prototype Design,” said to be a codename for the next-generation of Windows.

Continue reading “Windows 12 rumored to arrive in fall 2024 with a floating taskbar and a focus on AI” »

Dr. Varsha Ramachandran from the Center for Astronomy of Heidelberg University (ZAH) and her colleagues uncovered the first “stripped” star of intermediate-mass. This discovery marks a missing link in our picture of stellar evolution toward systems with merging neutron stars, which are crucial to our understanding of the origin of heavy elements, such as silver and gold. Dr. Ramachandran is a postdoc in the research group of Dr. Andreas Sander, located at ZAH’s Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI). These results were now published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The team of researchers discovered the first representative of the long-predicted, but as yet unconfirmed population of intermediate-mass stripped stars. “Stripped stars” are stars that have lost most of their outer layers, revealing their hot and dense helium-rich core, which results from the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. Most of these stripped stars are formed in binary star systems in which one star’s strong gravitational pull peels off and accretes matter from its companion.

For a long time, astrophysicists have known of low-mass stripped stars, known as subdwarfs, as well as their massive cousins, known as Wolf-Rayet stars. But until now, they have never been able to find any of the so-called “intermediate-mass stripped stars,” raising questions whether our basic theoretical picture needs a major revision.

NASA technicians have installed the heat shield on the Artemis 2 Orion spacecraft, which will carry astronauts around the moon in late 2024.