Lifeboat Foundation

The makers noticed that the processing time with GPT-4 was much longer than GPT-3 and made Ameca appear less responsive with her facial expressions.

In December 2021, we brought to you the ‘world’s most advanced humanoid robot’. Ameca, born of a UK-based company Engineered Arts, displayed a multitude of human-like expressions in August 2022. Now, the developers behind Ameca have released a new video in which the bot can be seen exhibiting its polyglot-like qualities — speaking several languages including Japanese, German, Chinese, French, British, and American English.

Continue reading “Researchers train ‘world’s most advanced humanoid robot’ Ameca on GPT-4, finds her less responsive” »

The team developed a cyclical process in which the device is rinsed with water, dried in relatively low heat, and printed on again.

In the electronics industry, placing several layers of components on top of each other to develop complex devices is no easy task. And with printed electronics, the task is more complicated.

“If you’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, one layer on either slice of bread is easy,” Aaron Franklin, the Addy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke, said in a statement. “But if you put the jelly down first and then try to spread peanut butter on top of it, forget it, the jelly won’t stay put and will intermix with the peanut butter.

Continue reading “Researchers print fully recyclable electronics that replace toxic chemicals with water” »

More than 60 scientists work to convert research into practical applications too.

The government of China has provided funding to set up a leading laboratory to study brain-machine interfaces, much like Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been working on. The recently inaugurated Sixth Haihe Laboratory in the northeast port city of Tianjin to “drive innovation and create new areas for economic growth”, the South China Morning Post.

Chinese lab to work on brain-machine interfaces

Continue reading “Chinese Neuralink? State-funded lab to work on brain-machine interaction in China” »

The explosion of AI to the tech scene is interesting but also scary at the same time.

A noted computer scientist at the University of Berkeley, Stuart Russell, has warned of dire consequences if artificial intelligence (AI) development remains unchecked. Russell is one of the noted scientists who co-signed a letter seeking a moratorium on releasing AI products for the next six months.

It would be hard for anyone to believe that ChatGPT has only been with us for a few months. While AI used to be a topic of discussion amongst a small group of computer researchers, the conversational chatbot has become a topic of conversation in mainstream media, too.

Continue reading “Rise of AI: Computer researcher warns of ‘Chernobyl’-like situation without safeguards” »

According to Chinese state media, a natively developed ground-effect “wingship” has completed 30 critical sea trials, opening the door for further development.

The South China Morning Post claims that China’s new ground-effect “wingship” has just completed 30 sea trials. According to the state-run media company, the new vehicle could be used to airdrop supplies on islands and beaches and conduct quick search and rescue missions.

Continue reading “Chinese ‘wingship’ that can travel 20 times faster than a boat completes sea trials” »

The project aims to cut the cargo cost per kilogram to 5 percent of that of the existing Long March rockets.

In response to advancements in the United States’ reusable rocket technology, especially being offered by SpaceX, Chinese space authorities have launched a counter-offensive to lower the costs of its space programs.

According to a report by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), a new rocket launching system in China, which is under development, aims to cut the cargo cost per kilogram to 5 percent to that of the existing Long March rockets.

Like the better-known prostate-specific antigen (PSA), prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) is a biomarker that can tell physicians much about a patient’s metastatic prostate cancer. PSMA is a protein on the cell surface of most prostate cancers; scanning for it with positron emission tomography (PET) can indicate where in the body prostate cancer has spread, and it can be targeted with a newly approved radioactive therapy. In 15%–20% of patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer, however, PSMA production stops at advanced stages of the disease.

In a new study in the journal Nature Cancer, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute scientists shed new light on the mechanism that raises and lowers PSMA expression in prostate cancer cells. The findings may help physicians select PSMA-targeting therapies for specific patients.

It has long been known that the androgen receptor (AR)—a structure that triggers cell growth in response to the hormone androgen—controls the production of PSMA in prostate cancer cells. In the Nature Cancer study, researchers led by Dana-Farber’s Himisha Beltran, MD, and Martin Bakht, Ph.D., found that PSMA expression is lower in liver metastases than in other parts of the body, regardless of expression of the androgen receptor.

The circadian system of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7,942 relies on a three-protein nanomachine (KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC) that undergoes an oscillatory phosphorylation cycle with a period of ~24 h. This core oscillator can be reconstituted in vitro and is used to study the molecular mechanisms of circadian timekeeping and entrainment. Previous studies showed that two key metabolic changes that occur in cells during the transition into darkness, changes in the ATP/ADP ratio and redox status of the quinone pool, are cues that entrain the circadian clock. By changing the ATP/ADP ratio or adding oxidized quinone, one can shift the phase of the phosphorylation cycle of the core oscillator in vitro. However, the in vitro oscillator cannot explain gene expression patterns because the simple mixture lacks the output components that connect the clock to genes. Recently, a high-throughput in vitro system termed the in vitro clock (IVC) that contains both the core oscillator and the output components was developed. Here, we used IVC reactions and performed massively parallel experiments to study entrainment, the synchronization of the clock with the environment, in the presence of output components. Our results indicate that the IVC better explains the in vivo clock-resetting phenotypes of wild-type and mutant strains and that the output components are deeply engaged with the core oscillator, affecting the way input signals entrain the core pacemaker. These findings blur the line between input and output pathways and support our previous demonstration that key output components are fundamental parts of the clock.

Researchers have developed a new way to produce and shape large, high-quality mirrors that are much thinner than the primary mirrors previously used for telescopes deployed in space. The resulting mirrors are flexible enough to be rolled up and stored compactly inside a launch vehicle.

“Launching and deploying space telescopes is a complicated and costly procedure,” said Sebastian Rabien from Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany. “This new approach—which is very different from typical mirror production and polishing procedures—could help solve weight and packaging issues for telescope mirrors, enabling much larger, and thus more sensitive, telescopes to be placed in orbit.”

In the journal Applied Optics, Rabien reports successful fabrication of parabolic membrane mirror prototypes up to 30 cm in diameter. These mirrors, which could be scaled up to the sizes needed in space telescopes, were created by using chemical vapor deposition to grow membrane mirrors on a rotating liquid inside a vacuum chamber. He also developed a method that uses heat to adaptively correct imperfections that might occur after the mirror is unfolded.