Lifeboat Foundation

Sony has shown off its new surgical robot doing some super-precise work sewing up a tiny slit in a corn kernel. It’s the first machine of its kind that auto-switches between its different tools, and has successfully been tested in animal surgery.

It’s designed to help in the field of super-microsurgery, a highly specialized field in which surgeons operate on extremely small blood vessels and nerves, with diameters well under 1 mm (0.04 in). As you might imagine, this kind of thing requires incredibly steady hands, and specialists in this field often do their work whole looking through a microscope.

Continue reading “Watch: Sony’s new microsurgery robot stitches up a corn kernel” »

If you’re worried about your data, here’s what you can do, including how to reset your AT&T account passcode.

A British consortium with funding from the UK government has successfully tested what it calls “un-jammable” quantum navigation tech in flight.

Geopolitical tensions and warfare have introduced GPS jamming as a means of messing with enemy communication and navigation. This can cause disturbances for both military and civilian transportation and location services.

The quantum-based navigation system is called Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT). Its developers are quantum technology firm Infleqtion’s UK subsidiary in collaboration with aerospace company BAE Systems and defence tech contractor QinetiQ, among others.

From Stanford TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correction.

From Stanford.

TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correction.

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A quantum internet would essentially be unhackable. In the future, sensitive information—financial or national security data, for instance, as opposed to memes and cat pictures—would travel through such a network in parallel to a more traditional internet.

Of course, building and scaling systems for quantum communications is no easy task. Scientists have been steadily chipping away at the problem for years. A Harvard team recently took another noteworthy step in the right direction. In a paper published this week in Nature, the team says they’ve sent entangled photons between two quantum memory nodes 22 miles (35 kilometers) apart on existing fiber optic infrastructure under the busy streets of Boston.

“Showing that quantum network nodes can be entangled in the real-world environment of a very busy urban area is an important step toward practical networking between quantum computers,” Mikhail Lukin, who led the project and is a physics professor at Harvard, said in a press release.

A substantial proportion of people with a traumatic brain injury who had their life support withdrawn may have survived and at least partially recovered, a study suggests.

Traumatic brain injuries can occur due to a forceful blow, a jolt to the head or an object entering the brain, such as a bullet…

After comparing people with brain injuries whose life support was continued with those who had it turned off, scientists calculated that around 40 per cent in the latter group may have made some recovery.

Continue reading “Some brain injury patients would recover if life support weren’t ended” »

An advanced new technique combines machine-learning algorithms with measurements of vibrations for monitoring tool wear.

In an amazing phenomenon of quantum physics known as tunneling, particles appear to move faster than the speed of light. However, physicists from Darmstadt believe that the time it takes for particles to tunnel has been measured incorrectly until now. They propose a new method to stop the speed of quantum particles.

In classical physics, there are hard rules that cannot be circumvented. For example, if a rolling ball does not have enough energy, it will not get over a hill, but will turn around before reaching the top and reverse its direction. In quantum physics, this principle is not quite so strict: a particle may pass a barrier, even if it does not have enough energy to go over it. It acts as if it is slipping through a tunnel, which is why the phenomenon is also known as quantum tunneling. What sounds magical has tangible technical applications, for example in flash memory drives.

In the past, experiments in which particles tunneled faster than light drew some attention. After all, Einstein’s theory of relativity prohibits faster-than-light velocities. The question is therefore whether the time required for tunneling was “stopped” correctly in these experiments. Physicists Patrik Schach and Enno Giese from TU Darmstadt follow a new approach to define “time” for a tunneling particle. They have now proposed a new method of measuring this time. In their experiment, they measure it in a way that they believe is better suited to the quantum nature of tunneling.

A viral two-minute short titled “Air Head,” created in part by using OpenAI’s video-generating Sora tool, required a good bit human editing.