Lifeboat Foundation

A nova outburst visible to the naked eye is expected to decorate the night sky this year, offering a rare skywatching opportunity.

The star system offering us this opportunity is known as T Coronae Borealis (T CrB). It’s located some 3,000 light-years away from Earth and consists of a red giant star and a white dwarf that orbit each other. When the white dwarf steals enough stellar material from its red giant companion, it ignites a brief flash of nuclear fusion on its surface, triggering what is known as a nova outburst.

A new haptic device mimics materials’ softness, from marshmallow to heart, conquering complex challenges surrounding robotics.

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University –led research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

The team presented their findings on March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

Scientists used graphene, another form of carbon, but a good conductor of electricity to transform their new diamonds into conductors.

A team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) detailed their ‘Complementary-Transformer’ AI chip during the recent 2024 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC). The new C-Transformer chip is claimed to be the world’s first ultra-low power AI accelerator chip capable of large language model (LLM) processing.

In a press release, the researchers power-shame Nvidia, claiming that the C-Transformer uses 625 times less power and is 41x smaller than the green team’s A100 Tensor Core GPU. It also reveals that the Samsung fabbed chip’s achievements largely stem from refined neuromorphic computing technology.

Though we are told that the KAIST C-Transformer chip can do the same LLM processing tasks as one of Nvidia’s beefy A100 GPUs, none of the press nor conference materials we have provided any direct comparative performance metrics. That’s a significant statistic, conspicuous by its absence, and the cynical would probably surmise that a performance comparison doesn’t do the C-Transformer any favors.

Water determines life: humans are three-quarters water. An international research team led by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) has now discovered how water also determines the structure of the material that holds us together: collagen.

In a paper published in PNAS, the researchers elucidate the role of water in the molecular self-assembly of collagen. They show that by replacing water with its ‘twin molecule’ heavy water (D₂O), one can ‘tune’ the interaction between collagen molecules, and thus influence the process of collagen self-assembly. The findings will help to better understand the tissue failures resulting from heritable collagen-related diseases, such as brittle bone disease (osteogenesis imperfecta).

As lead author Dr. Giulia Giubertoni of the UvA’s Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences (HIMS) puts it, “In studying these and other collagen diseases, many researchers, including myself, … have always missed an important part of the puzzle, and the possibility that tissue failure might be partly due to water-collagen interaction was not taken very seriously. We now show that perturbing the water layer around the protein, even very slightly, has dramatic effects on collagen assembly.”

Most humanoid robots pick things up with their hands – but that’s not how we humans do it, particularly when we’re carrying something bulky. We use our chests, hips and arms as well – and that’s the idea behind Toyota’s new soft robot.

Punyo, as it’s called, is a torso-up humanoid research platform. First and foremost, it’s adorably Japanese, with a cute and approachable looking face and a cuddly, husky look reminiscent of the Baymax robot from Disney’s Big Hero 6. Adding to the cuddle factor, he appears to be wearing a big, cosy-looking sweater.

Continue reading “Toyota’s new soft humanoid picks things up with its whole body” »

Water and electronics don’t usually mix, but as it turns out, batteries could benefit from some H₂O.

By replacing the hazardous chemical electrolytes used in commercial batteries with water, scientists have developed a recyclable ‘water battery’ – and solved key issues with the emerging technology, which could be a safer and greener alternative.

Continue reading “New ‘Water Batteries’ Are Cheaper, Recyclable, And Won’t Explode” »

In a collaborative study, researchers from Kyushu University and Harvard Medical School have identified proteins that can turn or “reprogram” fibroblasts—the most commonly found cells in skin and connective tissue—into cells with similar properties to limb progenitor cells. Publishing in Developmental Cell, the researchers’ findings have enhanced our understanding of limb development and have set the stage for regenerative therapy in the future.

Globally, close to 60 million people are living with limb loss. Amputations can result from various medical conditions such as tumors, infections, and birth defects, or due to trauma from industrial accidents, traffic accidents, and natural disasters such as earthquakes. People with limb injuries often rely on synthetic materials and metal prostheses, but many researchers are studying the process of limb development, with the aim of bringing regenerative therapy, or natural tissue replacement, one step closer as a potential treatment.

“During limb development in the embryo, limb progenitor cells in the limb bud give rise to most of the different limb tissues, such as bone, muscle, cartilage and tendon. It’s therefore important to establish an easy and accessible way of making these cells,” explains Dr. Yuji Atsuta, lead researcher who began tackling this project at Harvard Medical School and continues it as a lecturer at Kyushu University’s Graduate School of Sciences.