Lifeboat Foundation

Gino Elia reviews The Last Writings of Thomas S Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science edited by Bojana Mladenovic.

Stepping inside Erin Adams’ lab at the University of Chicago is a bit overstimulating.

Adams’ work centers on molecular immunology. As the Joseph Regenstein Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and vice provost for research, she researches the molecular signals that the immune system uses to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy tissue.

And her lab is expansive. It includes a tissue culture lab space—where she and her team of postdoctoral fellows work with cells to try to recapitulate things. Then there’s the crystal room where one can find hundreds of labeled wells filled with proteins that are being watched to see if three-dimensional crystals materialize.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a second iteration of its Tools Competition to discover artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that can aid data science and other forms of adult learning.

The agency said Monday that the new program aims to upskill and reskill adults in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and similarly complex areas, preparing them for the 21st century labor landscape.

The opportunity is open to digital learning platform experts, technologists, researchers, students and educators who can propose AI tools that can provide feature tutoring and self-directed learning. The resulting platform may leverage AI or large language models.

Over ten years ago, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) began mapping the universe to find evidence that could help us understand the nature of the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. I’m one of more than 100 contributing scientists that have helped produce the final DES measurement, which has just been released at the 243rd American Astronomical Society meeting in New Orleans.

Dark energy is estimated to make up nearly 70% of the observable universe, yet we still don’t understand what it is. While its nature remains mysterious, the impact of dark energy is felt on grand scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe.

The announcement in New Orleans may take us closer to a better understanding of this form of energy. Among other things, it gives us the opportunity to test our observations against an idea called the cosmological constant that was introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917 as a way of counteracting the effects of gravity in his equations to achieve a universe that was neither expanding nor contracting. Einstein later removed it from his calculations.

Novel GHz-class NMR systems are enabling unprecedented life science and materials research in functional structural biology, drug discovery, metabolomics, and cleantech research.

In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2024. We’ll hear about the mass of the neutrino, the neural basis of consciousness and the climate lawsuits at the Hague, to name but a few.

Hear the biggest stories from the world of science | 6 January 2023.

New discoveries in Tidal Disruption Events enhance our understanding of supermassive black holes and their properties.

A new study by Hebrew University is a significant breakthrough in understanding Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) involving supermassive black holes. The new simulations, for the first time ever, accurately replicate the entire sequence of a TDE from stellar disruption to the peak luminosity of the resulting flare. This study has unveiled a previously unknown type of shockwave within TDEs, settling a longstanding debate about the energy source of the brightest phases in these events. It confirms that shock dissipation powers the brightest weeks of a TDE flare, opening doors for future studies to utilize TDE observations as a means to measure essential properties of black holes and potentially test Einstein’s predictions in extreme gravitational environments.

The mysteries of supermassive black holes have long captivated astronomers, offering a glimpse into the deepest corners of our universe. Now, a new study led by Dr. Elad Steinberg and Dr. Nicholas C. Stone at the Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University, sheds new light on these enigmatic cosmic entities.

Time to move philosophers into the lab. AI is making theories of consciousness testable.

Scientists are exploring the potential of quantum machine learning. But whether there are useful applications for the fusion of artificial intelligence and quantum computing is unclear.