The animal world is full of different types of intelligence, from the simple bodily coordination of jellyfish to the navigation abilities of bees, the complex songs of birds, and the imaginative symbolic thought of humans.
In an article published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we argue the evolution of all these kinds of animal intelligence has been shaped by just five major changes in the computational capacity of brains.
Each change was a major transitional point in the history of life that changed what types of intelligence could evolve.
Many cancer cells carry too many or too few chromosomes, a condition known as aneuploidy. Scientists have known this for a very long time, but the impact of aneuploidy has been unclear. Researchers recently developed a computational tool that analyzed cells from thousands of cancer patients. This effort identified critical regions of chromosomes that can be harmful or beneficial to tumor cells when they are deleted or duplicated. The findings have been reported in Nature.
In this study, the investigators developed a method called BISCUT (Breakpoint Identification of Significant Cancer Undiscovered Targets), which located where major changes start and end in chromosomes. Regions that were often found were more likely to help cancer cells survive while less commonly found regions were associated with a lack of cancer cell growth or their death. For example, one-third of all cancer cells in The Cancer Cell Genome Atlas lack one arm of chromosome 8.
Superconducting quantum technology has long promised to bridge the divide between existing electronic devices and the delicate quantum landscape beyond. Unfortunately progress in making critical processes stable has stagnated over the past decade.
Now a significant step forward has finally been realized, with researchers from the University of Maryland making superconducting qubits that last 10 times longer than before.
What makes qubits so useful in computing is the fact their quantum properties entangle in ways that are mathematically handy for making short work of certain complex algorithms, taking moments to solve select problems that would take other technology decades or more.
Restoring And Extending The Capabilities Of The Human Brain — Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, Ph.D. — Director, Rice Neuroengineering Initiative, Rice University
Dr. Behnaam Aazhang, Ph.D. (https://aaz.rice.edu/) is the J.S. Abercrombie Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director, Rice Neuroengineering Initiative (NEI — https://neuroengineering.rice.edu/), Rice University, where he has broad research interests including signal and data processing, information theory, dynamical systems, and their applications to neuro-engineering, with focus areas in (i) understanding neuronal circuits connectivity and the impact of learning on connectivity, (ii) developing minimally invasive and non-invasive real-time closed-loop stimulation of neuronal systems to mitigate disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson, depression, obesity, and mild traumatic brain injury, (iii) developing a patient-specific multisite wireless monitoring and pacing system with temporal and spatial precision to restore the healthy function of a diseased heart, and (iv) developing algorithms to detect, predict, and prevent security breaches in cloud computing and storage systems.
Dr. Aazhang received his B.S. (with highest honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1981, 1983, and 1986, respectively. From 1981 to 1985, he was a Research Assistant in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois. In August 1985, he joined the faculty of Rice University. From 2006 till 2014, he held an Academy of Finland Distinguished Visiting Professorship appointment (FiDiPro) at the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland.
Dr. Aazhang is a Fellow of IEEE and AAAS, and a distinguished lecturer of IEEE Communication Society.
Dr. Aazhang received an Honorary Doctorate degree from the University of Oulu, Finland (the highest honor that the university can bestow) in 2017 and IEEE ComSoc CTTC Outstanding Service Award “For innovative leadership that elevated the success of the Communication Theory Workshop” in 2016. He is a recipient of 2004 IEEE Communication Society’s Stephen O. Rice best paper award for a paper with A. Sendonaris and E. Erkip. In addition, Sendonaris, Erkip, and Aazhang received IEEE Communication Society’s 2013 Advances in Communication Award for the same paper. He has been listed in the Thomson-ISI Highly Cited Researchers and has been keynote and plenary speaker of several conferences.
Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have used bacteria for recording, storing, and retrieving images in DNA. This biological analog to a digital camera, which the authors have named “BacCam,” is a crucial step for DNA data storage techniques and the merging of biological and electronic systems.
Prior to this publication, there were two landmark papers that addressed either the use of cells to capture light or the storage of images into DNA, but not the two together. In May 2017, researchers from the lab of Christopher Voigt, PhD, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a system to produce ‘color photographs’ on bacterial culture plates by controlling pigment production and to redirect metabolic flux by expressing CRISPRi guide RNAs. Two months later, researchers in the lab of George Church, PhD, at Harvard Medical School demonstrated a method for encoding images via de novo DNA synthesis before insertion into the bacterial genome.
Physicist Lennard Kwakernaak finds the “complexity of simple things” intriguing, and it is a tough ask to make an inanimate object count.
A collaboration between researchers at Leiden University and AMOLF in Amsterdam has yielded a new metamaterial, a rubber block that can count. The researchers are calling it a Beam Counter and it is pretty nifty.
In a world where researchers are racing to make a quantum computer that can do complex math, building a new rubber block might not seem like much. But physicist Lennard Kwakernaak finds the “complexity of simple things” intriguing, and it is a tough ask to make an inanimate object count.
One of the greatest challenges facing the future of clean nuclear energy is scientists’ ability to recover heavy metals from nuclear waste, such as lanthanides and actinides. A new computational tool could help chemists design ligands to selectively bind valuable metals in organometallic complexes.
Nuclear waste contains a smorgasbord of elements from across the periodic table, including transition metals, lanthanides, and actinides. Ideally, scientists would like to reduce the amount of waste generated from nuclear reactors by separating out elements that could be repurposed elsewhere. To tackle these tricky chemical separation techniques, chemists often start with 3D structural models to design ligands that can selectively bind the desired metal to form an organometallic complex that can later be isolated.
Though researchers working with d-block organometallics have an arsenal of structural prediction tools at their disposal, there are no resources available to do the same for the full range of lanthanide and actinide complexes. That’s partly because these f-block elements can form higher coordinate complexes with ligands compared to d-block transition metals, according to Ping Yang and Michael G. Taylor, computational chemists at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
When you turn on a lamp to brighten a room, you are experiencing light energy transmitted as photons, which are small, discrete quantum packets of energy.
These photons must obey the sometimes strange laws of quantum mechanics, which, for instance, dictate that photons are indivisible, but at the same time, allow a photon to be in two places at once.
Similar to the photons that make up beams of light, indivisible quantum particles called phonons make up a beam of sound. These particles emerge from the collective motion of quadrillions of atoms, much as a “stadium wave” in a sports arena is due to the motion of thousands of individual fans. When you listen to a song, you’re hearing a stream of these very small quantum particles.
Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
The storage allows unprecedented properties including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1,000°C and virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature (13.8 billion years at 190°C) opening a new era of eternal data archiving. [source].
New research by the University of Liverpool could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.
Published in the journal Nature, Liverpool researchers have shown that a mathematical algorithm can guarantee to predict the structure of any material just based on knowledge of the atoms that make it up.
Developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, the algorithm systematically evaluates entire sets of possible structures at once, rather than considering them one at a time, to accelerate identification of the correct solution.
