Lifeboat Foundation

The second law of thermodynamics explains why some events in nature can never run in reverse, despite the fact that they do not violate other laws of physics. For example, you can crack an egg, yet that cracked egg will never spontaneously put itself back together. Interestingly, if an egg were to uncrack itself, it would not violate the conservation of energy, which states that the total energy content of a system must always remain the same. Obviously eggs don’t randomly put themselves back together, and many other events usually only move in one direction. The second law of thermodynamics explains why this occurs through the concept of entropy. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder. If your room is messy, you can say it has high entropy. If your room is tidy, it has low entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of entropy in a closed system will always increase. Thus, the total amount of disorder in the universe will always increase. Although some processes do go from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, interactions with the environment will always result in a net increase of entropy. For example, a living organism is fairly organized, and so it would have low entropy. However, the way that organism interacts with its environment will increase the total amount of entropy. The second law explains why some events, such as uncracking an egg, can never occur because the total amount of entropy must always be increasing. Entropy also explains how heat moves from warm objects to cold objects. When you leave your coffee out for too long, it inevitably gets colder. That’s because heat can only move from hot to cold, and never in reverse. This occurs because entropy must always increase.

The concept of entropy, and the fact that most things in the universe only occur in one direction, has interesting implications for the flow of time. Time is a poorly understood aspect of our universe. Even the smartest scientists have a hard time providing a good definition for what time actually is. We humans generally perceive time as the passage of events. The past is composed of events that once occurred, the present is events that are occurring, and the future is events that have yet to occur. However, why does time seem to only flow in one direction? As far as scientists know, there are no laws of physics that state time must always move forward. Time obviously only runs in one direction, a concept called the arrow of time. The second law of thermodynamics may actually provide a reason for why there seems to be an arrow of time. Since entropy and disorder must always increase as a whole in the cosmos, events will only occur in one direction, and never in reverse.

Artificial intelligence has turned its power on deciphering the complex structures of proteins, the substances behind many vital processes in cells. It is a great boost for biology and, ultimately, wider society.

In recent years, material scientists have designed a wide range of innovative materials that could be used to create new technologies, including soft robots, controllers and smart textiles. These materials include artificial muscles, structures that resemble biological muscles in shape and that could improve the movements of robots or enable the creation of clothing that adapts to different environmental conditions.

As part of an ongoing project focused on textile-based soft actuators, a team of researchers at Jiangnan University in China recently developed new artificial muscles based on free-standing, single-helical woolen yarn. Their artificial muscles, introduced in a paper published in Smart Materials and Structures, could be used to easily and affordably produce twisted actuators that can detect and respond to humidity in their environment.

“We are trying to design flexible and versatile actuators by leveraging the hierarchical structure design of textiles, ranging from microscales (e.g., molecular chains and aggregation structures) to macroscales (e.g., fiber morphology and textile architectures),” Fengxin Sun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Realizing a yarn-based artificial muscle with free-standing and single-helical architecture via eco-friendly and easy-fabrication manufacturing process is still challenging.”

From Alice in Wonderland to The Lord of the Rings, our stories have long depicted magical worlds hidden underground. Yet the most magical account of all might turn out to be reality, as scientists reveal a complex network of reactions between plants, fungi, bacteria, and more, interacting below the soil surface to support the foundations of life. At USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, one part of the research into this intricate underground world involves identifying techniques that will keep nitrogen—a vital element for plant growth—in the soil.

Like all good stories, this one has heroes and villains whose actions can wreak havoc or save us. When properly sequestered underground, some forms of nitrogen like ammonium and nitrate perform heroic feats, fertilizing the plants that we depend on for our food. Yet when they escape the soil in the wrong ways, they morph into closely-related super-villains malignant forms of nitrogen like nitrous oxide that, in the atmosphere, is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in trapping heat, and lingers far longer. In fact, N2O is the largest source of greenhouse gas from agriculture. Escaped nitrogen can also get into groundwater or run off fields and into waterways; once there, it can fuel algae blooms in coastal waters that consume oxygen, harming fish and other aquatic creatures.

Continue reading “Scientists Identify Cover Crops That Keep Nitrogen in Soil” »

Helium ion beam (HIB) technology plays an important role in the extreme fields of nanofabrication. Due to high resolution and sensitivity, HIB nanofabrication technology is widely used to pattern nanostructures into components, devices, or systems in integrated circuits, materials sciences, nano-optics, and bio-sciences applications. HIB-based nanofabrication includes direct-write milling, ion beam-induced deposition, and direct-write lithography without the need to resist assistance. Their nanoscale applications have also been evaluated in the areas of integrated circuits, materials sciences, nano-optics, and biological sciences.

In a new paper published in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, a team of researchers, led by Dr. Deqiang Wang from Chongqing Key Laboratory of Multi-scale Manufacturing Technology, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, PR China, have summarized comprehensively the extreme processes and applications of HIB nanofabrication.

The main aim of this review is to address the latest developments in HIB technology with their extreme processing capabilities and widespread applications in nanofabrication. Based on the introduction of the HIM system with GFIS, the performance characteristics and advantages of HIB technology have been discussed first. Thereafter, certain questions about the extreme processes and applications of HIB nanofabrication have been addressed: How many extreme processes and applications of HIB technology have been developed in nanofabrication for integrated circuits, materials sciences, nano-optics, and bio-sciences applications? What are the main challenges in the extreme nanofabrication with HIB technology for high resolution and sensitivity applications?

Circa 2021 This article states that humans have possibly an untapped regeneration ability and they may have found it in mice.

Using new phospho-flow cytometry techniques to measure signaling in individual cell subsets we compared mouse to salamander inflammation. These studies demonstrated evolutionarily conserved responses to PAMP ligands through toll-like receptors (TLRs) but identified key differences in response to DAMP ligands. Co-exposure of macrophages to DAMPs/PAMPs suppressed MAPK signaling in mammals, but not salamanders, which activate sustained MAPK stimulation in the presence of endogenous DAMPS.

Researchers have been trying to build artificial synapses for years in the hope of getting close to the unrivaled computational performance of the human brain. A new approach has now managed to design ones that are 1,000 times smaller and 10,000 times faster than their biological counterparts.

Despite the runaway success of deep learning over the past decade, this brain-inspired approach to AI faces the challenge that it is running on hardware that bears little resemblance to real brains. This is a big part of the reason why a human brain weighing just three pounds can pick up new tasks in seconds using the same amount of power as a light bulb, while training the largest neural networks takes weeks, megawatt hours of electricity, and racks of specialized processors.

That’s prompting growing interest in efforts to redesign the underlying hardware AI runs on. The idea is that by building computer chips whose components act more like natural neurons and synapses, we might be able to approach the extreme space and energy efficiency of the human brain. The hope is that these so-called “neuromorphic” processors could be much better suited to running AI than today’s computer chips.

Living organisms offer extensive diversity in terms of their phenotypes, metabolic processes, and adaptation to various niches. However, the basic building blocks that create this diversity are remarkably similar. How can we advance our understanding of the fascinating mechanisms that drive biological complexity and how can we harness biological components to build entirely new materials and devices?

A new Special Issue from ACS Synthetic Biology will focus on this dynamic topic, including contributions that deconstruct as well as build up and mimic biological systems. The resulting work serves both to test our scientific understanding and to extend known biology to develop new concepts and applications. The issue will be led by Associate Editor Michael Jewett with Guest Editors Kate Adamala, Marileen Dogterom, and Neha Kamat.

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The field of Artificial Intelligence was founded in the mid 1950s with the aim of constructing “thinking machines” — that is to say, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Think of humanoid robots that not only look but act and think with intelligence equal to and ultimately greater than that of human beings. But in the intervening years, the field has drifted far from its ambitious old-fashioned roots.

Continue reading “#58 Dr. Ben Goertzel — Artificial General Intelligence” »