Lifeboat Foundation

The White House recently announced its vision for an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. RAND researchers explain what it might take to ens… See More.

DARPA also maintains an extremely high tolerance for failure. The modest budgets of the NIH, combined with an enormous pool of applicants, force these institutions to bet on low-risk research that guarantees incremental progress. ARPA-H could take a different approach than NIH by accepting a much higher tolerance for failure, so that researchers are not discouraged from dreaming big.

The scientific methods behind the products of ARPA-H might gain public trust if the agency made a point of being transparent and accessible. Consider how the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine was met with incredulity and suspicion, slowing progress toward herd immunity. An investment in ARPA-H could accelerate the time it takes to get innovative ideas from “bench to bedside,” but it could benefit from informing the public about incremental advancements in a way that is easy to understand.

Continue reading “Biden’s Proposed New Health Agency Would Emphasize Innovation. Here’s How It Might Work” »

Erika Woodrum/HHMI/NatureTwo tiny arrays of implanted electrodes relayed information from the brain area that controls the hands and arms to an algorithm, which translated it into letters that appeared on a screen.

Balls.

That delightful saying about men thinking with their nether regions has gained a new meaning. A new study has found an unnerving lot of similarities between men’s brains and the innards of their scrotums.

The next time you see a spider crawling around your house, look at the bright side. It’s probably feasting on a bunch of other insects and providing you with free pest control.

A new study released on Tuesday says that spiders eat an estimated 400 to 800 million metric tons of insects every year.

For comparison, the entire human population consumes about 400 million tons of meat and fish every year.

Like all metals, silver, copper, and gold are conductors. Electrons flow across them, carrying heat and electricity. While gold is a good conductor under any conditions, some materials have the property of behaving like metal conductors only if temperatures are high enough; at low temperatures, they act like insulators and do not do a good job of carrying electricity. In other words, these unusual materials go from acting like a chunk of gold to acting like a piece of wood as temperatures are lowered. Physicists have developed theories to explain this so-called metal-insulator transition, but the mechanisms behind the transitions are not always clear.

“In some cases, it is not easy to predict whether a material is a metal or an insulator,” explains Caltech visiting associate Yejun Feng of the Okinawa Institute for Science and Technology Graduate University. “Metals are always good conductors no matter what, but some other so-called apparent metals are insulators for reasons that are not well understood.” Feng has puzzled over this question for at least five years; others on his team, such as collaborator David Mandrus at the University of Tennessee, have thought about the problem for more than two decades.

Now, a new study from Feng and colleagues, published in Nature Communications, offers the cleanest experimental proof yet of a metal-insulator transition theory proposed 70 years ago by physicist John Slater. According to that theory, magnetism, which results when the so-called “spins” of electrons in a material are organized in an orderly fashion, can solely drive the metal-insulator transition; in other previous experiments, changes in the lattice structure of a material or electron interactions based on their charges have been deemed responsible.

With the massive proliferation of data-heavy services, including high-resolution video streaming and conferencing, cloud services infrastructure growth in 2021 is expected to reach a 27% CAGR. Consequently, while 400 gigabit ethernet (GbE) is currently enjoying widespread deployment, 800 GbE is poised to rapidly follow to address these bandwidth demands.

One approach to 800 GbE is to install eight 100 gigabit per second (Gbps) optical interfaces or lanes. As an alternative to reduce the hardware count, increase reliability, and lower cost, a team of researchers at Lumentum developed an optical solution that uses four 200 Gbps wavelength lanes to reach 800 GbE.

Syunya Yamauchi, a principal optical engineer at Lumentum, will present the optimized design during a session at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exhibition (OFC), being held virtually from 06–11 June, 2021.

The world is one step closer to ultimately secure conference calls, thanks to a collaboration between Quantum Communications Hub researchers and their German colleagues, enabling a quantum-secure conversation to take place between four parties simultaneously.

The demonstration, led by Hub researchers based at Heriot-Watt University and published in Science Advances, is a timely advance, given the global reliance on remote collaborative working, including conference calls, since the start of the C19 pandemic.

There have been reports of significant escalation of cyber-attacks on popular teleconferencing platforms in the last year. This advance in quantum secured communications could lead to conference calls with inherent unhackable security measures, underpinned by the principles of quantum physics.

At Boston University, a team of researchers is working to better understand how language and speech is processed in the brain, and how to best rehabilitate people who have lost their ability to communicate due to brain damage caused by a stroke, trauma, or another type of brain injury. This type of language loss is called aphasia, a long-term neurological disorder caused by damage to the part of the brain responsible for language production and processing that impacts over a million people in the US.

“It’s a huge problem,” says Swathi Kiran, director of BU’s Aphasia Research Lab, and College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College associate dean for research and James and Cecilia Tse Ying Professor in Neurorehabilitation. “It’s something our lab is working to tackle at multiple levels.”

For the last decade, Kiran and her team have studied the brain to see how it changes as people’s language skills improve with speech therapy. More recently, they’ve developed new methods to predict a person’s ability to improve even before they start therapy. In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, Kiran and collaborators at BU and the University of Texas at Austin report they can predict language recovery in Hispanic patients who speak both English and Spanish fluently—a group of aphasia patients particularly at risk of long-term language loss—using sophisticated computer models of the brain. They say the breakthrough could be a game changer for the field of speech therapy and for stroke survivors impacted by aphasia.

TAMPA, Fla. — Satellite operators have cleared a portion of C-band in a key step toward giving the spectrum to U.S. wireless companies in December.

Work has now started on installing filters on ground antennas across the United States, so wireless operators can use the lower 120 MHz of C-band for 5G without interfering with satellite broadcast customers.

Intelsat and SES, the satellite operators with the largest share of the 500 MHz C-band in the U.S., will get more than $2 billion from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) if they can hand over the 120 MHz swath of frequencies by Dec. 5.