This week, a new paper described how researchers pieced together the entire molecular structure of the protein shell of the HIV virus using GPU-based simulations. This remarkable achievement not only paves the way for new therapeutic approaches to AIDs, but establishes GPUs as franchise players in molecular simulation.
Falling into a black hole may not be as final as it seems. Apply a quantum theory of gravity to these bizarre objects and the all-crushing singularity at their core disappears.
In its place is something that looks a lot like an entry point to another universe. Most immediately, that could help resolve the nagging information loss paradox that dogs black holes.
Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence.
Love hurts. To which a logician might reply: "So shouldn't hate feel, really, really good?"
Logic and love have about as intimate a relationship as bread and a calorie-controlled diet.
The absent-minded professor is a classic image: someone who's lost in deep thoughts all the time but pays very little attention to the what's going on right in front of them. Well, there may be a little something to that cliché (if only just a little) if a study published this week in Current Biology is to be believed. The study showed that IQ scores, an imperfect measure of people's general mental faculties, correlated with their tendency to ignore an image that may be mistaken for background visual noise.
LEGIONS of disembodied brains floating in deep space threaten to undermine our understanding of the universe. New mathematical modelling suggests string theory and its multiple universes may just provide our salvation – and that could win the controversial theory a few more backers.
Physicists have dreamed up some bizarre ideas over the years, but a decade or so ago they outdid themselves with the concept of Boltzmann brains – fully formed, conscious entities that form spontaneously in outer space.
Turns out, that old "practice makes perfect" adage may be overblown. New research led by Michigan State University's Zach Hambrick finds that a copious amount of practice is not enough to explain why people differ in level of skill in two widely studied activities, chess and music.
In other words, it takes more than hard work to become an expert. Hambrick, writing in the research journal Intelligence, said natural talent and other factors likely play a role in mastering a complicated activity.
In the age of ubiquitous computing, we've grown fairly used to infrastructure, objects, and even furniture that adapt to the presence of humans. But what if you could control the behavior of a wall or room simply by thinking harder?
A Russian spacecraft containing 45 mice, 8 gerbils, and 15 newts returned to Earth on Sunday. The spacecraft, a modified Bion-M life sciences satellite, was launched in April 2013 and was intended to study the biological effects of long-term weightlessness. However, due to a combination of equipment failure and what scientists referred to as "the stresses of space," fewer than half the mice (and none of the gerbils) remained alive after their month in space. The newts were fine, though.
University of Washington engineers and NanoFacture, a Bellevue, Wash., company, have created a device that can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods.
The device will give hospitals and research labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations.
