March 16, 2018

Einstein's violin fetches $516,500 at New York auction

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       A violin owned and played by Albert Einstein achieved $516,500 at Bonhams New York auction yesterday. Like so many other major items of Einstein memorabilia that have gone to auction in recent times, a bidding war broke out that raised the price – in this case to five times its estimate.
       The instrument was made in Pennsylvania by Oscar Steger of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, who dedicated the instrument to "the Worlds [sic] Greatest Scientist Profesior [sic]" on an inscription in the violin's body.







       Steger presented the violin to Einstein in 1933 when he moved to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein subsequently gifted the instrument to Lawrence Hibbs, the young son of a Princeton University handyman who was a budding violinist, and it has been kept in the family since that time.



       Einstein is also quoted as saying: "Life without playing music was inconceivable for me. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music...I get most joy in life out of music."
The violin now becomes the most valuable Einstein memorabilia (other than documents), surpassing his telescope (which fetched $432,500 at auction), his pocket watch which fetched $352,054, his childhood building blocks which fetched $82,564 and his billiard briar pipe which fetched $67,665.       The Levi Strauss Leather Jacket worn Einstein on the cover of Timemagazine, was expected to sell for between $55,000 and $80,000 and fetched $145,974. The jacket was purchased by Levi Strauss and the 1930s design was reissued as a limited edition of 500 only at $1200 per jacket. The inside story of the jacket being purchased makes excellent reading on the Levi Strauss blog.

       In 2010, X-rays of Einstein's skull sold at a Julien's auction for $38,750, a signed impression of Albert's handprints sold for $85,000 and a print of the image at right (with his tongue poking out) from his 72nd birthday party sold at auction for $56,250 in January, 2015.
       Much more on the history of Einstein memorabilia, both scientific and personal, can be found in this extensive story we wrote when Albert's leather jacket was going to auction.

Source: NewAtlas
March 16, 2018

Robot uses AI to shoot hoops better than the pros

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Electric Hoop Dreams: CUE uses AI to beat the pros(Credit: Alvark Tokyo)

       The Toyota Engineering Society has created an android that scores baskets better than professional basketball players. Named CUE, the robot reportedly uses artificial intelligence to learn to shoot better than players from Japanese B League team Alvark Tokyo. It can apparently now shoot with nearly 100-percent accuracy at short distances.
       It seems the team, which is sponsored by Toyota, has more or less adopted CUE, assigning it a number 70 jersey and the position of shooting guard. However, the robot doesn't actually move so it's unlikely to be appearing in any B League fixtures just yet. The robot is 190 cm (6 ft 3 in) tall.


Electric Hoop Dreams: CUE uses AI to beat the pros(Credit: Alvark Tokyo)
       According to a reports in The Asahi Shimbun and Newsweek, the robot uses artificial intelligence to learn to make better shots, having practiced some 200,000 times. Apparently the 17 engineers were inspired by Sakuragi Hanamichi, protagonist of the manga Slam Dunk. Remarkably, the team of engineers had no robotics experience before building CUE.
       We're in touch with Toyota and Alvark Tokyo and will update this story as we learn more. You can see video of the robot in action on the Alvark Tokyo Facebook page and in The Asahi Shimbun.
March 16, 2018

Hybrid artificial-natural cells bring together the best of both worlds

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An artist's impression of a biological cell (brown) encased in an artificial cell (green)(Credit: Imperial College London)

       The more we study natural biological cells, the more we learn about how to control them or build artificial versions. These independent avenues of study have huge potential, but also their limitations.                     Researchers from Imperial College London have worked out a way to borrow the strengths of each, fusing together living and non-living cells to create tiny chemical factories that might one day aid drug delivery.
       In past work, scientists have packaged proteins and enzymes inside artificial casings to better treat conditions like cancer or diabetes. Rather than just using some natural parts, the Imperial College study instead wrapped entire biological cells inside artificial ones.
       "Biological cells can perform extremely complex functions, but can be difficult to control when trying to harness one aspect," says Oscar Ces, lead researcher on the project. "Artificial cells can be programmed more easily but we cannot yet build in much complexity. Our new system bridges the gap between these two approaches by fusing whole biological cells with artificial ones, so that the machinery of both works in concert to produce what we need."
       To pair up natural and artificial cells, the team used a microfluidic process to guide liquids very precisely through tiny channels. A liquid solution containing the biological cells was carefully pumped into a tube of oil, which forces the liquid into droplets surrounded by a lipid shell. Then, the droplets containing cells were dripped into a chamber where oil was floating on top of water. Their weight dragged them down into the watery solution, sealing them inside a bilayered bubble that could then be encased in the artificial cell wall.
       The end result are hybrid cells, made up of an artificial shell containing a natural cell and enzymes. To test whether the living and non-living halves of the cell worked together, the team designed an experiment where the two parts would come together to produce a fluorescent chemical. Sure enough, a healthy glow indicated that all was in working order.
       The team also tested the durability of the cells by placing them in a copper-rich solution. This mix would normally kill biological cells, but the team found that the hybrid cells were still fluorescing, indicating that the tough outer shell was protecting the natural innards. This function could prove handy in vivo, where a patient's immune system might attack foreign cells used in a treatment.
       The researchers say the technique could have a range of applications for targeted drug delivery, sensors or even creating cellular "batteries" that run on the process of photosynthesis. With further study, the artificial casing could be made to function more like the real thing, opening its shell on demand to release its payload.
       "The system we designed is controllable and customizable," says Yuval Elani, first author of the study. "You can create different sizes of artificial cells in a reproducible manner, and there is the potential to add in all kinds of cell machinery, such as chloroplasts for performing photosynthesis or engineered microbes that act as sensors."
The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
March 16, 2018

Acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76

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      Pioneering theoretical physicist and science popularizer Stephen Hawkinghas passed away at the age of 76. Details have not been released yet, but the BBC reports that his children Lucy, Robert and Tim have released a statement saying, "We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years."
      Born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, Stephen Hawking studied at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Despite the diagnosis in 1963 of a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that should have claimed his life in a matter of months, Hawking survived and continued to work, write, and lecture for decades, even after he suffered total paralysis and required a speech synthesizer to communicate.
      Hawkings went on to become one of the most acclaimed scientists of his generation with a level of fame rivaled only by Albert Einstein. His early work on the mechanics of black holes led him into the fields of cosmology, quantum mechanics, and relativity. He was especially notable for his work on Hawking radiation, the Penrose–Hawking theorems, the Bekenstein–Hawking formula, and Hawking energy.
      Aside from his rather esoteric work in physics, Hawking was also an author, most famously of A Brief History of Time (1988), which was described as, "the least read best seller in history." He was also an advocate for the disabled, an outspoken proponent of materialism, and even went into acting with appearances on Star Trek: The Next GenerationThe Simpsonsand The Big Bang Theory, among others.
       His PhD thesis was recently released to the public as part of an effort to make scientific more accessible. Fellow physicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson had the following to say on Twitter on Hawking's death.
      "His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake," he said. "But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure. Stephen Hawking, RIP 1942-2018.
Source NewAtlas
March 12, 2018

The Sun's "evil" twin is probably lurking beyond the Solar System

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      Since the 1980s, astronomers have been searching for the Sun's "evil" twin, dubbed Nemesis due to its habit of slinging deadly asteroids our way every 26 million years or so. Lately, the Nemesis hypothesis has fallen out of favor after decades of sky surveys have turned up no trace of the star, but a new mathematical model from UC Berkeley suggests that almost every star is born with a buddy – including our Sun.
      The team probed the Perseus cloud, a stellar nursery some 600 light years away, to take stock of the number of single and binary stars. Combining several data sets from different surveys, the researchers identified 19 binary-star systems and 45 single-star systems.
      Intriguingly, in wide binary systems in which the two stars are further than 500 Astronomical Units (AU) apart, all of the stars were very young – under 500,000 years old. The slightly older stars – between 500,000 and 1 million years – were all closer together, about 200 AU.
      "This has not been seen before or tested, and is super interesting," says Sarah Sadavoy, first author of the study. "We don't yet know quite what it means, but it isn't random and must say something about the way wide binaries form."
The Perseus cloud appears in the sky as a black spot, since it's made up of dense gas and dust that blocks light from stars inside and behind it(Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO)
      To try to find those answers, the team ran computer simulations to model several scenarios. There was only one way to make all the pieces fit with observations: all stars with masses about that of the Sun must start life as part of a wide binary system. Over time, an estimated 60 percent of them split up to form two single-star systems, while the rest drift closer together into tight binaries.
      That means that even though the hypothetical Nemesis has never been detected, the Sun probably does have a long-lost twin, which has since migrated out into the Milky Way – it probably isn't evil, though.
      "We are saying, yes, there probably was a Nemesis, a long time ago," says Steven Stahler, co-author of the study. "We ran a series of statistical models to see if we could account for the relative populations of young single stars and binaries of all separations in the Perseus molecular cloud, and the only model that could reproduce the data was one in which all stars form initially as wide binaries. These systems then either shrink or break apart within a million years."
      To test its mettle, the model needs to be applied to other star-birthing clouds.
The research has been published online, and will appear in a future issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.