new Independent game publisher PLAYISM announced that the latest game in the “Crab Wars” series of crustacean action games developed by Calappa Games, in which you knock your opponents to the ground to win – “Crab Wars 2”, will be released on February 13, 2024. Start Early Access on Steam. In addition, a trial version of this game will be released at the Steam New Product Festival on February 6, 2024. “Crab Wars 2” is the long-awaited sequel to “Crab Wars”. You need to win by knocking over your opponent. It is a fighting action game that incorporates strategic elements into the giant crustacean battle based on the physics engine. Advertisement (Please continue reading this article) In this game, you can challenge various enemies in the career mode while creating your own unique tactics. Have fun with crabs from all over the world through online play for up to 5 people. In addition, in addition to the operation method of the previous game “Crab War”, this game also adds a “modern mode” operation method similar to a third-person action game, and also has a commentary function that allows you to know the battle situation. You can also realize automatic operations through skill matching, etc. This game has gained a new evolution and will be simpler and easier to use than the previous game. Early access advertising will be launched on February 13, 2024 (please continue reading this article). The career mode that can cultivate crabs and various modes that can enjoy online battles have been implemented in the early access version. If you want to experience this game as soon as possible, Players who have played the game, please actively participate in the early experience! We plan to gradually adjust the balance and add various new elements as the early access progresses. This game will be released as a limited-time trial version at the Steam New Product Festival. In this trial version, you can experience the new modern mode operation, as well as new elements such as career mode, and even experience content such as battles and cooperative play that require online connections. . The trial version is only open until early access starts, so don’t miss this good opportunity. ※The trial version has restrictions on the types of crabs and weapons, as well as the career mode training time, etc. Picture Carousel 0 Game Introduction A career mode that you can enjoy alone. Grow up with the crabs and aim for the highest peak! You need to acquire a variety of skills and weapons, and advance your career while improving your abilities. You can compete in the “Official Competition” to improve your ranking, you can also fight against farm machinery and even monsters in the “Exhibition Competition”, and you can even punish evil crabs for justice in the “Event Competition”. The trained crabs can be used in online battles, or their skills can be passed on to new generations of crabs. An online mode that everyone can enjoy together. This game is equipped with a ranked matching mode for 1V1 competition with players from all over the world, an entertainment matching mode, a challenge mode where you can work together to fight powerful crabs, and a room matching function for up to 5 people to play together. . In room matching, you can also set a password or customize rules to have a unique contest. Here comes the key point! Humanity! In this game, you don’t play as a crab. But humans! You can ride on the crab and manipulate it freely. After getting off the crab, you can also help the crab by carrying and throwing weapons, using stage mechanisms, etc. In a group battle, even if your crab is eliminated, you can transfer to your partner’s crab. Develop highly skilled tactics such as this. In addition, in this game, you can not only customize the appearance and equipment, but also customize your own character appearance by linking it with VRoid Hub. Weapons: The crab can hold weapons with its left and right pincers. There are everything from daggers and chainsaws to super weapons such as motorcycles, drills and jets, and even fantasy artifacts such as holy swords and somersault clouds. Use these weapons to defeat crabs with ease! Spells: As you take damage, you will accumulate “crab energy”. By consuming the crab energy, you can exert various effects. Such as summoning weapons and obstacles, or shooting lasers from the eyes, etc. In some cases, this may be a way to turn defeat into victory! SkillsAcquire more than 40 various skills and equip them on your body to customize your crab! Skills include automatic skills to assist crabs in their movements, visual enhancement skills to increase the amount of information displayed, and even super skills to release special moves through postures, etc.! Even a novice can use various skills to achieve smooth and smooth operations! Crab Breeder——Shione Maki Here we will introduce to you the breeder who assists players in raising crabs in the career mode—Shione Maki. The school color designer is illustrator Mr. Koshida Kushida (@KIN_G_OF_KINGS). She appears in the game as a 3D model, come and check it out in the game. — Archyde, 14h ago

new Chen’s laboratory in Weizmann’s Brain Sciences Department focuses on the molecular and behavioral aspects of the response to stress. In previous studies, Chen’s team examined how stress during pregnancy affects mouse offspring when they reach maturity. In the current research, the scientists, led by Dr. Aron Kos, studied how trauma experienced shortly after birth affects mouse pups later in life. To advance the understanding of this topic, the researchers pulled together the strengths of Chen’s lab: its expertise in exploring the brain’s molecular processes at the highest possible resolution, using genetic sequencing on the level of individual cells; the ability to use cameras to track dozens of behavioral variables in a rich social environment intended to recreate natural living conditions; and the ability to process the massive quantities of data generated in this environment, using machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. — Weizmann Wonder Wander - News, Features and Discoveries from the Weizmann Institute of Science, 1d ago

new Diagnosis is another area where AI is playing a key role. “Based on morphological markers of the patient, it tells us exactly what kind of a retinopathy the patient suffers from. It also provides us with the grading of DR,”says Pillai. “For instance, proliferative DR would be classified as a vision-threatening one and require urgent treatment as against a mild DR. Also, deep learning or machine learning can pick up a lot of things that ordinary eyes cannot pick up, especially when there is large data.”As of now, Pillai and his team are trying to explore the possibilities of predicting heart attacks and strokes using the retina. — theweek.in, 1d ago

new Owing to the remarkable properties of the somatosensory system, human skin compactly perceives myriad forms of physical stimuli with high precision. Machines, conversely, are often equipped with sensory suites constituted of dozens of unique sensors, each made for detecting limited stimuli. Emerging high degree-of-freedom human-robot interfaces and soft robot applications are delimited by the lack of simple, cohesive, and information-dense sensing technologies. Stepping toward biological levels of proprioception, we present a sensing technology capable of decoding omnidirectional bending, compression, stretch, binary changes in temperature, and combinations thereof. This multi-modal deformation and temperature sensor harnesses chromaticity and intensity of light as it travels through patterned elastomer doped with functional dyes. Deformations and temperature shifts augment the light chromaticity and intensity, resulting in a one-to-one mapping between stimulus modes that are sequentially combined and the sensor output. We study the working principle of the sensor via a comprehensive opto-thermo-mechanical assay, and find that the information density provided by a single sensing element permits deciphering rich and diverse human-robot and robot-environmental interactions. — interestingengineering.com, 1d ago

new A new study from Mass Eye and Ear investigators shows that individuals who report tinnitus, which present as a ringing in the ears in more than one out of ten adults worldwide, are experiencing auditory nerve loss that is not picked up by conventional hearing tests. This work is part of a P50 grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to Mass Eye and Ear researchers within the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories (EPL) for their work on cochlear synaptopathy, which is commonly referred to as "hidden hearing loss." The results from this study provide a better understanding on the origins of tinnitus and are published November 30th in Scientific Reports. — ScienceDaily, 1d ago

new In the fifth book I’ve selected, Waller’s Against Moral Responsibility, one of the sources he appeals to in support of his scepticism about moral responsibility is data coming from neuroscience. This reflects a wider trend in philosophy, which is to be better informed and more deeply integrated with advances in empirical science and to use these resources to help us understand philosophical problems. To a certain extent, this approach cuts in the opposite direction from Williams, who employs a more humanistic understanding of philosophy, as informed by history and literature. However, neuroscience is very influential in the philosophy of free will right now, as are certain kinds of psychological experiments that aim to debunk our confidence that we are agents making conscious choices and in control of ourselves. The gist of Waller’s book is that we aren’t really responsible at all, because the kind of control that we think of as essential to responsibility is illusory. His principal argument in support of this conclusion is that we are vulnerable to luck, but another layer of his scepticism relies on neuroscience data — and, as you say, Libet is really the major figure here. While we may have a conception of ourselves as conscious agents making choices, the empirical data that Libet has provided claims to show that it is not the conscious self that decides but prior events in the brain. It can be shown experimentally that the brain has already settled how we will act several hundred milliseconds prior to our awareness of making any conscious choice. This supports a seemingly sceptical position about the role of conscious choice, on which responsibility seems to rest, since how we will act is already settled prior to the occurrence of conscious choice itself. The conscious agent, it seems, is not really in charge of conduct. — Five Books, 2d ago

new Dr. Durrance has an interdisciplinary research and education program in long-term human space exploration. The hazards associated with long-term exposure to the space environment, such as radiation damage and the loss of bone mass, are not sufficiently understood to determine whether they pose acceptable risks or not. Research focused on these hazards is critical to sustained human presence outside the protective environment of the Earth ’s atmosphere and magnetosphere. This program uses the Space Life Sciences Laboratory (SLS Lab) at Kennedy Space Center (KSC); as well as labs at Florida Tech.Lunar dust physics: Enabling technologies must be developed, including systems to mitigate the damaging effects of dust contamination; technologies that use the local planetary resources to produce consumables such as oxygen, water and rocket propellant; food production systems; innovative range technologies and many more. We are currently studying the induction charging characteristics of lunar dust.Bone Loss: The objectives of the bone project are (1) to provide a dynamic model of the structure and function of bone in response to loading with sufficient precision to predict the effect of any arbitrary loading history and (2) to develop and refine new countermeasures against bone loss.Radiation damage: Solar and galactic radiation is a major hazard to space crews during long-duration flights and planetary bases beyond the Earth ’s magnetic field. Intense solar flares can induce acute radiation sickness, galactic cosmic rays can kill brain cells that the body cannot replace, and all forms of radiation can induce cancer. The only known safety measure is shielding to prevent the high-speed particles from reaching the crew.Dr. Durrance is has an interdisciplinary research and education program in astrobiology addressing three fundamental questions: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the Universe? What is the future of life on Earth and beyond? Research addressing these questions is highly interdisciplinary involving fields such as physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and planetary science.Extrasolar Planets: Most of the newly discovered planets have been found using indirect techniques, where the planet ’s effect on light emitted from the parent star is detected, not the light emitted by the planet itself. The most likely technique for detecting life on these planets is a detailed analysis of their spectra; therefore, we are developing a system that may be able to detect IR emissions from exoplanets using large, ground-based telescopes along with Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) techniques developed for radio astronomy.Amyloid Fiber Formation: We are pursuing research that may shed light on a fundamental question regarding the origin of life: how did the transition from non-living to living matter occur? We are investigating the spontaneous formation of long linear fibers from a weak solution of proteins using dielectric spectroscopy. This phenomenon may be important in neurodegenerative diseases and it may help to understand the emergence of ordered biological structures that are far from thermodynamic equilibrium.Dr. Durrance Director of the Sub-Orbital Research and Training Center that utilizes flights of high performance F-104 jets from the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at KSC. In addition to the testing of prototype spaceflight hardware for NASA and commercial companies, we are developing an imaging system designed specifically for imaging Earth ’s coastal regions. The coastal zone is not only the most significant ocean area in terms of productivity, economics, recreation, and natural resources but it is also the most difficult to image. — fit.edu, 2d ago

new One example of this is autism, once thought to be something that almost exclusively affected males. In fact, under something called the brain organization theory, it was thought that sex hormones present during fetal development permanently “masculinized” boys’ brains in ways that made them, among other things, more likely to have autism. Recently, there’s been a rethink and a huge increase in our understanding of how autism presents differently in women and girls, leading to many more diagnoses. — IFLScience, 2d ago

new The other research is from Mattia Veronese, PhD, a scientist from King’s College in London and associate professor at the University of Padua in Italy, who studied human PET imaging data of participants of the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) to look for brain network changes and disease progression using the network neuroscience approach developed by Sporns. Veronese is also a co-author on the Alzheimer’s & Dementia journal article. “Those two pieces of work led our team to develop tools that would extract additional meaning from images of MODEL-AD mouse models, with the goal of not only providing similar whole brain metrics observed in the previous clinical studies, but to also dive deeper and possibly understand how subnetworks within the brain of these models might shed light on the mechanisms of the underlying biology,” Territo said. Chumin helped develop the tools and resources from the network neuroscience approach of human clinical research to preclinical animal models of MODEL-AD. The investigators analyzed the brain as a whole and also looked at subnetworks within the brain to see how those areas communicate and interact as the disease progresses. “Using this approach, the research team’s analysis of metabolism changes in animal models confirmed previous clinical findings of disease progression in patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” Territo said. The animal models showed age-related changes in glucose uptake as well as differences between males and females—similar to findings from Alzheimer’s disease human data. Territo said MODEL-AD plans to use these network neuroscience tools in their investigations of other preclinical data, including models of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, potential therapeutics for the disease and multi-modal analyses that combine neuroimaging data from PET and MRI. About IU School of Medicine IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability. — newswise.com, 2d ago

new Thinking across species in the context of slavery in the Caribbean can help to engage the historically embodied reality of being Black in a shared, oppressive world. The talk begins with a summary of my PhD research, which explores how anglophone Caribbean neo-slave narratives rewrite Black humanity and the nonhuman world against controlling anti-Black images. It will examine how this decolonial ecocritical reading has revealed hidden histories of interspecies violence and resistance during slavery in a distinctly Caribbean context. Reflecting on the ways I have sought to deepen and disrupt my own typical methods of engaging with neo-slave narratives, this talk examines how my thesis has evolved into visual and auditory art within my current role as a creative practitioner in residence at ILCS. I will reflect on my process and progress in creating two large-scale visual art pieces and soundscapes as ways of animating my own literary analysis of two Caribbean neo-slave poems. In doing so, I seek to highlight how a multi-sensory experience of Caribbean neo-slave narratives can provide a powerful tool for examining the limitations and possibilities of written literature in re-presenting the intimacies and enigmas of embodied contact with our complicated world. Renée Landell is a Creative Practitioner at ILCS, School of Advanced Study. She has recently finished writing up her PhD thesis which undertakes decolonial ecocritical approaches to Anglophone Caribbean neo-slave narratives. Alongside her research, Renée works as the founding director of Beyond Margins UK, a racial justice and equity movement, and as co-founder of Black in Arts and Humanities, a global online network of Black scholars and practitioners. She is also a writer represented by the leading international literary agency, Andrew Nurnberg Associates, and has appeared on Al Jazeera News, BBC News and CBS (Canada) as a commentator, and more recently in the BBC 2 documentary 'David Harewood on Blackface' as an on-screen historian. — School of Advanced Study, 2d ago

new At the core of this innovation is the ability to capture and process vast amounts of data – a hallmark of AI’s capabilities. The researchers at the University of Copenhagen conducted wine tastings with 256 participants, translating the sensory experience into data points that an AI could understand and learn from. The result is an algorithm that predicts wine preferences with unprecedented accuracy, a significant step towards personalised gastronomy. — IO, 2d ago

new Liquid-crystal (LC) phase modulators are widely used in optical systems because of their advantages of low power consumption, light weight, flexible bandwidth adjustment, and non-mechanical movements. However, most LC phase modulators are polarization-sensitive, meaning that they affect the phase of light differently depending on its polarization. This can limit their performance and functionality in some applications.There are two main approaches to realizing polarization-independent LC phase modulators. The first approach is to use polarization-independent LC materials, such as polymer-stabilized blue-phase liquid crystals (PS-BPLCs). However, PS-BPLCs require high driving voltages, which can make them impractical for some applications.The second approach is to change the alignment of the LC directors. One way to do this is to use a double-layer LC cell, which consists of two LC cells stacked on top of each other with their LC directors oriented orthogonally. This allows light to be decomposed into two orthogonal components, each of which experiences the same phase modulation. However, double-layer LC cells are complex and difficult to manufacture.Another way to achieve polarization-independent LC phase modulation is to use orthogonal photoalignment. This involves using a special photoalignment layer that creates orthogonal alignment domains in the LC. However, it is difficult to achieve precise alignment using this method.In a new paper published in Light: Advanced Manufacturing, a team of scientists led by Professor Jiangang Lu have developed a new approach to polarization-independent LC phase modulation.Polarization-independent LC phase modulation is based on a light-controlled azimuth angle (LCAA) process. The LCAA process uses the optical rotatory effect of cholesteric liquid crystals (CLC) to create single-layer, multi-microdomain, orthogonally twisted (MMOT) structures.MMOT structures are composed of multiple microdomains with orthogonally aligned LC directors. The LCAA process uses a patterned light beam to control the alignment of the LC directors in each microdomain. This allows the researchers to create MMOT structures with precise alignment.LC phase modulators with a single-layer MMOT structure have the potential to be both polarization-independent and have a large phase depth. This makes them ideal for a wide range of applications, including optical communications, wearable devices, and displays.A light-controlled azimuth angle (LCAA) process can be used to fabricate a multi-microdomain orthogonally twisted (MMOT) device with low polarization dependence, high phase retardation, and a simple structure. The alignment angle between the top and bottom substrates in the LCAA process and the mask grid size of the MMOT structure can be tailored to meet the requirements of different applications.This device has the potential to revolutionize the way we use light in a variety of applications. For example, it could be used to create new types of optical communications systems that are more efficient and reliable. It could also be used to develop new types of wearable devices that can display information in a more clear and concise way. — newswise.com, 2d ago

new Major current projects in Dr. Shenker's laboratory focus on processes affecting the recruitment and survival of larval and juvenile fishes. A primary program is the Bonefish Restoration and Conservation Program, where Dr. Shenker works with a team of collaborators to study bonefish prespawning aggregations in the Bahamas. In addition to tracking fish on their spawning migrations, the team examines behavior and biology of fish at prespawning aggregation sites and tracks their final movements to spawning sites. Dr. Shenker leads the efforts to collect and hold fish from the prespawning aggregation to induce spawning in captivity and study the embryonic development and the feeding biology of the leptocephalus larvae. The results of this work are being incorporated into an aquaculture project at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution that seeks to develop population restoration tools for the Florida Keys bonefish populations. In addition to the bonefish work, Dr. Shenker's students have helped identify spawning sites of tarpon off the southeastern Florida coast and in the Gulf of Mexico. Continuing with the bonefish theme, his graduate students are working on age and growth of adult bonefish populations in Cuba, and on the sensory biology of larval bonefish. — fit.edu, 2d ago

new In brains, online learning (editing weights, not just context window) is part of problem-solving. If I ask a smart human a hard science question, their brain may chug along from time t=0 to t=10 minutes, as they stare into space, and then out comes an answer. After that 10 minutes, their brain is permanently different than it was before (i.e., different weights)—they’ve figured things out about science that they didn’t previously know. Not only that, but the online-learning (weight editing) that they did during time 0<t<5 minutes is absolutely critical for the further processing that happens during time 5<t<10 minutes. This is not how today’s LLMs work—LLMs don’t edit weights in the course of “thinking”. I think this is safety-relevant for a number of reasons, including whether we can expect future AI to get rapidly smarter in an open-ended way without new human-provided training data (related discussion). — alignmentforum.org, 2d ago

new Exhibit A is Amara’s law, named for scientist, researcher and former President of the Institute for the Future Roy Amara. He is best known for saying, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” Boy howdy, does that ever apply to digital technologies in general and artificial intelligence specifically. AI may change the world — curing cancer, reversing climate change or taking all our jobs while creating a bunch more new ones — but mostly in the outbound years and decades. In the near term, it creates shadows for us to worry about, plan around and get distracted by even as we experiment and put it to work.In many respects, GenAI represents a victory lap for Moore’s law, based on Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s formulation about the exponential growth of computational prowess. Originally coined in 1965 around the doubling of transistors on microchips every couple of years, it bumped up against the physical limits of silicon-based technologies. As AI models grow massively in size, from millions to billions and even trillions of parameters, the underlying hardware continues to keep pace even as margins narrow. Chip maker Nvidia, with its combination of advanced graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs) that are optimized for AI tasks, reaches beyond transistor density in pushing the upward limits in the exponential increase in computational power.Not far behind, but perhaps in a supporting role, is Metcalfe’s law. Named for Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, it suggests that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. When the campaign for digital government was young, broadband penetration reached 51 percent — giving advocates the opportunity to claim that government could then serve a “digital majority.” As of last year, that number has reached 90 percent. The stakes are high for the remaining 10 percent, often characterized as underserved communities including low-income and racialized populations along with people who have chosen not to engage in a connected world. By extension of Metcalfe’s law, more user interactions contribute to AI’s knowledge, which relies on iterative feedback for fine-tuning and improvement. The absence of marginalized voices is deafening to generative models. They cannot be trained with what isn’t there, increasing the risk of unconscious bias and the skewing of results. — GovTech, 2d ago

new As a physician-scientist, Perlmutter is internationally recognized for his research on alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (ATD), a genetic disorder in which accumulations of a misfolded protein can cause severe liver damage. His work has led to advances in the understanding of how cells dispose of misfolded proteins that cause cellular dysfunction as well as the development of a pipeline of ATD drugs that could eliminate the need for liver transplantation in those with the disorder. Since drugs in this pipeline target and enhance autophagy, a cellular degradation pathway that is critical for the functioning of all cells and declines with age, they also represent exciting candidates for prevention of cognitive decline and other degenerative diseases of aging. Perlmutter and his collaborators recently discovered that a drug currently used for Type 2 diabetes may slow age-dependent degeneration in the nervous system and in the liver. — Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, 2d ago