environments

New research has discovered how cancer cells can gravitate toward certain mechanical “sweet spot” environments.Discovery offers insight into how cancer spreads and provides a tool for developing new treatments.Scientists have discovered that cancer cells can gravitate toward certain mechanical “sweet spot” environments, providing new insights into how cancer invades the body. The findings could help scientists and engineers better understand how cancer spreads. The discovery could also lead to improved future…

Microbes are the smallest known living organisms on Earth and can be found just about everywhere, even in the cold, Mars-like conditions of lava caves.On the island of Hawai'i, scientists recently found a marvelous assortment of novel microbes thriving in geothermal caves, lava tubes, and volcanic vents.  These underground structures were formed 65 and 800 years ago and receive little to no sunlight. They can also harbor toxic minerals and gases. Yet microbial mats are a common feature of Hawai'ian lava caves. Samples of…

Once again, life has been found in an environment that would be deeply inhospitable to most organisms living on this planet.Fed by waters that pass through 600 meters (1,970 ft) of permafrost, the sub-zero, salty, virtually oxygen-free Lost Hammer Spring in the Canadian Arctic is one of the harshest places on Earth. Even here, however, life finds a way.  Scientists have found microbes thriving in the briny water that seeps up from deep below the permafrost – and it could offer a hint of the extraterrestrial microbial…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Whenever a mass shooting takes place in schools, public discussion often focuses on laws or policies that might have prevented the tragedy. But averting school violence needs more than gun policy. It requires both prevention and crisis response that take students' emotional well-being—not just their physical safety—into account.…

Collision Avoidance Long-term Value Iteration NetworkSummary: CALVIN is a neural network that can plan, explore and navigate in novel 3D environments. It learns tasks such as solving mazes, by just learning fromvg expert demonstrations. Our work builds upon Value Iteration Networks (VIN) , a type of recurrent convolutional neural network. While VINs only work well in fully-known environments, CALVIN works even in unknown environments where the agent has to explore the environment in order to find the target.The three…

Manage both ARM64 and x86 Python environments using condaPhoto by Jan Kopřiva on UnsplashThis article describes how to manage both ARM64 and x86 Python environments using conda. To accomplish the same thing using pyenv (my preferred tool) and virtual environments, see my article on that topic.If you work with Python enough, you’ll eventually need to manage environments with different Python versions. When starting new projects you’ll want to take advantage of the latest features (Python 3.10 was recently released!), but…

An incredible discovery has just revealed a potential new source for understanding life on ancient Earth.A team of geologists has just discovered tiny remnants of prokaryotic and algal life – trapped inside crystals of halite dating back to 830 million years ago.  Halite is sodium chloride, also known as rock salt, and the discovery suggests that this natural mineral could be a previously untapped resource for studying ancient saltwater environments.Moreover, the organisms trapped therein may still be alive.The…

A swarm of 10 bright blue drones lifts off in a bamboo forest in China, then swerves its way between cluttered branches, bushes, and over uneven ground as it autonomously navigates the best flight path through the woods.  The experiment, led by scientists at Zhejiang University, evokes scenes from science fiction – and the authors in fact cite films such as Star Wars, Prometheus, and Blade Runner 2049 in the opening of their paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics."Here, we take a step forward (to) such…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Humans live in a world where safety-critical systems are at work all around them. Scientists want to ensure that the proper safety constraints are in place so these systems can operate safely while also performing as needed. Toward this goal, researchers at Michigan State University have developed a method for designing a learning-enabled safe controller for systems that operate in uncertain…