Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have developed techniques to manufacture different types of glass in space, uncovering potential for advancements in optical technology.

Thanks to human ingenuity and zero gravity, we reap important benefits from science in space. Consider smartphones with built-in navigation systems and cameras.

Continue reading “Neutrons Illuminate the Mysteries of Space Glass” »

Advanced observations by the JWST indicate that early galaxies matured faster and were less chaotic, challenging previous theories of galaxy evolution.

New research has revealed that the Universe’s early galaxies were less turbulent and developed more rapidly than previously believed. This research, led by an international team from Durham University, utilized the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to find evidence of bar formation when the Universe was only a few billion years old.

Continue reading “Webb Space Telescope Rewrites the Rules of Galactic Evolution” »

From MIT

Not all language model features are linear.

Recent work has proposed the linear representation hypothesis: that language models perform computation by manipulating one-dimensional representations of concepts (“features”) in activation space.

Continue reading “Not All Language Model Features Are Linear” »

The future of space-based UV/optical/IR astronomy requires ever larger telescopes. The highest priority astrophysics targets, including Earth-like exoplanets, first generation stars, and early galaxies, are all extremely faint, which presents an ongoing challenge for current missions and is the opportunity space for next generation telescopes: larger telescopes are the primary way to address this issue.

With mission costs depending strongly on aperture diameter, scaling current space telescope technologies to aperture sizes beyond 10 m does not appear economically viable. Without a breakthrough in scalable technologies for large telescopes, future advances in astrophysics may slow down or even completely stall. Thus, there is a need for cost-effective solutions to scale space telescopes to larger sizes.

The FLUTE project aims to overcome the limitations of current approaches by paving a path towards space observatories with large aperture, unsegmented liquid primary mirrors, suitable for a variety of astronomical applications. Such mirrors would be created in space via a novel approach based on fluidic shaping in microgravity, which has already been successfully demonstrated in a laboratory neutral buoyancy environment, in parabolic microgravity flights, and aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

I found this on NewsBreak: Study: Experiments That Could Show Gravity’s ‘Quantumness’ Are Achievable #Astronomy

Gravity permeates every part of our world, yanking us down to Earth and stringing together the Solar System, galaxies, and Universe through which our planet glides…

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Researchers studied how temperatures up to 500 degrees Celsius would affect electronic devices made from gallium nitride, a key step in their multiyear research effort to develop electronics that can operate in extremely hot environments, like the surface of Venus.

Researchers use NASA supercomputer:

The new discovery not only enhances our understanding of the Sun’s dynamics but can also help in more precise prediction of solar storms.

All sensations—hunger, feeling pain, seeing red, falling in love—are the result of physiological states that an LLM simply doesn’t have. Consequently we know that an LLM cannot have subjective experiences of those states. In other words, it cannot be sentient.

An LLM is a mathematical model coded on silicon chips. It is not an embodied being like humans. It does not have a “life” that needs to eat, drink, reproduce, experience emotion, get sick, and eventually die.

It is important to understand the profound difference between how humans generate sequences of words and how an LLM generates those same sequences. When I say “I am hungry,” I am reporting on my sensed physiological states. When an LLM generates the sequence “I am hungry,” it is simply generating the most probable completion of the sequence of words in its current prompt. It is doing exactly the same thing as when, with a different prompt, it generates “I am not hungry,” or with yet another prompt, “The moon is made of green cheese.” None of these are reports of its (nonexistent) physiological states. They are simply probabilistic completions.

The Sun’s magnetic field is an incredibly powerful mechanism that produces equally powerful solar storms, some of which resulted in the recent aurora activity observed as far south as the State of Florida. However, in the 400 years since Galileo Galilei first discovered the Sun’s magnetic field, scientists have been stumped regarding where inside the Sun the magnetic field originates. This is what a study published today in Nature hopes to address as a team of international researchers have discovered how deep inside the Sun the magnetic field originates, which holds the potential to help scientists better understand and predict solar storms.

“Understanding the origin of the sun’s magnetic field has been an open question since Galileo and is important for predicting future solar activity, like flares that could hit the Earth,” said Dr. Daniel Lecoanet, who is an Assistant Professor of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University and a co-author on the study. “This work proposes a new hypothesis for how the sun’s magnetic field is generated that better matches solar observations, and, we hope, could be used to make better predictions of solar activity.”

For the study, the researchers used a NASA supercomputer to conduct several calculations to ascertain if the source of the Sun’s magnetic field was close to the surface or much deeper, as previous hypotheses have stated the magnetic field’s source is more than 130,000 miles beneath the surface of the Sun. In the end, the researchers of this latest study estimated the source of the Sun’s magnetic field is approximately 20,000 miles beneath the surface. For context, the diameter of the Sun is just over 865,000 miles across, so these new findings indicate the magnetic field originates approximately 2 percent beneath the Sun’s surface, as opposed to 15 percent based on the previous hypotheses.