Lifeboat Foundation

“There is a tremendous amount of interest in what enables wildfire ignitions and what can be done to prevent them,” said Dr. Erica Fleishman. “This database increases the ability to access relevant information and contribute to wildfire preparedness and prevention.”

Can wildfires be predicted in advance to allow for safeguards that can prevent their spread? This is what a recent study published in Earth System Science Data hopes to address as a team of researchers have developed a database to help firefighters and power companies establish protocol for implementing strategies that holds the potential for helping to reduce the spread of a wildfire before it gets too large.

Wildfire closure sign seen in the Oregon Cascades in September 2020. (Credit: Oregon State University)

Continue reading “Enhanced Database AIDS Wildfire Managers in Predicting Fires” »

In inertial confinement fusion experiments, lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility focus on a tiny fuel capsule suspended inside a cylindrical x-ray oven called a hohlraum. (Photo: Jason Laurea)

The Quantum Insider (TQI) is the leading online resource dedicated exclusively to Quantum Computing.

SearchGPT is just a “prototype” for now. The service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and will only be accessible to 10,000 test users at launch, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood tells The Verge. Wood says that OpenAI is working with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to build its search results. The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT.

It’s the start of what could become a meaningful threat to Google, which has rushed to bake in AI features across its search engine, fearing that users will flock to competing products that offer the tools first. It also puts OpenAI in more direct competition with the startup Perplexity, which bills itself as an AI “answer” engine. Perplexity has recently come under criticism for an AI summaries feature that publishers claimed was directly ripping off their work.

Research commissioned by Google estimates 31% of jobs would be insulated from AI and 61% radically transformed by it.

Did abstract mathematics, such as Pythagoras’s theorem, exist before the big bang?

Simon McLeish Lechlade, Gloucestershire, UK

The notion of the existence of mathematical ideas is a complex one.

Continue reading “Did abstract mathematics exist before the big bang?” »

Machine learning influences numerous aspects of modern society, empowers new technologies, from Alphago to ChatGPT, and increasingly materializes in consumer products such as smartphones and self-driving cars. Despite the vital role and broad applications of artificial neural networks, we lack systematic approaches, such as network science, to understand their underlying mechanism. The difficulty is rooted in many possible model configurations, each with different hyper-parameters and weighted architectures determined by noisy data. We bridge the gap by developing a mathematical framework that maps the neural network’s performance to the network characters of the line graph governed by the edge dynamics of stochastic gradient descent differential equations. This framework enables us to derive a neural capacitance metric to universally capture a model’s generalization capability on a downstream task and predict model performance using only early training results. The numerical results on 17 pre-trained ImageNet models across five benchmark datasets and one NAS benchmark indicate that our neural capacitance metric is a powerful indicator for model selection based only on early training results and is more efficient than state-of-the-art methods.

New data confirms that variation in our Universe’s expansion rate (or the Hubble ‘tension’) is not an error in measurement.

Summary: A new experimental cancer drug could ease cognitive difficulties for those with Rett syndrome, a rare autism-linked disorder, by enhancing brain cell functions. The drug, ADH-503, improves the activity of microglia, which are crucial for maintaining neural networks.

Researchers found that healthy microglia restored synapse function in brain organoids mimicking Rett syndrome. This breakthrough suggests potential therapies for Rett syndrome and other neurological conditions.