Dan Breeden – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:06:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 CMS finds unexpected excess of top quarks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/cms-finds-unexpected-excess-of-top-quarks https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/cms-finds-unexpected-excess-of-top-quarks#respond Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:06:55 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/cms-finds-unexpected-excess-of-top-quarks

The CMS collaboration at CERN has observed an unexpected feature in data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which could point to the existence of the smallest composite particle yet observed. The result, reported at the Rencontres de Moriond conference in the Italian Alps this week, suggests that top quarks – the heaviest and shortest lived of all the elementary particles – can momentarily pair up with their antimatter counterparts to produce an object called toponium. Other explanations cannot be ruled out, however, as the existence of toponium was thought too difficult to verify at the LHC, and the result will need to be further scrutinised by CMS’s sister experiment, ATLAS.

High-energy collisions between protons at the LHC routinely produce top quark–antiquark pairs (tt-bar). Measuring the probability, or cross section, of tt-bar production is both an important test of the Standard Model of particle physics and a powerful way to search for the existence of new particles that are not described by the 50-year-old theory. Many of the open questions in particle physics, such as the nature of dark matter, motivate the search for new particles that may be too heavy to have been produced in experiments so far.

CMS researchers were analysing a large sample of tt-bar production data collected in 2016–2018 to search for new types of Higgs bosons when they spotted something unusual. Additional Higgs-like particles are predicted in many extensions of the Standard Model. If they exist, such particles are expected to interact most strongly with the singularly massive top quark, which weighs in at 184 times the mass of the proton. And if they are massive enough to decay into a top quark–antiquark pair, this should dominate the way they decay inside detectors, with the two massive quarks splintering into “jets” of particles.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/cms-finds-unexpected-excess-of-top-quarks/feed 0
Gödel pro and contra AI: dismissal of the case https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/godel-pro-and-contra-ai-dismissal-of-the-case https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/godel-pro-and-contra-ai-dismissal-of-the-case#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:06:22 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/godel-pro-and-contra-ai-dismissal-of-the-case

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is used by both advocates and adversaries of strong AI to show that computers can(not) perform the same feats as humans. This article extends the construction through which Gödel proved his theorem, in order to allow a broader interpretation, showing that neither side has exploited its arguments to the fullest extend, and that the evidence can never be conclusive.

Dr.ir. C.J.B. Jongeneel & prof.dr. H. Koppelaar, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics, Section of Knowledge Based Systems.

1 Introduction

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/godel-pro-and-contra-ai-dismissal-of-the-case/feed 0
Science Saturday: Understanding the speed of brain communication https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/science-saturday-understanding-the-speed-of-brain-communication https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/science-saturday-understanding-the-speed-of-brain-communication#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:05:33 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/science-saturday-understanding-the-speed-of-brain-communication

Called the human connectome, the structural system of neural pathways in the brain or nervous system develops as people age.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/science-saturday-understanding-the-speed-of-brain-communication/feed 0
Small molecules restore mutant mitochondrial DNA polymerase activity https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/small-molecules-restore-mutant-mitochondrial-dna-polymerase-activity https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/small-molecules-restore-mutant-mitochondrial-dna-polymerase-activity#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 18:04:56 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/small-molecules-restore-mutant-mitochondrial-dna-polymerase-activity

Mitochondrial diseases caused by POLG mutations vary in severity. In young children, these diseases can quickly result in brain damage and life-threatening liver problems while others suffer muscle weakness, epilepsy, and organ failure later in childhood. POLG mutations recently received media attention when Prince Frederik of Nassau in Luxembourg died in March 2025 at just 22 years of age.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/small-molecules-restore-mutant-mitochondrial-dna-polymerase-activity/feed 0
China scientists develop flash memory 10,000× faster than current tech https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/china-scientists-develop-flash-memory-10000x-faster-than-current-tech https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/china-scientists-develop-flash-memory-10000x-faster-than-current-tech#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 14:02:37 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/china-scientists-develop-flash-memory-10000x-faster-than-current-tech

PoX is a new class of ultra‑fast, ultra‑green memories that meet the swelling appetite of large‑language‑model accelerators.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/china-scientists-develop-flash-memory-10000x-faster-than-current-tech/feed 0
How Connectionism Is Reshaping the Future of Machine Learning | Pedro Domingos https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/how-connectionism-is-reshaping-the-future-of-machine-learning-pedro-domingos https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/how-connectionism-is-reshaping-the-future-of-machine-learning-pedro-domingos#respond Fri, 18 Apr 2025 02:06:30 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/how-connectionism-is-reshaping-the-future-of-machine-learning-pedro-domingos

This episode is sponsored by Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites. Indeed’s Sponsored Jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster.

Get a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to boost your job’s visibility! Claim your offer now: https://www.indeed.com/EYEONAI

In this episode, renowned AI researcher Pedro Domingos, author of The Master Algorithm, takes us deep into the world of Connectionism—the AI tribe behind neural networks and the deep learning revolution.

From the birth of neural networks in the 1940s to the explosive rise of transformers and ChatGPT, Pedro unpacks the history, breakthroughs, and limitations of connectionist AI. Along the way, he explores how supervised learning continues to quietly power today’s most impressive AI systems—and why reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning are still lagging behind.

We also dive into:
The tribal war between Connectionists and Symbolists.
The surprising origins of Backpropagation.
How transformers redefined machine translation.
Why GANs and generative models exploded (and then faded)
The myth of modern reinforcement learning (DeepSeek, RLHF, etc.)
The danger of AI research narrowing too soon around one dominant approach.

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast, a machine learning practitioner, or just curious about where intelligence is headed, this episode offers a rare deep dive into the ideological foundations of AI—and what’s coming next.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/how-connectionism-is-reshaping-the-future-of-machine-learning-pedro-domingos/feed 0
The mysteries of the dark universe could be solved by the Rubin Observatory https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/the-mysteries-of-the-dark-universe-could-be-solved-by-the-rubin-observatory https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/the-mysteries-of-the-dark-universe-could-be-solved-by-the-rubin-observatory#respond Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:02:43 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/the-mysteries-of-the-dark-universe-could-be-solved-by-the-rubin-observatory

With its Legacy Survey of Space and Time, the new observatory is expected to build the most precise map of the universe — ever.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/the-mysteries-of-the-dark-universe-could-be-solved-by-the-rubin-observatory/feed 0
Self-Assembled Soft Matter https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/self-assembled-soft-matter https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/self-assembled-soft-matter#respond Thu, 17 Apr 2025 22:02:28 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/self-assembled-soft-matter

In this cross-journal Collection, across Nature Communications, Communications Chemistry, Communications Materials and Scientific Reports, we focus on…

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/self-assembled-soft-matter/feed 0
Latest 2D Chip: 6,000 Transistors, 3 Atoms Thick https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/latest-2d-chip-6000-transistors-3-atoms-thick https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/latest-2d-chip-6000-transistors-3-atoms-thick#respond Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:12:19 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/latest-2d-chip-6000-transistors-3-atoms-thick

New circuits might find use in edge computing chips

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/latest-2d-chip-6000-transistors-3-atoms-thick/feed 0
Innovation Archives https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/innovation-archives https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/innovation-archives#respond Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:11:37 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/innovation-archives

Get news on the latest news in technology, health, and more with Interesting Engineering. From AI, cryptocurrency, to drones, we will research and explore everything so that you can learn about the newests.

]]>
https://lifeboat.com/blog/2025/04/innovation-archives/feed 0