Summary: A new predictive model is able to determine who will change their minds about contentious scientific information when presented with evidence-based research.
Source: Santa Fe Institute.
A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information.
This Friday, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has shared another post on Instagram after being trolled for the previous one. He stated that Meta is actually working on the graphics, which seemed literally “poor” in the first image.
Must have seen all the mockings and the memes about the amateur-looking picture.
Mark Zuckerberg shared a post on Instagram: “Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics coming soon. I’ll share more at Connect. Also, I know the photo I posted earlier this week was pretty basic — it was taken very quickly to celebrate a launch. The graphics in Horizon are capable of much more — even on headsets — and Horizon is improving very quickly.”. Follow their account to see 239 posts.
“Fire-proofing” wood and yet retaining the natural aesthetics of wood grain is now possible.
Metamorworks/iStock.
The system, named Cas13D-N2V8, showed a significant reduction in the number of off-target genes and no detectable collateral damage in cell lines and somatic cells, which indicated its future potential, according to a report published in South China Morning Post newspaper on Wednesday.
It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to be the closest things to aliens we have ever encountered: cephalopods.
Cephalopods—the family of creatures which contains octopuses, squids, and cuttlefish—are one of nature’s most intriguing creations. They are all soft-bodied, containing no skeleton, only a hardened beak. They are aquatic, although they can survive for some time in the air; some are even capable of short flight, propelled by the same jets of water that move them through the ocean. They do strange things with their limbs. And they are highly intelligent, easily the most intelligent of the invertebrates, by any measure.
Octopuses in particular seem to enjoy demonstrating their intelligence when we try to capture, detain, or study them. In zoos and aquariums they are notorious for their indefatigable and often successful attempts at escape. A New Zealand octopus named Inky made headlines around the world when he escaped from the National Aquarium in Napier by climbing through his tank’s overflow valve, scampering eight feet across the floor, and sliding down a narrow, 106-foot drainpipe into the ocean. At another aquarium near Dunedin, an octopus called Sid made so many escape attempts, including hiding in buckets, opening doors, and climbing stairs, that he was eventually released into the ocean. They’ve also been accused of flooding aquariums and stealing fish from other tanks: Such tales go back to some of the first octopuses kept in captivity in Britain in the 19th century and are still being repeated today.
You can buy What We Owe the Future here: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/william-macaskill/what-we-…541618626/
In his new book about longtermism, What We Owe the Future, the philosopher William MacAskill argues that concern for the long-term future should be a key moral priority of our time. There are three central claims that justify this view. 1. Future people matter. 2. There could be a lot of them. 3. We can make their lives go better. In this video, we focus on the third claim.
Continue reading “Can we make the future a million years from now go better?” »
Reflections from Brookhaven Lab physicists on culmination of 2020–22 U.S. high-energy physics community planning process.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Argentina has found chromosomal evidence of people living in South America as far back as 18,000 years ago. The group has published a paper describing their work and findings on the open access site PLOS ONE.
Over the past several years, scientists have found evidence of people first traveling to North America from Siberia approximately 14,000 to 17,000 years ago, using what was then a land bridge to Alaska. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence suggesting that the timeline may have to be pushed back a bit.
Supercooled water undergoes a liquid–liquid phase transition. The authors show that the two phases have distinct hydrogen-bond networks, differing in their degree of entanglement, and thus the transition can be described by the topological changes of the network.
Numbers are an integral part of programming. Hence, programming languages support various datatypes to represent different kinds of numbers and provide various methods to work with them. Each of these datatypes comes with certain limitations on the range of numbers they can represent; while some can represent a small range of numbers, others support a very large range of numbers. Depending on our use case, we can choose from one of them. But none of them have a way to represent infinity.
We often encounter and have to deal with infinity in many real-world scenarios, and so we need a way to represent them in programming languages. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to represent and work with infinity in Python.
