Lifeboat Foundation

Prediction: GPT-4 will be bigger, more skilled, more robust and will have more memory than GPT-3.

Papers and a diverse range of personal items belonging to the late British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking have been acquired by Cambridge University and a UK museum group.

Under an agreement between Cambridge University Library, the Science Museum Group and the UK government, the entire contents of the world-renowned scientist’s office and archive will be preserved for future generations.

The £4.2 million ($5.9 million, 4.8 million euros) deal means 10000 pages of Hawking’s scientific papers and other documents will remain in the university city of Cambridge in eastern England where he died in 2018.

The claw belonged to a moa, an extinct flightless bird from New Zealand.

After the Pentagon said it would “reassess” its JEDI strategy, the department has decided to continue defending the cloud contract in court.

A series of experiments shows, remarkably, that it just might.

Falling drops usually make a splash, but these drops do the twist. Researchers have created surfaces that can make droplets spin and whirl at more than 7300 revolutions per minute when they rebound.

To make the water droplets spin, researchers first had to make sure they didn’t wet the surface they fell on—otherwise, they’d just splash. The researchers did this by coating alumina plates with a fluorinated nonstick coating, similar to those found in nonstick cooking pans. Next, they masked some regions of the surface and shone ultraviolet (UV) light on the entire plate. The regions exposed to the UV became highly “wettable,” meaning water touching those regions spread out immediately rather than bouncing back up. The team created several designs of the wettable regions, including one with spiral arms radiating out from a center, much like a pinwheel.

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What information is retained in a memory over time, and which parts get lost? These questions have led to many scientific theories over the years, and now a team of researchers at the Universities of Glasgow and Birmingham have been able to provide some answers.

Their new study, which is published today (May 26, 2021) in Nature Communications, demonstrates that our memories become less vibrant and detailed over time, with only the central gist eventually preserved. Moreover, this ‘gistification’ of our memories is boosted when we frequently recall our recent experiences.

The work could have implications in a number of areas, including the nature of memories in post-traumatic stress disorder, the repeated questioning of eye-witness testimonies and even in best practice for exam studying.

Dinosaur bones down under!