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Category: materials – Page 92

The discovery of superconductivity more than a century ago has significantly changed our world.

The story began in 1911 when the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes observed that the electrical resistance of mercury abruptly dropped to zero when it was cooled to a temperature of about 4 Kelvin (approximately 269°C)—a bit colder than the boiling point of liquid helium.

The practical applications of this remarkable effect were realized much later, in 1986, when a class of high-temperature superconductors was discovered. These high-Tc materials have a critical temperature below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, about −196°C, which reduces the complexity and cost of their operation.

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Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden, and just as you would use a flashlight to see in the dark, scientists can use light to uncover these properties.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used an advanced optical technique to learn more about a quantum material called Ta2NiSe5 (TNS). Their work appears in Nature Materials.

Materials can be perturbed through different external stimuli, often with changes in temperature or pressure; however, because light is the fastest thing in the universe, materials will respond very quickly to optical stimuli, revealing properties that would otherwise remain hidden.

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In physics, scientists have been fascinated by the mysterious behavior of superconductors—materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. Within these superconducting systems, electrons team up in “Cooper pairs” because they’re attracted to each other due to vibrations in the material called phonons.

As a thermodynamic phase of matter, superconductors typically exist in an . But recently, researchers at JILA became interested in kicking these materials into excited states and exploring the ensuing dynamics. As reported in a new Nature paper, the theory and experiment teams of JILA and NIST Fellows Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson, in collaboration with Prof. Robert Lewis-Swan at the University of Oklahoma, simulated superconductivity under such excited conditions using an atom-cavity system.

Instead of dealing with actual superconducting materials, the scientists harnessed the behavior of strontium atoms, laser-cooled to 10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero and levitated within an optical cavity built out of mirrors.

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Richard Mansell, Chief Executive Officer at IVO Limited gave the reasons he is optimistic about the Quantum Space Drive tests that will be done in orbital microgravity.

IF the orbital test works then it will lead to interstellar travel and shrinking it down would give material that would have anti-gravity like effects. We would spend the money to make nanocavities so that we could have propellantless thrust for floating cities. All of space and propulsion related science fiction would become possible within about three decades short of faster than light. This drive is in orbit now for a few months. I think DARPA gave them more money to conclusively prove if it works or not. All of the ground tests show it might work. But if it proves out then we first get 1,000 times better than a hall effect thruster but with no fuel limit. No fuel is used. So long as you have power, solar or nuclear the drive keeps working. So nuclear fuel supply for decades then thrust for decades. The theory proves out, then we make nanocavities which could act like antigravity then we get 1G or even 3G thrusters in space. This would be the Expanse TV show tech.

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A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air.

Researchers describe the “generic Air-gen effect”—nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity.

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In this video, we recount an incident that occurred at OpenAI while researchers were trying to finetune GPT-2 to be as helpful and ethical as possible. It’s narrated that inadvertently flipping a single minus sign led GPT-2 to become the embodiment of a well-known cardinal sin.

#ai #aisafety #alignment.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀SOURCES \& READINGS▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/fine-tuni…
OpenAI paper behind the blog post: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08593.pdf.
RLHF explainer on Hugging Face: https://huggingface.co/blog/rlhf.
RLHF explainer on aisafety.info https://aisafety.info/?state=88FN_904…
Concrete Problems in AI Safety, by @RobertMilesAI: • Concrete Problems in AI Safety.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀PATREON, MEMBERSHIP, KO-FI▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

🟠 Patreon: / rationalanimations.

Continue reading “The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd” | >

A breakthrough discovery of a new superconducting material sets a new record for transition metal sulfide superconductors with a transition temperature of 11.6 K and a high critical current density, marking a significant advancement in superconductor development.

With the support of electrical transport and magnetic measurement systems of Steady High Magnetic Field Facility (SHMFF), a research team from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), discovered a new superconducting material called (InSe2)xNbSe2, which possesses a unique lattice structure. The superconducting transition temperature of this material reaches 11.6 K, making it the transition metal sulfide superconductor with the highest transition temperature under ambient pressure.

The results were published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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