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When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) achieved fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022, the world’s attention turned to the prospect of how that breakthrough experiment — designed to secure the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — might also pave the way for virtually limitless, safe and carbon-free fusion energy.

Advanced 3D printing offers one potential solution to bridging the science and technology gaps presented by current efforts to make inertial fusion energy (IFE) power plants a reality.

“Now that we have achieved and repeated fusion ignition,” said Tammy Ma, lead for LLNL’s inertial fusion energy institutional initiative, “the Lab is rapidly applying our decades of know-how into solving the core physics and engineering challenges that come with the monumental task of building the fusion ecosystem necessary for a laser fusion power plant. The mass production of ignition-grade targets is one of these, and cutting-edge 3D printing could help get us there.”

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Welcome to Impact Theory, I’m Tom Bilyeu and in today’s episode, Nick Bostrom and I dive into the moral and societal implications of AI as it becomes increasingly advanced.

Nick Bostrom is a leading philosopher, author, and expert on AI here to discuss the future of AI, its challenges, and its profound impact on society, meaning, and our pursuit of happiness.

We touch on treating AI with moral consideration, the potential centralization of power, automation of critical sectors like police and military, and the creation of hyper-stimuli that could impact society profoundly.

We also discuss Nick’s book, Deep Utopia, and what the ideal human life will look like in a future dominated by advanced technology, AI, and biotechnology.

Our conversation navigates through pressing questions about AI aligning with human values, the catastrophic consequences of powerful AI systems, and the need for deeper philosophical and ethical considerations as AI continues to evolve.

Continue reading ““Life Will Get Weird The Next 3 Years!” — Future of AI, Humanity & Utopia vs Dystopia | Nick Bostrom” | >

Quantum walks are a powerful theoretical model using quantum effects such as superposition, interference and entanglement to achieve computing power beyond classical methods.

A research team at the National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology from the Academy of Military Sciences (China) recently published a review article that thoroughly summarizes the theories and characteristics, physical implementations, applications and challenges of quantum walks and quantum walk computing. The review was published Nov. 13 in Intelligent Computing in an article titled “Quantum Walk Computing: Theory, Implementation, and Application.”

As quantum mechanical equivalents of classical random walks, quantum walks use quantum phenomena to design advanced algorithms for applications such as database search, network analysis and navigation, and . Different types of quantum walks include discrete-time quantum walks, continuous-time quantum walks, discontinuous quantum walks, and nonunitary quantum walks. Each model presents unique features and computational advantages.

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No mirror-image life exists yet, but scientists are calling for the research to stop before it gets close to a breakthrough.

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Through its commitment to international nuclear nonproliferation — a mission focused on limiting the spread of nuclear weapons and sensitive technology while working to promote peaceful use of nuclear science and technology — the United States maintains a constant vigilance aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism worldwide.

With extensive research into both basic and applied uranium science, as well as internationally deployed operational solutions, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is uniquely positioned to contribute its comprehensive capabilities toward advancing the U.S. nonproliferation mission.

In 1943, seemingly overnight, ORNL emerged from a rural Tennessee valley as the site of the world’s first continuously operating nuclear reactor, in support of U.S. efforts to end World War II. ORNL’s mission soon shifted into peacetime applications, harnessing nuclear science for medical treatments, power generation and breakthroughs in materials, biological and computational sciences.

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The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.

Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.

Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…

Continue reading “What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know” | >

The notion of entropy grew out of an attempt at perfecting machinery during the industrial revolution. A 28-year-old French military engineer named Sadi Carnot set out to calculate the ultimate efficiency of the steam-powered engine. In 1824, he published a 118-page book(opens a new tab) titled Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, which he sold on the banks of the Seine for 3 francs. Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers. But some copies of his book survived, and in them lay the embers of a new science of thermodynamics — the motive power of fire.

Carnot realized that the steam engine is, at its core, a machine that exploits the tendency for heat to flow from hot objects to cold ones. He drew up the most efficient engine conceivable, instituting a bound on the fraction of heat that can be converted to work, a result now known as Carnot’s theorem. His most consequential statement comes as a caveat on the last page of the book: “We should not expect ever to utilize in practice all the motive power of combustibles.” Some energy will always be dissipated through friction, vibration, or another unwanted form of motion. Perfection is unattainable.

Reading through Carnot’s book a few decades later, in 1865, the German physicist Rudolf Clausius coined a term for the proportion of energy that’s locked up in futility. He called it “entropy,” after the Greek word for transformation. He then laid out what became known as the second law of thermodynamics: “The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”

Physicists of the era erroneously believed that heat was a fluid (called “caloric”). Over the following decades, they realized heat was rather a byproduct of individual molecules bumping around. This shift in perspective allowed the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann to reframe and sharpen the idea of entropy using probabilities.

Boltzmann distinguished the microscopic properties of molecules, such as their individual locations and velocities, from bulk macroscopic properties of a gas like temperature and pressure…

Google DeepMind, Google’s flagship AI research lab, wants to beat OpenAI at the video-generation game — and it might just, at least for a little while.

Continue reading “Google DeepMind Unveils Veo 2, A New AI Video Model To Rival OpenAI’s Sora” | >

After the successful completion of Phase 1 of the next-generation electronics program, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has provided BAE Systems’ FAST Labs research and development organization a $5 million contract for Phase 2 of the Technologies for Mixed-mode Ultra Scaled Integrated Circuits (T-MUSIC) program.

T-MUSIC is designed to enable disruptive radio frequency (RF) mixed-mode technologies by developing high performance RF analog electronics integrated with advanced digital electronics on the same wafer. This technology supports critical communications, radar, and electronic warfare (EW) capabilities, and is widely used to support commercial telecommunications.

“Building on the success of Phase 1, in Phase 2 we’ll continue to develop the advanced electronics capabilities that could serve as the foundation for greatly enhanced Department of Defense capabilities in advanced RF sensors and high capacity communications,” said Chris Rappa, product line director for Radio Frequency, Electronic Warfare, and Advanced Electronics at BAE Systems’ FAST Labs. “Phase 2 of the program will move the industry closer to the eventual fielding of this disruptive technology to protect our warfighters.”

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Imagine this: a round, plump robot, like a giant bowling ball, that can roll on land, swim in water, and perform all sorts of high-tech operations. On October 9th, a team of scientists from Zhejiang University unveiled something called the RT-G spherical robot, claiming it’s a \.

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