Potentially good technology if it makes it to market. A new semiconductor would be great!
Researchers at the Georgia Institute for Technology have found a new semiconductor that’s a really good candidate for making computers faster and smaller than ever. Amazingly enough, it works by combining graphene with silicon carbide, to give a material with a sensible band gap that still has a high thermal conductivity.
Correction to what I say at 02:54 — That should have been voltage, not current.
Magnetic random-access memories (MRAMs) are data storage devices that store digital data within nanomagnets, representing it in binary code (i.e., as “0” or “1”). The magnetization of nanomagnets inside these memory devices can be directed upward or downward.
Over the past decade, electronics engineers have introduced techniques that can switch this direction using in-plane electrical currents. These techniques ultimately enabled the creation of a new class of MRAM devices, referred to as spin-orbit torque (SOT)-MRAMs.
While existing techniques to switch magnetization direction of nanomagnets in SOT-MRAMs have proved effective, many only work if external magnetic fields are aligned with the direction of the electric current. In a recent paper published in Nature Electronics, researchers at the National University of Singapore demonstrated the field-free switching of the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) ferromagnet cobalt iron boron (CoFeB) at ambient conditions.
It’s fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today’s show is something different: a solo effort, featuring just me talking without any guests to cramp my style. This won’t be the usual format, but I suspect it will happen from time to time. Feel free to chime in below on how often you think alternative formats should be part of the mix. The topic today is “Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?”, or equivalently “Why Does the Universe Exist at All?” Heady stuff, but we’re not going to back away from the challenge.
What I have to say will roughly follow my recent paper on the subject, although in a more chatty and accessible style. It concerns ideas at the intersection of physics, philosophy, and theology, so tune in if you’re into that sort of thing.
Big news! After a number of people have asked, I have finally opened a Patreon account for people who would like to support Mindscape in some way. You can sign up to kick in a dollar or more per podcast episode, and in return you get 1) access to occasional Ask Me Anything episodes done exclusively for patrons, and 2) my undying gratitude. If the Patreon route is successful enough, I’ll forego having ads on the podcast — we’ll see how it goes.
GOOGLE’S NEW SENSOR DENOISNG ALGORITHM brings yet another game changer for LOW LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY. Within a handful of years, this will be added to other factors coming down the pipe, giving further impetus to a revolution in night vision. The video below speaks for itself. In effect, the system takes a series of images from different angles, exposures, and so on, then accurately reconstructs what is missing:
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Half of the universe is filled with expansionist alien civilizations, and it’s only a matter of time before they’ll reach us. OK, that sounded a little sensationalist. But it’s also the conclusion of a recent astrophysics paper. Let’s see how they figure this, and whether we should take it seriously.
🙏 We would like to thank our generous Patreon supporters who make Two Minute Papers possible: Aleksandr Mashrabov, Alex Balfanz, Alex Haro, Andrew Melnychuk, Benji Rabhan, Bryan Learn, B Shang, Christian Ahlin, Eric Martel, Geronimo Moralez, Gordon Child, Jace O’Brien, Jack Lukic, John Le, Jonas, Jonathan, Kenneth Davis, Klaus Busse, Kyle Davis, Lorin Atzberger, Lukas Biewald, Luke Dominique Warner, Matthew Allen Fisher, Michael Albrecht, Michael Tedder, Nevin Spoljaric, Nikhil Velpanur, Owen Campbell-Moore, Owen Skarpness, Rajarshi Nigam, Ramsey Elbasheer, Steef, Taras Bobrovytsky, Ted Johnson, Thomas Krcmar, Timothy Sum Hon Mun, Torsten Reil, Tybie Fitzhugh, Ueli Gallizzi. If you wish to appear here or pick up other perks, click here: https://www.patreon.com/TwoMinutePapers.
🙏 We would like to thank our generous Patreon supporters who make Two Minute Papers possible: Aleksandr Mashrabov, Alex Balfanz, Alex Haro, Andrew Melnychuk, Benji Rabhan, Bryan Learn, B Shang, Christian Ahlin, Eric Martel, Geronimo Moralez, Gordon Child, Ivo Galic, Jace O’Brien, Jack Lukic, John Le, Jonas, Jonathan, Kenneth Davis, Klaus Busse, Kyle Davis, Lorin Atzberger, Lukas Biewald, Matthew Allen Fisher, Michael Albrecht, Michael Tedder, Nevin Spoljaric, Nikhil Velpanur, Owen Campbell-Moore, Owen Skarpness, Rajarshi Nigam, Ramsey Elbasheer, Steef, Taras Bobrovytsky, Ted Johnson, Thomas Krcmar, Timothy Sum Hon Mun, Torsten Reil, Tybie Fitzhugh, Ueli Gallizzi. If you wish to appear here or pick up other perks, click here: https://www.patreon.com/TwoMinutePapers.
To try out our new course (and many others on math and science), go to https://brilliant.org/sabine. You can get started for free, and the first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
Physicists have many theories for the beginning of our universe: A big bang, a big bounce, a black hole, a network, a collision of membranes, a gas of strings, and the list goes on. What does this mean? It means we don’t know how the universe began. And the reason isn’t just that we’re lacking data, the reason is that science is reaching its limits when we try to understand the initial condition of the entire universe.
00:00 Intro. 00:25 The Big Bang Theory. 03:47 Why So Many Other Theories? 04:53 The Problem With Cosmology. 07:30 The Importance of Simplicity. 10:57 Stories of Creation. 15:35 Sponsor Message
To help developers protect their applications against possible misuse, we are introducing the faster and more accurate Moderation endpoint. This endpoint provides OpenAI API developers with free access to GPT-based classifiers that detect undesired content — an instance of using AI systems to assist with human supervision of these systems. We have also released both a technical paper describing our methodology and the dataset used for evaluation.
When given a text input, the Moderation endpoint assesses whether the content is sexual, hateful, violent, or promotes self-harm — content prohibited by our content policy. The endpoint has been trained to be quick, accurate, and to perform robustly across a range of applications. Importantly, this reduces the chances of products “saying” the wrong thing, even when deployed to users at-scale. As a consequence, AI can unlock benefits in sensitive settings, like education, where it could not otherwise be used with confidence.
