Lifeboat Foundation

The same day Microsoft invested billions in OpenAI, McKinsey snatched up enterprise-focused AI firm Iguazio for a relative steal.

The consulting giant reportedly paid around $50 million for Iguazio, a Tel Aviv–based company offering an MLOps platform for large-scale businesses — “MLOps” refers to a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production. In a press release, McKinsey says it plans to use the startup’s tech and team of 70 data scientists to bolster its QuantumBlack platform, McKinsey’s data analytics–focused group, with “industry-specific” AI solutions.

“We analyzed more than a 1,000 AI companies worldwide and identified Iguazio as the best fit to significantly accelerate our AI offering — from the initial concept to production, in a simplified, scalable and automated manner,” McKinsey senior partner Ben Ellencweig said in a statement. Over time, he added, the Iguazio and QuantumBlack teams will be fully integrated and work from a single product roadmap, combining the best of both worlds (with any luck).

A recent observational study of some 191 giant stars at the end of their lives as hydrogen-burning, main sequence stars, places more precise parameters our own star’s expansionary endgame. The Sun will finish its life at perhaps two to three hundred times its current angular size.

The observations were made between 1996 and 2008 with the now defunct Palomar Testbed Interferometer atop Mount Palomar in southern California. They were coupled with data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hipparcos and Gaia missions to more accurately calculate the stars’ distances and effective temperatures.

New survey of giant stars reveals details about the Sun’s own likely endgame as an expanding red giant.

Continue reading “Sun Will Eventually Expand To Some 300 Times Its Current Size, Says Study” »

Escucha Sound of the Hunga Tonga Volcanic Eruption de European Space Agency en #SoundCloud

One year ago, the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted, causing widespread destruction to the Pacific Island Nation of Tonga. It spewed volcanic material up to 58 km into the atmosphere, brought a nearly 15 m tsunami that crashed ashore, destroying villages, and created a sonic boom that rippled around the world – twice. Even one year on, interest in the extraordinary explosive eruption remains. A sound artist has recently recreated the sonification of the underwater volcanic eruption using rayleigh signal intensity data provided by the Aeolus Virtual Research Environment platform. Using wind data obtained on one of its overpasses over the ash cloud of the Hunga Tonga explosion, Jamie Perera used an audio sample of one of the shock waves, time-stretched it into a ghostly tone, and assigned it to harmonic values transcribed from 90 Aeolus readings taken over a duration of approximately 15 minutes. The listener hears one reading every two seconds, in a harmonic range that spans six piano octaves, the highest of which can be heard at around 01:18 minutes when the readings show the eruption’s dust plume at its highest peak (over 20.5 km). The artistic intention behind the sonification was to evoke the otherworldly landscape of Hunga Tonga and other volcanoes. Sonification credit/copyright: @jamieperera (2023). Used by permission. Data and guidance provided by Daniel Santillan. Thanks to Peter Bickerton and Jemma Foster. Originally created as part of Wild Alchemy Journal — Air Edition — Aeolus.

Out solar system will soon be getting a new explorer, as a mission to study the moons of Jupiter readies for launch.

The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer mission, or JUICE, is scheduled for launch in just a few months’ time, so the spacecraft is now being packed up at its testing location in Toulouse, France, for transport to its launch location in French Guiana.

The spacecraft recently went through its final round of testing, including a thermal vacuum test to ensure it can handle the cold temperatures of space, and the system validation test in which the immediate steps after launch are simulated, like the deploying of booms and arrays that will happen in space.

In recent years, many computer scientists have been exploring the notion of metaverse, an online space in which users can access different virtual environments and immersive experiences, using VR and AR headsets. While navigating the metaverse, users might also share personal data, whether to purchase goods, connect with other users, or for other purposes.

Past studies have consistently highlighted the limitations of password authentication systems, as there are now many cyber-attacks and strategies for cracking them. To increase the security of users navigating the metaverse, therefore, password-based authentication would be far from ideal.

This inspired a team of researchers at VIT-AP University in India to create MetaSecure, a password-less authentication system for the metaverse. This system, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, combines three different authentication techniques, namely device attestation, facial recognition and physical security keys.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/02/07/183-…e-physics/

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it’s hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet, there are strong indications from theoretical considerations and cosmological data that we need to do better. But the leading contenders, especially supersymmetry, haven’t yet shown up in our experiments, leading some to wonder whether anthropic selection is a better answer. Michael Dine gives us an expert’s survey of the current situation, with pointers to what might come next.

Continue reading “Mindscape 183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics” »

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists say they’ve now observed galaxies from when the universe was just 330 million years old.

Read more about it here: https://ow.ly/jV1H50Mtv2S📷 @esa / @HUBBLE_space & @NASA M. Stiavelli, P. Erwin et al. pic.twitter.com/hprRJ8APnN

— HUBBLE (@HUBBLE_space) January 19, 2023.

It took two years to gather all the data included in this image.

This detailed catalog of the stars in our galaxy was a challenge to produce. The telescope’s near-infrared camera helped astronomers see through the clouds of dust that weave their way between the stars, blocking shorter wavelengths of light like visible and ultraviolet. But sometimes the problem is too much light. Our galaxy’s disk is packed so full of stars that they often overlap when you try to photograph them all, and the diffuse light from nebulae and star clusters makes it even harder to single out individual stars. Saydjari and his colleagues used a data processing program that helped predict the background behind each star, making it easier to separate one star from another.

“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 (the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey’s second data release) is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” says Saydjari.