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Apr 29, 2018

Bye, black holes: white holes are even weirder

Posted by in category: cosmology

If there is a phenomenon out there that is actually more bizarre than black holes, it has to be white holes. Black holes can’t say that they might be the answer to where so much of the dark matter—and even most of the matter—in the universe is lurking.

The gravitational pull of a black hole is so insanely strong that not even light (so much for being the fastest entity in the cosmos), can defy it. Nothing can save you once you pass the grim point of no return otherwise known as the event horizon. However, Space.com observed that when Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in his theory of relativity, he also predicted the theoretical reverse of these galactic monsters. A white hole would be no threat to objects in space passing dangerously close, nothing can even enter its event horizon.

When black holes devour massive amounts of matter and energy, it is thought that everything which appears to vanish forever actually emerges from a white hole. Exactly where the victims of a black hole come out could be anywhere from another place in this universe to another universe entirely. Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli theorized something even stranger linking the two. Black holes result from collapsed stars, but when these astral corpses die, they may actually turn into white holes.

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Apr 29, 2018

How Europe’s ‘energy citizens’ are leading the way to 100% renewable power

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Germany and Denmark are setting the standard.


Europe already has the technology to create a 100% renewable energy system, but communities will need to join forces to achieve this ambitious goal.

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Apr 29, 2018

Boston Dynamics (Marc Raibert, CEO)

Posted by in categories: engineering, robotics/AI

This is a talk by Marc Raibert for course 6.S099: Artificial General Intelligence. He is the CEO of Boston Dynamics. This class is free and open to everyone. Our goal is to take an engineering approach to exploring possible paths toward building human-level intelligence for a better world.

Note: Due to technical difficulties, we don’t have a screencast of the slides, and the video of the slides is low resolution. Despite this, I chose to include several parts of the talk that show slides, especially with videos. It’s not optimal, but I hope you learn and enjoy anyway. Thanks for understanding. We’re always learning and improving.

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Apr 29, 2018

Prosthetic Memory System Successful in Humans, Study Finds

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cyborgs, engineering, neuroscience

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.

In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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Apr 29, 2018

11 Industries Being Disrupted

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

AI is predicted to be one of the next big digital disruptions, but some places are already feeling its impact.

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Apr 29, 2018

Preparations for VLT UT1 first light

Posted by in category: space

Final preparations being carried out in the week before the VLT UT1 First Light. Following successful optical alignment tests, the 8.2-m primary mirror was removed from the first Unit Telescope (UT1). This image shows preparations to move it into the Mirror Maintenance Building (MMB) to be coated with a thin, highly reflective aluminium layer. The cell with the 8.2-m mirror has been detached from the lower part of the telescope tube. (Photo obtained on May 17, 1998).

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Apr 29, 2018

An Introductory Guide to Understand how ANNs Conceptualize New Ideas (using Embedding)

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Here’s something you don’t hear everyday – everything we perceive is just a best case probabilistic prediction by our brain, based on our past encounters and knowledge gained through other mediums. This might sound extremely counter intuitive because we have always imagined that our brain mostly gives us deterministic answers.

We’ll do a small experiment to showcase this logic. Take a look at the below image:

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Apr 29, 2018

Full moon tonight & conjunction with Jupiter

Posted by in category: space

Nashville, Tenn. (WKRN) — If you saw the moon Saturday night, you know how bright it was!

Technically, it will be a full moon Sunday at 7:58 p.m. There is something else that is special about Sunday’s night sky.

There is a “conjunction” of the moon with Jupiter Sunday and Monday evenings just after sunset in the southeastern sky. Sunset is at 7:32 p.m.

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Apr 29, 2018

Felix Klein and the Klein-Bottle

Posted by in categories: government, mathematics

On April 25, 1849, German mathematician and mathematics educator Felix Klein was born. Klein is known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and on the connections between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen Program, classifying geometries by their underlying symmetry groups, was a hugely influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the day. Klein also devised the Klein-bottle, a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down.

A mathematician named Klein Thought the Möbius band was divine. Said he: “If you glue The edges of two, You’ll get a weird bottle like mine.” ( Leo Moser )

Felix Klein’s father was an old Prussian Protestant from Ennepetal in southern Westphalia. He was district administrator of the government’s main fund in Düsseldorf, while Klein’s mother came from industrial circles in Aachen. In the autumn of 1865 Felix Klein began studying mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Bonn. Klein studied in Bonn with Rudolf Lipschitz and Julius Plücker, whose assistant he became. After Plucker’s death Alfred Clebsch took over the publication of his unfinished work and transferred this work to the talented Klein received his doctorate in 1868 from Plücker with a topic from geometry applied to mechanics. In 1869 he went to Berlin University and listened to a lecture by Leopold Kronecker on square forms.[5] He took part in the mathematical seminars of Ernst Eduard Kummer and Karl Weierstrass, where he also met Sophus Lie, with whom he went to Paris for a study visit in 1870 and was a friend.

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Apr 29, 2018

Reunion Island volcano erupts

Posted by in category: futurism

It’s said to be one of the most active volcanoes in the world.

Le Piton de la Fournaise on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean started spewing lava on Friday and continued into the weekend.

And there was a spectacular light show for those who ventured out.

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