Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 10106

There’s no x86 in the AI chip market yet—” People see a gold rush; there’s no doubt.”

A lot has changed since 1918. But whether it’s a literal (like the City of London School athletics’ U12 event) or figurative (AI chip development) race, participants still very much want to win.

For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share.

Read more

Arxiv – Observation of the Meissner effect at room temperature in single-layer graphene brought into contact with alkanes

There are claims of synthesis of a room temperature superconductor. However, these claims have not been officially accepted by scientific communities. Currently, the highest transition temperature (Tc) recognized in scientific articles is 135 K at 1 atm of Hg-Ba-Ca-Cu-O system which is a copper oxide superconductor. We packed graphite flakes into a ring-shaped polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tube and further injected heptane or octane. Then we generated circulating current in this ring tube by electromagnetic induction and showed that this circulating current continues to flow continuously at room temperature for 50 days. This experiment suggests that bringing alkane into contact with graphite may result in a material with zero resistance at room temperature.

Read more

But constraints brought about by the financial crisis ended the leverage that had fueled the boom. Fixed-income traders felt the brunt of the changes, and in the years since, equities traders —especially those with a technology background—have enjoyed a renaissance. Their rise has touched off a battle for supremacy that’s come down to only three companies: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase. These rivals are now locked in a technological arms race to control a $58 billion-a-year industry. As they each jockey for an edge over the other, no one who trades on Wall Street is safe.

Dimon, Blankfein, Gorman: Three great rivals are battling to control the $58 billion-a-year equities industry.

Read more

In the new study, the researchers dropped the full experimental set up for photocatalysis down a 120m drop tower, creating an environment similar to microgravity. As objects accelerate towards Earth in free fall, the effect of gravity diminishes as forces exerted by gravity are cancelled out by equal and opposite forces due to the acceleration. This is opposite to the G forces experienced by astronauts and fighter pilots as they accelerate in their aircraft.

The researchers managed to show that it is indeed possible to split water in this environment. However, as water is split to create gas, bubbles form. Getting rid of bubbles from the catalyst material once formed is important – bubbles hinder the process of creating gas. On Earth, gravity makes the bubbles automatically float to the surface (the water near the surface is denser than the bubbles, which makes them buyonant) – freeing the space on the catalyst for the next bubble to be produced.

In zero gravity this is not possible and the bubble will remain on or near the catalyst. However, the scientists adjusted the shape of nanoscale features in the catalyst by creating pyramid-shaped zones where the bubble could easily disengage from the tip and float off into the medium.

Read more

You’re probably sitting still, right? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Not only are you on a spinning orb, but you’re also traveling around 70,000 miles per hour around a star, in a galaxy that, observations imply, is sailing through space at over a million miles per hour.

If the above numbers seem shocking, they shouldn’t be. The laws of physics look and feel the same for any object so long as it’s not accelerating, the way you can’t feel that a car is traveling at a steady 60 miles per hour unless you look out the window. But that also makes our galactic speed hard to measure from here on Earth. The million-plus mile per hour number is based on measurements of how the most distant objects in the Universe appear to move in comparison to us, but scientists want to try to measure our acceleration by looking at more nearby objects.

Read more