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The ability to recognize and respond to emotionally-charged situations is essential to a species’ evolutionary success. A new study published in Nature Communications advances our understanding of how the brain responds to emotionally charged objects and scenes.

The research, led by Trinity College Dublin neuroscientist Prof. Sonia Bishop, and Google researcher Samy Abdel-Ghaffar while he was a Ph.D. student in Prof. Bishop’s lab at UC Berkeley, has identified how the represents different categories of emotional stimuli in a way that allows for more than a simple “approach/avoid” dichotomy when guiding behavioral responses.

Sonia Bishop, now Chair of Psychology in Trinity’s School of Psychology, and senior author of the paper, explains, It is hugely important for all species to be able to recognize and respond appropriately to emotionally salient stimuli, whether that means not eating rotten food, running from a bear, approaching an attractive person in a bar or comforting a tearful child.

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Quantum computers offer powerful ways to improve cybersecurity, communications, and data processing, among other fields. To realize these full benefits, however, multiple quantum computers must be connected to build quantum networks or a quantum internet. Scientists have struggled to come up with practical methods of building such networks, which must transmit quantum information over long distances.

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have proposed a new approach—building long quantum channels using vacuum sealed tubes with an array of spaced-out lenses. These vacuum beam guides, about 20 centimeters in diameter, would have ranges of thousands of kilometers and capacities of more than 1,013 qubits per second, better than any existing quantum communication approach. Photons of light encoding quantum data would move through the vacuum tubes and remain focused thanks to the lenses.

“We believe this kind of network is feasible and has a lot of potential,” said Liang Jiang, professor of molecular engineering and senior author of the new work. “It could not only be used for secure communication, but also for building distributed quantum computing networks, distributed quantum sensing technologies, new kinds of telescopes, and synchronized clocks.”

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Fundamental physics—let alone quantum physics—might sound complicated to many, but it can actually be applied to solve everyday problems.

Imagine navigating to an unfamiliar place. Most people would suggest using GPS, but what if you were stuck in an underground tunnel where radio signals from satellites were not able to penetrate? That’s where quantum sensing tools come in.

USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute researchers Jonathan Habif and Justin Brown, both from ISI’s new Laboratory for Quantum-Limited Information, are working at making sensing instruments like atomic accelerometers smaller and more accurate so they can be used to navigate when GPS is down.

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So I serve a hundred years in one day…’- Joe Haldeman, 2011.

Robot Preachers Found To Undermine Religious Commitment ‘Tell me your torments,’ the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion. — Philip K. Dick, 1969.

Gaia — Why Stop With Just The Earth? ‘But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn’t they?’ — Robert Castle, 1939.

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5:40 P.M. UPDATE: Spectrum has issued a statement saying a massive outage of its internet, phone and cable TV service across the state is due to damage caused by Hurricane Beryl. “The outage is due to a third-party infrastructure issue caused by the impact of Hurricane Beryl,” the company said at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. “We apologize for the inconvenience and are working with the third party to resolve this as quickly as possible.” The Bexar County…

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I watched United Nations delegates debate AI-based weapons that can fire without human initiation. Humans cannot be taken out of that decision-making.

By Kate Graham-Shaw

Imagine a weapon with no human deciding when to launch or pull its trigger. Imagine a weapon programmed by humans to recognize human targets, but then left to scan its internal data bank to decide whether a set of physical characteristics meant a person was friend or foe. When humans make mistakes, and fire weapons at the wrong targets, the outcry can be deafening, and the punishment can be severe. But how would we react, and who would we hold responsible if a computer programmed to control weapons made that fateful decision to fire, and it was wrong?

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Google’s DeepMind has unveiled a groundbreaking AI training method called JEST, which significantly reduces energy consumption and training time. Meanwhile, Chinese tech giants like SenseTime and Alibaba are showcasing their own powerful AI models, claiming to outperform even OpenAI’s GPT-4 in certain areas. The race for AI dominance is heating up, with advancements in efficient training and multimodal learning taking center stage.

#google #ai

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