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Sep 16, 2023

World’s First Zero-Emission Autonomous Cargo Ship Is All-Electric

Posted by in categories: economics, robotics/AI, transportation

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development estimates, transportation accounts for 27 percent of global carbon emissions. Powered by fossil fuels, road-based transportation contributes 80 percent of these emissions and therefore countries are aggressively pushing for the electrification of vehicles. While major advances have been made for passenger cars and air transport, water transport is still lagging. Yara’s new cargo ship might just lead the way.

Sep 16, 2023

If you’d bought Apple shares instead of iPhones, you’d now have $147,000

Posted by in categories: mathematics, mobile phones

What would happen if, instead of buying the newest iPhone every time Apple launches one, you bought that same amount of Apple stock? There is a tweet floating around saying that if you had bought Apple shares instead of an iPhone every time they came out, you’d have hundreds of millions of dollars. The math is off (if you’d spent $20k on Apple stock when the rumors of the iPhone first started, you’d have $1.5 million today, at best) but in any case – it’d only make sense if you were clairvoyant in 2007, and knew when Apple would be launching phones, and at which price.

I figured a more fair way of calculating it would be to imagine buy a top-of-the-line iPhone every time Apple releases a new iPhone, or spend the same amount on Apple stock. If you had done that, by my calculations, you’d have spent around $16,000 on iPhones over the years (that’s around $20,000 in today’s dollars). If you’d bought Apple shares instead, you’d today have $147,000 or so — or a profit of around $131,000.

Sep 16, 2023

Answering AI’s biggest questions requires an interdisciplinary approach

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI, space

When Elon Musk announced the team behind his new artificial intelligence company xAI last month, whose mission is reportedly to “understand the true nature of the universe,” it underscored the criticality of answering existential concerns about AI’s promise and peril.

Whether the newly formed company can actually align its behavior to reduce the potential risks of the technology, or whether it’s solely aiming to gain an edge over OpenAI, its formation does elevate important questions about how companies should actually respond to concerns about AI. Specifically:

Sep 16, 2023

Nano rocket thruster can run on water, fit on a fingertip

Posted by in category: satellites

Source: Imperial College/ESA

The engine called the Iridium Catalysed Electrolysis CubeSat Thruster (ICE-Cube Thruster) is based on electrolysis, a process that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using an electric current. The hydrogen and oxygen are then fed into a combustion chamber and nozzle less than 1mm in length to produce thrust.

Sep 16, 2023

A newly created artificial photosynthesis system is 10 times more effective than existing systems

Posted by in categories: chemistry, solar power, sustainability

Peter Allen.

Published in Nature Catalysis, the six chemists discovered a method that could be used to produce other chemicals.

Sep 16, 2023

Generative AI needs a court ruling on fair use of training data to stop all these lawsuits

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

A group of authors led by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon has filed suit against Meta and OpenAI in federal court in San Francisco. Another, you might rightfully ask.

The allegations are the same as in the pending lawsuits: direct and vicarious copyright infringement, removal of copyright information, unfair competition, and negligence.

The authors allege that their copyrighted works have been included in the training material of the respective AI systems without authorization, specifically in the so-called book datasets.

Sep 16, 2023

Biological Masterpiece — Evolution Wired Human Brains To Act Like Supercomputers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, evolution, neuroscience, supercomputing

Researchers have confirmed that human brains are naturally wired to perform advanced calculations, similar to e a high-powered computer, to make sense of the world through a process known as Bayesian inference.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications.

<em>Nature Communications</em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access, multidisciplinary, scientific journal published by Nature Portfolio. It covers the natural sciences, including physics, biology, chemistry, medicine, and earth sciences. It began publishing in 2010 and has editorial offices in London, Berlin, New York City, and Shanghai.

Sep 16, 2023

Gearing up for mobility’s future with quantum computing

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

Any physical object, alive or inanimate, is composed of atoms and subatomic particles that interact in different ways governed by the principles of quantum mechanics. Some particles are in a pure state—they remain fixed and unchanged. Others are in a quantum state—a concept that can be difficult to understand because it involves having a particle occupy multiple states simultaneously. For instance, an electron in a pure state spins up or down; in a quantum state, also referred to as superposition, it spins up and down simultaneously. Another quantum principle states that particles can be in a state of entanglement in which changes in one directly affect the other. The principles of superposition and entanglement are fundamental to quantum computing.

Quantum bits, or qubits, are the smallest units of data that a quantum computer can process and store. In a pure state, qubits have a value of 1 or 0, similar to the bits used in computing today. In superposition, they can be both of these values simultaneously, and that enables parallel computations on a massive scale. While classical computers must conduct a new calculation any time a variable changes, quantum computers can explore a problem with many possible variables simultaneously.

Existing computers, although sufficient for many applications, can’t fully support all of the changes required to create a connected and intelligent-mobility ecosystem. Quantum computing (QC) could potentially provide faster and better solutions by leveraging the principles of quantum mechanics—the rules that govern how atoms and subatomic particles act and interact. (See sidebar, “Principles of quantum computing,” for more information). Over the short term, QC may be most applicable to solving complex problems involving small data sets; as its performance improves, QC will be applied to extremely large datasets.

Sep 16, 2023

Beyond Moore’s Law: MIT’s Innovative “Lightning” System Combines Light and Electrons for Faster Computing

Posted by in categories: climatology, robotics/AI, time travel

“Lightning” system connects photons to the electronic components of computers using a novel abstraction, creating the first photonic computing prototype to serve real-time machine-learning inference requests.

Computing is at an inflection point. Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on an electronic chip will double each year, is slowing down due to the physical limits of fitting more transistors on affordable microchips. These increases in computer power are slowing down as the demand grows for high-performance computers that can support increasingly complex artificial intelligence models. This inconvenience has led engineers to explore new methods for expanding the computational capabilities of their machines, but a solution remains unclear.

Potential of Photonic Computing.

Sep 16, 2023

Podcast: Newly approved drug may slow progression of Alzheimer’s

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A new episode of our podcast, “Show Me the Science,” has been posted. These episodes feature stories about groundbreaking research, as well as lifesaving and just plain cool stuff involving faculty, staff and students at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In this episode, Washington University researchers discuss the Food and Drug Administration’s recent full approval of the drug Leqembi (lecanemab) and what it could mean to the future of Alzheimer’s disease treatments. The drug is approved for use in people with mild dementia from Alzheimer’s disease, but researchers at Washington University’s Charles F. and Joanne Knight Alzheimer Disease Research Center (ADRC), believe the drug, along with other medications in clinical trials, one day may help prevent the development of memory loss and problems with thinking in people who have Alzheimer’s pathology in the brain but who have not yet developed clinical symptoms of the disease.

Barbara Joy Snider, MD, PhD, a professor of neurology and director of clinical trials at the Knight ADRC, says that although Leqembi doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s disease, it slows the decline in memory and thinking, and it also slows the progression of the disorder by removing some amyloid plaques from the brain.