Lifeboat Foundation

According to today’s conventional scientific wisdom, time flows strictly forward — from the past to the future through the present. We can remember the past, and we can predict the future based on the past (albeit imperfectly) — but we can’t perceive the future.

But if the recent data from the lab of Prof. Daryl Bem at Cornell University is correct, conventional scientific wisdom may need some corrections on this particular point.

In a research paper titled Feeling the Future, recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bem presents some rather compelling empirical evidence that in some cases — and with weak but highly statistically significant accuracy – many human beings can directly perceive the future. Not just predict it based on the past.

A team from the University of Chicago has announced the first evidence for “quantum superchemistry” – a phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collective accelerated reactions. The effect had been predicted, but never observed in the laboratory.

The findings, published July 24 in Nature Physics, open the door to a new field. Scientists are intensely interested in what are known as “quantum-enhanced” chemical reactions, which could have applications in quantum chemistry, quantum computing, and other technologies, as well as in better understanding the laws of the universe.

Breakthrough could point way to fundamental insights, new technology.

Continue reading “UChicago scientists observe first evidence of ‘quantum superchemistry’ in the laboratory” »

In response to rising fuel prices, Uber has introduced electric motorbikes in Kenya, initially available only in Nairobi. Uber has unveiled an electric motorbike named “One Electric” for the Kenyan market.

This introduction is pivotal as the global automotive sector is shifting towards electric vehicles, with nations like the U.K. intending to eliminate vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. This announcement is Uber’s third significant product introduction in Kenya this year, preceded by the launch of an audio recording feature for safety and the incorporation of M-PESA into its payment methods.

Frans Hiemstra, the director and regional general manager for Uber in the Middle East and Africa, emphasized the company’s commitment to sustainable practices. He mentioned that introducing the Electric Boda on their platform showcases their dedication to offering an emissions-free transportation option in Kenya. This move also aligns with Uber’s global ambition to achieve a zero-emissions platform by 2040.

That’s why we were struck to see a team of scientists that includes researchers from the name-brand Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology sounding off about what they say are promising new leads, published this month in the journal Aging.

“We identify six chemical cocktails, which, in less than a week and without compromising cellular identity, restore a youthful genome-wide transcript profile and reverse transcriptomic age,” reads the paper. “Thus, rejuvenation by age reversal can be achieved, not only by genetic, but also chemical means.”

Sounds big, right? The researchers claim they pinpointed six treatments that can reverse aging in cells and turn them into a more “youthful state,” according to a press release from Aging’s publisher, without causing dangerous unregulated cell growth.

Catastrophic forgetting, an innate issue with backpropagation learning algorithms, is a challenging problem in artificial and spiking neural network (ANN and SNN) research.

The brain has somewhat solved this problem using multiscale plasticity. Under global regulation through specific pathways, neuromodulators are dispersed to target brain regions, where both synaptic and neuronal plasticity are modulated by neuromodulators locally. Specifically, neuromodulators modify the capacity and property of neuronal and synaptic plasticity. This modification is known as metaplasticity.

Researchers led by Prof. Xu Bo from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators have proposed a novel brain-inspired learning method (NACA) based on neural modulation dependent plasticity, which can help mitigate catastrophic forgetting in ANN and SNN. The study was published in Science Advances on Aug. 25.

Examples the team gives include choosing an object to use as a hammer when there’s no hammer available (the robot chooses a rock) and picking the best drink for a tired person (the robot chooses an energy drink).

“RT-2 shows improved generalization capabilities and semantic and visual understanding beyond the robotic data it was exposed to,” the researchers wrote in a Google blog post. “This includes interpreting new commands and responding to user commands by performing rudimentary reasoning, such as reasoning about object categories or high-level descriptions.”

The dream of general-purpose robots that can help humans with whatever may come up—whether in a home, a commercial setting, or an industrial setting—won’t be achievable until robots can learn on the go. What seems like the most basic instinct to us is, for robots, a complex combination of understanding context, being able to reason through it, and taking actions to solve problems that weren’t anticipated to pop up. Programming them to react appropriately to a variety of unplanned scenarios is impossible, so they need to be able to generalize and learn from experience, just like humans do.

Look, ma, no 3D glasses! Check out our first impressions of Lenovo’s glasses-free 3D monitor for content creators, debuting at IFA.

The U.S. Department of the Interior has announced its approval of the Revolution Wind project. Located off the coast of Rhode Island, it will supply 704 megawatts (MW) of clean energy, more than 16 times the current offshore wind capacity of the United States.

Revolution Wind. A simulated view of the project from Nomans Land, Massachusetts. From BOEM planning document.

Currently, the United States has only a small fraction of the world’s offshore wind power. Its first commercial offshore wind farm, near Block Island in the Atlantic, only began operation in 2016, with a nameplate capacity of 30 megawatts (MW). Since then, it has added just 12 MW, for a total of 42 MW.

To explore the association between a chemical’s structure and its odour, Wiltschko and his team at Osmo designed a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system called a neural network that can assign one or more of 55 descriptive words, such as fishy or winey, to an odorant. The team directed the AI to describe the aroma of roughly 5,000 odorants. The AI also analysed each odorant’s chemical structure to determine the relationship between structure and aroma.

The system identified around 250 correlations between specific patterns in a chemical’s structure with a particular smell. The researchers combined these correlations into a principal odour map (POM) that the AI could consult when asked to predict a new molecule’s scent.

To test the POM against human noses, the researchers trained 15 volunteers to associate specific smells with the same set of descriptive words used by the AI. Next, the authors collected hundreds of odorants that don’t exist in nature but are familiar enough for people to describe. They asked the human volunteers to describe 323 of them and asked the AI to predict each new molecule’s scent on the basis of its chemical structure. The AI’s guess tended to be very close to the average response given by the humans — often closer than any individual’s guess.