Menu

Blog

Page 1834

Aug 22, 2023

The creepiness of conversational AI has been put on full display

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The danger posed by conversational AI isn’t that it can say weird or dark things; it’s that it can manipulate you without your knowledge.

Aug 22, 2023

The Space 18th SDG at United Nations General Assembly 78 2023

Posted by in category: space

Only by expanding the domain of life into space can we fulfill the 17 SDGs on Earth in the long term. Therefore, the Space Renaissance International and the…

Aug 22, 2023

The causal effect of gut microbiota on psoriasis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Likewise, this dataset had 4,510 cases, 212,242 controls, with 16,380,464 SNPs for psoriasis, and 2,802 cases, 212,242 controls, with 16,380,459 SNPs for psoriasis vulgaris.

The team analyzed the aggregated statistical data using an MR approach to explore the potential causal relationship between the gut microbiome and psoriasis. SNPs with a threshold P-value of 1 × 10−5 worked as genetic instrumental variables in these MR analyses.

Aug 22, 2023

How a son’s illness helped save dad’s life

Posted by in category: genetics

While searching for answers about their son’s condition, Karlie and Evan Anderson made a startling discovery: despite living for 30 years without any symptoms, Evan tested positive for Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that nearly cost him his life. NBC’s Kaylee Hartung reports for TODAY.

Aug 22, 2023

Klotho levels and telomere length may be associated through a coordinated downregulation of longevity factors

Posted by in categories: biological, life extension, neuroscience

A new research paper was published by Aging (listed by MEDLINE/PubMed as “Aging (Albany NY)” and “Aging-US” by Web of Science) in Volume 15, Issue 15, entitled, “Associations between klotho and telomere biology in high stress caregivers.”

Aging biomarkers may be related to each other through direct co-regulation and/or through being regulated by common processes associated with chronological aging or stress. Klotho is an aging regulator that acts as a circulating hormone with critical involvement in regulating insulin signaling, phosphate homeostasis, oxidative stress, and age-related inflammatory functioning.

In this new study, researchers Ryan L. Brown, Elissa E. Epel, Jue Lin, Dena B. Dubal, and Aric A. Prather from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, University of California, San Francisco, and the Department of Neurology and Weill Institute of Neurosciences, University of California, San Francisco discuss the association between klotho levels and telomere length of specific sorted immune cells among a healthy sample of mothers caregiving for a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or a child without ASD — covarying age and body mass index — in order to understand if high stress associated with caregiving for a child with an ASD may be involved in any association between these aging biomarkers.

Aug 22, 2023

Message to NKY businesses: Start using AI or be out of business in 10 years

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

She uses Chat GPT to write computer code but says the applications are endless. “You need to cut what is not working in your company, go to the edges and start playing with this (AI) and see where it’s going to go. Because they’re predicting you either get on the AI train or you will be out of business in 10 years.”

RELATED: Ohio researchers predict the most critical job skills as AI gains traction

CEO of the KR Digital Agency Kendra Ramirez says businesses can use AI to do work they don’t want to. “HR: who likes writing job descriptions? Anyone? No, no one. Performance reviews: One gentleman, his team, he had 50 people he had to do quarterly performance reviews.”

Aug 22, 2023

Bridging coherence optics and classical mechanics: A generic light polarization-entanglement complementary relation

Posted by in category: particle physics

While optics and mechanics are two distinct branches of physics, they are connected. It is well known that the geometrical/ray treatment of light has direct analogies to mechanical descriptions of particle motion. However, connections between coherence wave optics and classical mechanics are rarely reported. Here we report links of the two through a systematic quantitative analysis of polarization and entanglement, two optical coherence properties under the wave description of light pioneered by Huygens and Fresnel. A generic complementary identity relation is obtained for arbitrary light fields. More surprisingly, through the barycentric coordinate system, optical polarization, entanglement, and their identity relation are shown to be quantitatively associated with the mechanical concepts of center of mass and moment of inertia via the Huygens-Steiner theorem for rigid body rotation.

Aug 21, 2023

PS gene-editing shown to restore neural connections lost in brain disorder

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, neuroscience

A new study from the University of Minnesota is the first to demonstrate the ability for gene therapy to repair neural connections for those with the rare genetic brain disorder known as Hurler syndrome. The findings suggest the use of gene therapies—an entirely new standard for treatment—for those with brain disorders like Hurler syndrome, which have a devastating impact on those affected.

Aug 21, 2023

Memory’s Future Focus: It’s Not Just What, but Why We Remember

Posted by in categories: futurism, neuroscience

Summary: Our ability to process sentences relies on the dynamic nature of working memory, where information is stored and integrated with our future intentions.

New research reveals that visual memories adapt according to our future use of that information. These findings challenge conventional theories arguing that our working memory’s neural codes remain unchanged over time.

Continue reading “Memory’s Future Focus: It’s Not Just What, but Why We Remember” »

Aug 21, 2023

Interferometric imaging of amplitude and phase of spatial biphoton states

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Photonic qudits are emerging as an essential resource for environment-resilient quantum key distribution, quantum simulation and quantum imaging and metrology1. The availability of unbounded photonic degrees of freedom, such as time-bins, temporal modes, orbital angular momentum (OAM) and radial number1, allows for encoding large amounts of information in fewer photons than would be required by qubit-based protocols (for example, when using only polarization). At the same time, the large dimensionality of these states, such as those emerging from the generation of photon pairs, poses an intriguing challenge for what concerns their measurement. The number of projective measurements necessary for a full-state tomography scales quadratically with the dimensionality of the Hilbert space under consideration2. This issue can be tackled with adaptive tomographic approaches3,4,5 or compressive techniques6,7, which are, however, constrained by a priori hypotheses on the quantum state under study. Moreover, quantum state tomography via projective measurement becomes challenging when the dimension of the quantum state is not a power of a prime number8. Here we try to tackle the tomographic challenge, in the specific contest of spatially correlated biphoton states, looking for an interferometric approach inspired by digital holography9,10,11, familiar in classical optics. We show that the coincidence imaging of the superposition of two biphoton states, one unknown and one used as a reference state, allows retrieving the spatial distribution of phase and amplitude of the unknown biphoton wavefunction. Coincidence imaging can be achieved with modern electron-multiplying charged coupled device cameras12,13, single photon avalanche diode arrays14,15,16 or time-stamping cameras17,18. These technologies are commonly exploited in quantum imaging, such as ghost imaging experiments19 or quantum super-resolution20,21, as well as for fundamental applications, including characterizing two-photon correlations13,22, imaging of high-dimensional Hong–Ou–Mandel interference23,24,25, and visualization of the violation of Bell inequalities26. Holography techniques have been recently proposed in the context of quantum imaging27,28,29; demonstrating the phase-shifting digital holography in a coincidence imaging regime using polarization entanglement27, and exploiting induced coherence, that is, the reconstruction of phase objects through digital holography of undetected photons28.

In this work, we focus on the specific problem of reconstructing the quantum state (in the transverse coordinate basis) of two photons emerging from degenerate spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC). These states are characterized by strong correlations in the transverse position (considered on the plane where the two-photon generation happens), which can be observed in other kinds of photon sources such as cold atoms30. In these sources, the two-photon wavefunction strongly depends on the shape of the pump laser used to induce the down-conversion process31. The most commonly used approach in the literature to reconstruct the biphoton state emitted by a nonlinear crystal is based on projective techniques32,33,34. This method has drawbacks concerning measurement times (as it needs successive measurements on non-orthogonal bases) and the signal loss due to diffraction. We proposed an imaging-based procedure capable of overcoming both of the issues mentioned above, while giving the full-state reconstruction of the unknown state. The core idea lies in assuming the SPDC state induced by a plane wave as known, and in superimposing this state with the unknown biphoton state. Unless the superposition is achieved directly on the crystal plane, a full analysis of the four-dimensional distribution of coincidences is necessary to retrieve the interference between the two wavefunctions. This information can be visualized by observing coincidence images, defined as marginals of the coincidence distribution obtained integrating over the coordinates of one of the two photons. In fact, obtaining coincidence images after post-selecting specific spatial correlations allows retrieval of the phase information, likewise in cases in which the state does not exhibit sharp spatial correlations. We demonstrate this technique for pump beams in different spatial modes, including Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) and Hermite–Gaussian (HG) modes. We investigate several physical effects from the reconstructed states, such as OAM conservation, the generation of high-dimensional Bell states, parity conservation and radial correlations. Remarkably, we show how, from a simple measurement, one can retrieve information about two-photon states in arbitrary spatial mode bases without the efficiency and alignment issues that affect previously implemented projective characterization techniques. Depending on the source brightness and the required number of detection events, the measurement time can be of the order of tens of seconds, whereas the previously implemented projective techniques required several hours and were limited to the exploration of a small subspace of spatial modes. As a latter example, we give a proof of principle demonstration of the use of this technique for quantum imaging applications.