More than 200 researchers and economists, including 15 Nobel laureates and researchers at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, have called for governments and technology leaders to urgently create policies and institutions to address the economic impact of AI.
Engineers have developed a new way to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere using a process similar to charging and discharging a battery—an advance that could help address the planet’s excess CO2 problem.
A new collaborative study between scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Toyota focuses on direct air capture, a technology designed to reduce new emissions and remove CO2 that has already accumulated in the atmosphere. Instead of using heat to absorb and release CO2, as many carbon capture methods do, the new method uses electricity and water-based chemistry within an electrochemical device.
The results of the study by mechanical engineering and science professor Kyle Smith, Illinois graduate students Paul Rozzi and JeongA Lee, and Chip Roberts and Tim Arthur from the Toyota Research Institute of North America are published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Colorado Boulder have directly observed, for the first time, four white dwarfs in binary star systems in our nearby region of space. These stellar binaries are all within 65 light-years of Earth, and one contains the ninth-closest white dwarf to the sun.
The four systems each include a red dwarf companion—a larger, brighter star—making the systems appear to be single-star systems. The new results, published in MNRAS, show that each of these nearby red dwarfs hosts a hidden white dwarf companion.
First author Dr. Mairi O’Brien, a research fellow at the University of Warwick, said, “Nearby isolated white dwarfs are usually easy to find, but we couldn’t see these four stars directly in visible wavelengths because their red dwarf companions were drowning out their light. It’s a reminder that even in our own cosmic neighborhood, we can still find surprises if we look in the right way, at the right wavelengths.”
Sam Altman has repeatedly suggested that today’s smartphones are not the ideal interface for advanced AI. The ambition is to create what some observers describe as an “AI-native” device—one that could eventually become as important as the smartphone itself.
Apple on Friday accused OpenAI of stealing trade secrets as it seeks to build its own hardware for ChatGPT, a major rupture in a partnership between the iPhone maker and the artificial intelligence company.
Apple said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees it was recruiting to share confidential information, even guiding how to avoid scrutiny when taking jobs at the other company.
“This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI,” the filing says. “Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it.”
North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead, which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere. This week, the Perseids begin.
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming global economies, governments, and daily life in an “acceleration era.” AI is also broadening the cyber risk landscape.
What makes information a real part of physics rather than just a way of describing the world?
Chiara Marletto explains how constructor theory grounds information in physical reality, why information is not merely a human concept, and how knowledge differs from information by possessing the ability to persist and shape the world around it.
0:00 Constructor Theory and the Physics of Information 1:49 Is Information Fundamental to Reality? 4:42 Constructor Theory Beyond Quantum Information 6:31 Information, Knowledge, and Resilience 10:17 Why Knowledge Emerges Above Fundamental Physics.
Chiara Marletto is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She holds degrees from the universities of Oxford and Turin. Her main research focus is in theoretical physics, and she also pursues interests in theoretical biology, epistemology, and Italian literature. The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals is her first trade book.
More from Chiara Marletto on Closer To Truth: Closer To Truth: The Podcast: • Closer To Truth: The Podcast Closer To Truth contributors: https://closertotruth.com/contributor… to Closer To Truth: / @closertotruthtv Join the Community:
Closer To Truth, created and hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence and sentience. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers. #CloserToTruth #Cosmos #ChiaraMarletto #InformationTheory #Knowledge.
The number of new cancer cases worldwide could rise to almost 35 million a year by 2050 unless countries take urgent action to strengthen prevention, early diagnosis and treatment, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday.