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Jun 4, 2023

The alien-hunting team at SETI has a new test for humanity to decipher messages sent from an alien race

Posted by in category: alien life

Someone in here can figure this out.


SETI hasn’t detected a real message from aliens so it decided to simulate one and see how people reacted and how long it would take to decode.

Jun 4, 2023

How AI could change the ways we live and work, reducing the digital divide

Posted by in categories: business, economics, education, employment, robotics/AI

AI is everywhere. Its use is being debated in headlines, on social media and around dinner tables. To some, the rate of AI acceleration is concerning, with many technology leaders calling for a six-month pause in the training of new systems to better understand the impact such tools are having. To others, AI is seen as the cornerstone of the fourth industrial revolution, the latest disruptive technology opening up possibilities for new ways of learning, working and living that we have never experienced before.

Yet, disruptive technologies are nothing new. They have been changing the way we live and work for decades. And these changes have not been without consequences, particularly in the form of economic dislocation and social upheaval. Automation in manufacturing has streamlined mass production and driven down costs; Ecommerce platforms have reshaped the way we shop and do business; even online education has found new ways to provide flexible and affordable ways of learning, delivering opportunities to millions across the globe that simply were not available before.

Presently, much of the discussion around the impact of AI is based on conjecture. However, it is widely agreed that it will have a major impact on jobs and even has the potential to call into question the very fundamentals of what work is. What is not understood is how AI will play out across society in the longer term. Will it, like previous technological revolutions, deliver short-term disruptions followed by long-term benefits, or will it be the catalyst for new ways of learning and upskilling and help reduce the widening digital divide?

Jun 4, 2023

Brainwashing: Signs That You Are Being Brainwashed (Without Even Realizing It)

Posted by in category: futurism

You might even go so far as to think of the term brainwashing in relation to propaganda spread during the First and Second World Wars, in order to influence vast amounts of people.

But what exactly is brainwashing and should we confine it to the past?

The term brainwashing was first coined in the 1950’s during the Korean War. It was used to explain how totalitarian regimes were able to completely indoctrinate American soldiers through a process of torture and propaganda.

Jun 4, 2023

Mitigating Operational Risk In Healthcare With High-Performance Pharmacies

Posted by in categories: finance, health

Guy, a recognized industry thought leader, is the president of SmartSense, IoT solutions for the enterprise.

It’s no secret that healthcare systems exist at the intersection of financial risk and operational risk. Amid the market volatility of our current socioeconomic environment, the pressure is on hospitals, clinics and blood banks to maintain healthy profit margins that enable them to keep pace with rising demand for clinical care and prescription medications. The rate of U.S. spending on prescriptions is increasing at a rapid clip, and considering physician-administered drugs provide hospitals with high gross profits, investing in pharmaceutical services is a logical pathway to profitability.

However, severe pharmaceutical compliance regulations related to safety and efficacy—CDC, VFC, FDA, AABB and BOP—create a myriad of risk management issues for healthcare organizations to juggle. In the U.S., adverse drug effects are one of the most common medical errors. All it takes is one mismanaged medication to put a patient’s health at significant risk. And on a global scale, widespread vaccine hesitancy rooted in public skepticism has served as a critical roadblock to mitigating the spread of severe infectious diseases like Covid-19.

Jun 4, 2023

Flexible and multiple uses of existing space

Posted by in categories: solar power, space, sustainability

Researchers not only want to further develop printable solar cells technologically. Rather, they want to provide solutions with them in order to implement different application variants.

Jun 4, 2023

The Curious Strength of a Sea Sponge’s Glass Skeleton

Posted by in category: futurism

A glass sponge found deep in the Pacific shows a remarkable ability to withstand compression and bending, on top of the sponge’s other unusual properties.

Jun 4, 2023

Quantum Physics Could Explain Nearly All the Mysteries of How Life Works

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

Quantum effects are phenomena that occur between atoms and molecules that can’t be explained by classical physics. It has been known for more than a century that the rules of classical mechanics, like Newton’s laws of motion, break down at atomic scales. Instead, tiny objects behave according to a different set of laws known as quantum mechanics.

For humans, who can only perceive the macroscopic world, or what’s visible to the naked eye, quantum mechanics can seem counterintuitive and somewhat magical. Things you might not expect happen in the quantum world, like electrons “tunneling” through tiny energy barriers and appearing on the other side unscathed or being in two different places at the same time in a phenomenon called superposition.

I am trained as a quantum engineer. Research in quantum mechanics is usually geared toward technology. However, and somewhat surprisingly, there is increasing evidence that nature – an engineer with billions of years of practice — has learned how to use quantum mechanics to function optimally. If this is indeed true, it means that our understanding of biology is radically incomplete. It also means that we could possibly control physiological processes by using the quantum properties of biological matter.

Jun 4, 2023

Scientists ‘stunned’

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered hundreds of mysterious structures in the centre of the Milky Way.

The one-dimensional cosmic threads are made up of hundreds of horizontal or radial filaments, slender, elongated bodies of luminous gas that potentially originated a few million years ago — and seem to be pointing the direction of the black hole.

“I was actually stunned when I saw these. We had to do a lot of work to establish that we weren’t fooling ourselves,” added Yusef-Zadeh, who’s also a member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics.

Jun 4, 2023

Car-Free Cities Are the Future, Biometrics Reveal

Posted by in categories: privacy, transportation

Advanced tools for tracking people’s eye movements and facial expressions can be used to design better places.

Jun 4, 2023

This AI used GPT-4 to become an expert Minecraft player

Posted by in categories: physics, robotics/AI

AI researchers have built a Minecraft bot that can explore and expand its capabilities in the game’s open world — but unlike other bots, this one basically wrote its own code through trial and error and lots of GPT-4 queries.

Called Voyager, this experimental system is an example of an “embodied agent,” an AI that can move and act freely and purposefully in a simulated or real environment. Personal assistant type AIs and chatbots don’t have to actually do stuff, let alone navigate a complex world to get that stuff done. But that’s exactly what a household robot might be expected to do in the future, so there’s lots of research into how they might do that.

Minecraft is a good place to test such things because it’s a very (very) approximate representation of the real world, with simple and straightforward rules and physics, but it’s also complex and open enough that there’s lots to accomplish or try. Purpose-built simulators are great, too, but they have their own limitations.