Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2017

China Telecom claims it has built the country’s first supercomputer constructed entirely with Chinese-made components and technology (via ITHome). Based in Wuhan, the Central Intelligent Computing Center supercomputer is reportedly built for AI and can train large language models (LLM) with trillions of parameters. Although China has built supercomputers with domestic hardware and software before, going entirely domestic is a new milestone for the country’s tech industry.

Exact details on the Central Intelligent Computing Center are scarce. What’s clear so far: The supercomputer is purportedly made with only Chinese parts; it can train AI models with trillions of parameters; and it uses liquid cooling. It’s unclear exactly how much performance the supercomputer has. A five-exaflop figure is mentioned in ITHome’s report, but to our eyes it seems that the publication was talking about the total computational power of China Telecom’s supercomputers, and not just this one.

Read more | >

The study shows that analyzing ancient organisms can help unravel the evolutionary history of life on Earth, Craig said.

“Positively identifying any fossil over a billion years old is inherently challenging. For example, the oldest dinosaur fossils are only about 250 million years old, and the ones in this study are almost seven times older,” he said. “That’s why research such as this is exceptionally difficult, but highly rewarding, and when conclusions such as the ones in this study can be reached with high confidence, it represents a significant discovery.”

Read more | >

For example, a video of a swinging pendulum would look the same if you played it backward. We see time as irreversible because of another law of nature, the second law of thermodynamics. This law says that the disorder in a system always increases. If the broken glass reassembled itself, the disorder would decrease.

The same law applies to the aging of materials. But physicists from Darmstadt have found out that this is not the case. They have discovered that the motion of molecules in glass or plastic can be reversed in time if you look at it from a special angle.

Read more | >

“It performs very well. Depending on where you’re looking at along the coast, it would be quite difficult to identify a simulated hurricane from a real one,” Pintar said.

However, the system isn’t without flaws. The data it is fed does not account for the potential effects of rising temperatures, and the simulated storms produced for areas with less data were not as plausible.

“Hurricanes are not as frequent in, say, Boston as in Miami, for example. The less data you have, the larger the uncertainty of your predictions,” NIST Fellow Emil Simiu said.

Read more | >

Collisions of high energy particles produce “jets” of quarks, anti-quarks, or gluons. Due to the phenomenon called confinement, scientists cannot directly detect quarks. Instead, the quarks from these collisions fragment into many secondary particles that can be detected.

Scientists recently addressed jet production using quantum simulations. They found that the propagating jets strongly modify the quantum vacuum—the with the lowest possible energy. In addition, the produced quarks retain quantum entanglement, the linkage between particles across distances. This finding, published in Physical Review Letters, means that scientists can now study this entanglement in experiments.

This research performed that have detected the modification of the vacuum by the propagating jets. The simulations have also revealed quantum entanglement among the jets. This entanglement can be detected in nuclear experiments. The work is also a step forward in quantum-inspired classical computing. It may result in the creation of new application-specific integrated circuits.

Read more | >

“The memory requirements for PRIYA simulations are so big you cannot put them on anything other than a supercomputer,” Bird said.

TACC awarded Bird a Leadership Resource Allocation on the Frontera supercomputer. Additionally, analysis computations were performed using the resources of the UC Riverside High-Performance Computer Cluster.

The PRIYA simulations on Frontera are some of the largest cosmological simulations yet made, needing over 100,000 core-hours to simulate a system of 30723 (about 29 billion) particles in a ‘box’ 120 megaparsecs on edge, or about 3.91 million light-years across. PRIYA simulations consumed over 600,000 node hours on Frontera.

Read more | >

Researchers at the University of Cordoba, in collaboration with other institutions, have developed a new type of battery using hemoglobin as a catalyst in zinc-air batteries. This biocompatible battery can function for up to 30 days and offers several advantages, such as sustainability and suitability for use in human body devices. Despite its non-rechargeable nature, this innovation marks a significant step towards environmentally friendly battery alternatives, addressing the limitations of current lithium-ion batteries. (Artist’s Concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

Researchers at the Chemical Institute for Energy and the Environment (IQUEMA) at the University of Cordoba have developed a battery that employs hemoglobin to facilitate electrochemical reactions, maintaining functionality for approximately 20 to 30 days.

Hemoglobin is a protein present in red blood cells and is responsible for conveying oxygen from the lungs to the different tissues of the body (and then transferring carbon dioxide the other way around). It has a very high affinity for oxygen and is fundamental for life, but, what if it were also a key element for a type of electrochemical device in which oxygen also plays an important role, such as zinc-air batteries?

Read more | >