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Chinese automaker Nio’s flagship electric sedan, the ET7, completed a historic journey of 649 miles (1,044 kilometers) on a single charge. The feat, led by Nio’s CEO William Li, not only showcased the capabilities of the ET7 but also highlighted the advancements in Nio’s cutting-edge battery technology.

CEO William Li’s announcement on Weibo

Nio’s CEO, William Li, took to the Chinese social media platform Weibo to announce the success of the 150kWh battery endurance challenge. He shared, “The 150kWh battery life challenge was completed, with a final score of 1,044 kilometers!” Li emphasized the challenging conditions, including a nationwide cold wave, during the 14-hour journey from Shanghai to Xiamen. Despite starting at a chilly 28 Fahrenheit (−2 degrees Celsius), the ET7 showcased exceptional performance, reaching its destination with 3 percent battery power remaining.

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A universe that continually expands has long been the dominant cosmological framework. But a universe that undergoes cycles of expansion and contraction, perhaps for all time, has recently been analyzed mathematically, and its proponents claim that it provides a more convincing cosmological paradigm. Join leaders of this renegade approach as they make the case for a new kind of cosmology that reimagines time.

The Big Ideas Series is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participants:
Peter Galison.
Anna Ijjas.
Paul Steinhardt.

Moderator:

Continue reading “Was the Big Bang the Beginning? Reimagining Time in a Cyclic Universe” | >

Google has been dominating the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for years. This has undoubtedly been helped by its 2014 acquisition of DeepMind, the London-based startup focused on AI research that developed AlphaGo, a program capable of defeating a grand champion of complex Asian board game Go, which opened debate on whether the AI would eventually surpass the human mind.

But Google’s unquestioned dominance was interrupted last year by another startup — OpenAI. The launch of ChatGPT, the most successful application in history, caught big technology companies off guard, and forced them to accelerate their AI programs. In April of this year, DeepMind — which until then had functioned as a relatively independent research laboratory— and Google Brain — the technology company’s other major research division — merged into a single organization: Google DeepMind, which has some of the best AI scientists in the world.

Colin Murdoch, 45, is the chief business officer of Google’s new AI super division, which has just presented its first toy: Gemini, a multimodal generative AI platform that can process and generate text, code, images, audio and video from different data sources. Those who have used it say that it far surpasses the latest version of ChatGPT, and that it puts Google back in the fight to dominate the market.

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This may sound great at first glance, but researchers say it could signal the start of a “vicious cycle.”

The world is undergoing an insect apocalypse, with our buggy friends experiencing global mass population decreases at an estimated 2 percent yearly due to a woeful combination of climate change, pesticides, habitat loss, and other human-made ills.

How are flora — which often rely on insects for pollination — adapting to this massive change within the worldwide food chain? Researchers in France have now revealed one way: turning to self-pollination.

In a new study published in the journal New Phytologist, researchers have found that wildflowers in a patch of farm meadow in the Paris region have increasingly adapted to self-fertilization.

Continue reading “Wildflowers Adapting to Insect Apocalypse by Pollinating Themselves, Scientists Say” | >

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, “Say what?” It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google’s take on a modular supercomputer with a healthy dose of its homegrown TPU v5p AI accelerators, which were also announced this month.

The modular design also allows workloads to be sliced up between TPUs and GPUs, with Google’s software tools doing the provisioning and orchestration in the background. Theoretically, if Google were to add a quantum computer to the Google Cloud, it could also be plugged into the Hypercomputer.

While the Hypercomputer was advertised as an AI supercomputer, the good news is that the system also runs scientific computing applications.

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In a recent leap forward for quantum computing and optical technologies, researchers have uncovered an important aspect of photon detection. Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), pivotal in quantum communication and advanced optical systems, have long been hindered by a phenomenon known as intrinsic dark counts (iDCs). These spurious signals, occurring without any real photon trigger, significantly impact the accuracy and reliability of these detectors.

Understanding and mitigating iDCs are crucial for enhancing the performance of SNSPDs, which are integral to a wide range of applications, from secure communication to sensitive astronomical observations.

A team headed by Prof. Lixing You and Prof. Hao Li from Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) employed a novel differential readout method to investigate the spatial distribution of iDCs in SNSPDs with and without artificial geometric constrictions. This approach allowed for a precise characterization of the spatial origins of iDCs, revealing the significant influence of minute geometric constrictions within the detectors.

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