Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 22

Researchers have discovered that superconducting nanowire photon.

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

Read more | >

Abstract: Leveraging Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to create embodied agents offers a promising avenue for tackling real-world tasks. While language-centric embodied agents have garnered substantial attention, MLLM-based embodied agents remain underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation frameworks. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmbodiedBench, an extensive benchmark designed to evaluate vision-driven embodied agents. EmbodiedBench features: a diverse set of 1,128 testing tasks across four environments, ranging from high-level semantic tasks (e.g., household) to low-level tasks involving atomic actions (e.g., navigation and manipulation); and six meticulously curated subsets evaluating essential agent capabilities like commonsense reasoning, complex instruction understanding, spatial awareness, visual perception, and long-term planning. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated 13 leading proprietary and open-source MLLMs within EmbodiedBench. Our findings reveal that: MLLMs excel at high-level tasks but struggle with low-level manipulation, with the best model, GPT-4o, scoring only 28.9% on average. EmbodiedBench provides a multifaceted standardized evaluation platform that not only highlights existing challenges but also offers valuable insights to advance MLLM-based embodied agents. Our code is available at this https URL.

From: Rui Yang [view email].

Read more | >

Our entire reality could – in theory – be built on a bed of sand, teetering on the brink of collapse. If so, a new device developed by a collaboration of physicists in Europe might give us some idea of how it all ends.

Using a process known as quantum annealing, the researchers have provided a proof-of-concept method to study the dynamics of a terrifying kind of reality-decay that would pull at the threads of physics, causing them to unravel.

Were such an event to occur somewhere in the cosmos, the quantum laws that lend structure to matter would be rewritten at the speed of light, spelling an end to all reality as we know it.

Read more | >

The Anderson transition is a phase transition that occurs in disordered systems, which entails a shift from a diffusive state (i.e., in which waves or particles are spread out) to a localized state, in which they are trapped in specific regions. This state was first studied by physicist Philip W. Anderson, who examined the arrangement of electrons in disordered solids, yet it was later found to also apply to the propagation of light and other waves.

Researchers at Missouri University of Science & Technology, Yale University, and Grenoble Alpes University in France recently set out to further explore the Anderson transition for light (i.e., electromagnetic waves) in 3D disordered systems.

Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, outlines the simulation of light wave transport in an arrangement of perfect-electric-conducting (PEC) spheres, materials that reflect electromagnetic waves.

Read more | >

This periodic table depicts the primary source on Earth for each element. In cases where two sources contribute fairly equally, both appear. || PeriodicTableOrigins2_print.jpg (1024×682) [251.7 KB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2_Large.png (25042×16695) [52.0 MB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2.png (6000×4000) [3.4 MB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2.jpg (6000×4000) [2.2 MB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2_searchweb.png (320×180) [82.4 KB] || PeriodicTableOrigins2_thm.png (80×40) [7.6 KB].

Read more | >

Divorce, the legal dissolution of marriage, can be driven by a variety of factors, ranging from changes in the economic status or health conditions of spouses to contrasting values. The end of a marriage can often be challenging to process. Thus, it can have adverse effects on the well-being and mental health of ex-spouses.

On average, the rates of worldwide have increased over the past century. Improved understanding of the primary factors that prompt people to dissolve a marriage could help to devise more effective couples and marriage counseling strategies, potentially contributing to a reduction in divorce rates.

Sari Mentser and Lilach Sagiv, two researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently carried out a study specifically exploring the relationship between people’s values and divorce. Their findings, published in Communications Psychology, suggest that interaction between spouses’ cultural and can predict divorce.

Read more | >

Astrophysicists have unearthed a surprising diversity in the ways in which white dwarf stars explode in deep space after assessing almost 4,000 such events captured in detail by a next-gen astronomical sky survey. Their findings may help us more accurately measure distances in the universe and further our knowledge of “dark energy.”

The dramatic explosions of at the ends of their lives have for decades played a pivotal role in the study of dark energy—the mysterious force responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. They also provide the origin of many elements in our periodic table, such as titanium, iron and nickel, which are formed in the extremely dense and hot conditions present during their explosions.

A major milestone has been achieved in our understanding of these explosive transients with the release of a major dataset, and associated 21 publications in an Astronomy & Astrophysics special issue.

Read more | >

University of Queensland researchers have for the first time introduced genetic material into plants via their roots, opening a potential pathway for rapid crop improvement. The research is published in Nature Plants.

Professor Bernard Carroll from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences said nanoparticle technology could help fine-tune plant genes to increase crop yield and improve food quality.

“Traditional plant breeding and take many generations to produce a new crop variety, which is time-consuming and expensive,” Professor Carroll said.

Read more | >

In April 1982, Prof. Dan Shechtman of the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology made the discovery that would later earn him the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: the quasiperiodic crystal. According to diffraction measurements made with an electron microscope, the new material appeared “disorganized” at smaller scales, yet with a distinct order and symmetry apparent at a larger scale.

This form of matter was considered impossible, and it took many years to convince the scientific community of the discovery’s validity. The first physicists to theoretically explain this discovery were Prof. Dov Levine, then a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania and now a faculty member in the Technion Physics department, and his advisor, Prof. Paul Steinhardt.

The key insight that enabled their explanation was that quasicrystals were, in fact, periodic—but in a higher dimension than the one in which they exist physically. Using this realization, the physicists were able to describe and predict mechanical and thermodynamic properties of quasicrystals.

Read more | >