Ultralight dark matter particles that behave like waves, called axions, seem to be a better match for gravitational lensing measurements than more traditional explanations for dark matter.
By Leah Crane
A Scanner Darkly
Posted in biotech/medical, government, security
America in the near future has lost the war against drugs. Paranoia reigns as 2 out of every 10 Americans have been hired by the government to spy on the other 8 in the name of national security and drug enforcement. Enter Fred, a reluctant undercover cop recruited by the government. To maintain his cover, Fred regularly ingests the popular Substance D. The drug has caused Fred to develop a split personality, of which he is unaware; his alter ego is Bob Arctor, a drug dealer. Fred’s superiors set up a hidden holographic camera in his home as part of a sting operation to snare Bob. A “scramble suit” that changes his appearance allows Fred to appear on camera as Bob and prevents his colleagues from knowing his true identity. The camera in Fred/Bob’s apartment reveals that Bob’s friends regularly betray one another for the chance to score more drugs.
2010: The Year We Make Contact
Posted in computing, space travel
In the year 2001, the spaceship Discovery is betrayed by its on-board computer, HAL, while on a mission to Jupiter. Nine years later, with the United States and Russia on the brink of war, the superpowers launch a joint mission to return to the Discovery in 2010: The Year We Make Contact. During the three-year voyage to Jupiter, world war breaks out on Earth, threatening to extend to the spaceship. But the ghostly presence of Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) of the Discovery crew intervenes, warning that something grand, dangerous and wonderful is about to occur…
Here’s a quick look at Maria Entraigues Abramson’s presentation at RAADfest 2023 in California. Our Director of Develpoment gives an overview of SRF’s work and misison. You can watch the full presentation by renting the video program for the full event from the Coalition for Radical Life Extension here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/raadfest2023/
In her full presentation, she highlights that adopting a better lifestyle to enhance our health is always a good idea and we should all do this. She personally advocates for everyone to utilize all scientifically supported resources to achieve optimized health. However, she reminds the audience that the mission of SRF is not about lifestyle changes but to transform the aging process completely, aiming to significantly extend our healthspan by repairing our bodies at a cellular level. SRF’s damage-repair approach will lead to a much longer and healthier lifespan—a feat not yet accomplished, regardless of the excellent care we may take of ourselves through lifestyle changes, supplement intake, etc.
She also underscores the importance of SRF’s work being on applied research, with the explicit goal to translate their science into therapies for everyone.
Scientists have caught fast-moving hydrogen atoms—the keys to countless biological and chemical reactions—in action.
A team led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University used ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) to record the motion of hydrogen atoms within ammonia molecules. Others had theorized they could track hydrogen atoms with electron diffraction, but until now nobody had done the experiment successfully.
The results, published in Physical Review Letters, leverage the strengths of high-energy Megaelectronvolt (MeV) electrons for studying hydrogen atoms and proton transfers, in which the singular proton that makes up the nucleus of a hydrogen atom moves from one molecule to another.
WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) — Since beginning operations last year, the James Webb Space Telescope has provided an astonishing glimpse of the early history of our universe, spotting a collection of galaxies dating to the enigmatic epoch called cosmic dawn.
But the existence of what appear to be massive and mature galaxies during the universe’s infancy defied expectations — too big and too soon. That left scientists scrambling for an explanation while questioning the basic tenets of cosmology, the science of the origin and development of the universe. A new study may resolve the mystery without ripping up the textbooks.
The researchers used sophisticated computer simulations to model how the earliest galaxies evolved. These indicated that star formation unfolded differently in these galaxies in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang event 13.8 billion years ago that initiated the universe than it does in large galaxies like our Milky Way populating the cosmos today.
To listen to more of John Wheeler’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzVlqiUh95Q881umWUPjQbB
American physicist, John Wheeler (1911−2008), made seminal contributions to the theories of quantum gravity and nuclear fission, but is best known for coining the term ‘black holes’. A keen teacher and mentor, he was also a key figure in the Manhattan Project. [Listener: Ken Ford]
TRANSCRIPT: I knew the stories about Gödel being concerned always about his health. I knew from his friend Oscar Morgenstern how Gödel would never take a pills prescription from his doctor without getting out a big medical book and studying up on that pill himself to make sure that it was okay. But I didn’t realize how far his dreams went, because I had failed to resonate to a talk he gave in 1945 at the symposium held in honor of Einstein’s birthday. In that talk Gödel had described what he called a Rotating Universe, a universe where all the galaxies turn the same way, and where the geometry is such that you keep on going living your life and you come round and come back and can live it over again; ‘Closed Time-like Line’ was the magic phrase to describe it. So you didn’t have to worry about the pill because you come back and live your life all over again. Well, after I’d introduced the two I said “Professor Gödel, we’d like to know what the relation is between the great Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty or Indeterminism; and your famous proof that every significant mathematical system contains theorems which cannot be proven, your theorem of Unprovable Propositions.” Well, he didn’t want to talk about that. It turned out that later that he had walked and talked enough with Einstein to dismiss quantum theory. He didn’t believe quantum[theory]. All he wanted to know is what we were going to say in our book about the rotating universe that he had described. Well actually, we weren’t saying anything. Well, this bothered him and he wanted to know what the evidence is today, at that moment, about whether galaxies do rotate in the same way. We said we hadn’t studied it. Well it turned out that he himself had taken out the great Hubble atlas of the galaxies and page after page had opened it up and looked at each galaxy, determined the direction of its axis. He made a statistics of these numbers and found there was no preferred direction of rotation, so they couldn’t all be rotating in the same way.
The most widely used machine learning algorithms were designed by humans and thus are hindered by our cognitive biases and limitations. Can we also construct meta-learning algorithms that can learn better learning algorithms so that our self-improving AIs have no limits other than those inherited from computability and physics? This question has been a main driver of my research since I wrote a thesis on it in 1987. In the past decade, it has become a driver of many other people’s research as well. Here I summarize our work starting in 1994 on meta-reinforcement learning with self-modifying policies in a single lifelong trial, and — since 2003 — mathematically optimal meta-learning through the self-referential Gödel Machine. This talk was previously presented at meta-learning workshops at ICML 2020 and NeurIPS 2021. Many additional publications on meta-learning can be found at https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/metalearning.html.
Jürgen Schmidhuber.
Director, AI Initiative, KAUST
Scientific Director of the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA
Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, NNAISENSE
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/blog.html.