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Feb 18, 2023

SpaceX launches 51 Starlink satellites, lands rocket on ship at sea (video)

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

51 of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit on Friday (Feb. 17), acing the first of two orbital missions the company has planned for the day.

The Starlink craft rode atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base at 2:12 p.m. EST (1912 GMT; 11:12 a.m. local California time).

Feb 18, 2023

What is GPT-3? Everything your business needs to know about OpenAI’s breakthrough AI language program

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

A software program that ingests gigabytes of text can automatically generate whole paragraphs so natural they sound like a person wrote them. OpenAI’s GPT-3 is all the rage. What is it, what can it do, and where is it going?

Feb 18, 2023

Introducing the AI Mirror Test, which very smart people keep failing

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Chatbots like Bing are software — not sentient.

Feb 18, 2023

Hacker Uncovers How to Turn Traffic Lights Green With Flipper Zero

Posted by in category: security

A DIY hacker equipped with a Flipper Zero and old security camera managed to build a Mobile Infrared Trasmitter to bypass red lights.

Feb 18, 2023

The Genes We Lost Along the Way

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, evolution

PBS Member Stations rely on viewers like you. To support your local station, go to http://to.pbs.org/DonateEons.
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Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the genes that we’ve lost along the way.

Thanks to these illustrators for their wonderful hominin illustrations featured throughout this episode!
Julio Lacerda: https://twitter.com/JulioTheArtist.
Fabrizio de Rossi: https://www.facebook.com/ArtofFabricious/
Jack Byrley: https://twitter.com/bedupolker.

Continue reading “The Genes We Lost Along the Way” »

Feb 18, 2023

AI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit

Posted by in categories: business, economics, employment, encryption, mathematics, robotics/AI, transportation

A second problem is the risk of technological job loss. This is not a new worry; people have been complaining about it since the loom, and the arguments surrounding it have become stylized: critics are Luddites who hate progress. Whither the chandlers, the lamplighters, the hansom cabbies? When technology closes one door, it opens another, and the flow of human energy and talent is simply redirected. As Joseph Schumpeter famously said, it is all just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. Even the looming prospect of self-driving trucks putting 3.5 million US truck drivers out of a job is business as usual. Unemployed truckers can just learn to code instead, right?

Those familiar replies make sense only if there are always things left for people to do, jobs that can’t be automated or done by computers. Now AI is coming for the knowledge economy as well, and the domain of humans-only jobs is dwindling absolutely, not merely morphing into something new. The truckers can learn to code, and when AI takes that over, coders can… do something or other. On the other hand, while technological unemployment may be long-term, its problematicity might be short-term. If our AI future is genuinely as unpredictable and as revolutionary as I suspect, then even the sort of economic system we will have in that future is unknown.

Continue reading “AI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit” »

Feb 18, 2023

What It’s Like to Trip on the Most Potent Magic Mushroom

Posted by in category: futurism

I felt as though I were communing directly with a plant for the first time.

Feb 18, 2023

New multi-policy-based annealer for solving real-world combinatorial optimization problems

Posted by in categories: finance, mathematics, policy, robotics/AI

A fully-connected annealer extendable to a multi-chip system and featuring a multi-policy mechanism has been designed by Tokyo Tech researchers to solve a broad class of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems relevant to real-world scenarios quickly and efficiently. Named Amorphica, the annealer has the ability to fine-tune parameters according to a specific target CO problem and has potential applications in logistics, finance, machine learning, and so on.

The has grown accustomed to an efficient delivery of goods right at our doorsteps. But did you know that realizing such an efficiency requires solving a mathematical problem, namely what is the best possible route between all the destinations? Known as the “traveling salesman problem,” this belongs to a class of mathematical problems known as “combinatorial optimization” (CO) problems.

As the number of destinations increases, the number of possible routes grows exponentially, and a brute force method based on exhaustive search for the best route becomes impractical. Instead, an approach called “annealing computation” is adopted to find the best route quickly without an exhaustive search.

Feb 18, 2023

New type of bolometer detector for far-infrared telescopes

Posted by in category: space

To study how stars and planets are born we have to look at star cradles hidden in cool clouds of dust. Far-infrared telescopes are able to pierce through those clouds. Conventionally, niobium nitride bolometers are used as the detectors, despite their low operating temperature of 4 Kelvin (−269° Celsius).

Now Yuner Gan (SRON/RUG), together with a team of scientists at SRON, TU Delft, Chalmers University and RUG, has developed a new type of bolometer, made of magnesium diboride, with an operating temperature of 20 Kelvin or above. This can significantly reduce the cost, complexity, weight and volume of the space instruments.

Conventional, superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) hot electron bolometers (HEBs) are so far the most sensitive heterodyne detectors for high-resolution spectroscopy at far-infrared frequencies. Heterodyne detectors take advantage of a local oscillator to convert a terahertz line into a gigahertz line.

Feb 18, 2023

Tapered optical fiber addresses challenge posed by Brillouin scattering

Posted by in category: futurism

When optical beams, consisting of photons, travel through fibers, they cause vibrations that generate acoustic waves, consisting of phonons. The phenomenon, called Brillouin scattering, has been harnessed by researchers to optomechanically “couple” acoustic waves with light waves. This coupling allows information carried by photons to be transduced, or converted, to the phonons, which travel nearly a million times more slowly than light waves.

Opto-acoustic coupling has enabled researchers to read and manipulate the transduced information more easily. To date, however, many of the Brillouin scattering techniques researchers have used rely on standard fiber geometries that cause acoustic waves to die out quickly, limiting the efficacy of the coupling.

Now, using an optical fiber with a micron-sized waist, University of Rochester researchers have demonstrated how to couple propagating optical waves and long-lived acoustic waves, with strong optical-acoustic interactions.