Lifeboat Foundation

When neutron stars collide they produce an explosion that is, contrary to what was believed until recently, shaped like a perfect sphere. Although how this is possible is still a mystery, the discovery may provide a new key to fundamental physics and to measuring the age of the universe. The discovery was made by astrophysicists from the University of Copenhagen and has just been published in the journal Nature.

Kilonovae—the giant explosions that occur when two neutron stars orbit each other and finally collide—are responsible for creating both great and small things in the universe, from black holes to the atoms in the gold ring on your finger and the iodine in our bodies. They give rise to the most extreme physical conditions in the universe, and it is under these extreme conditions that the universe creates the heaviest elements of the periodic table, such as gold, platinum and uranium.

But there is still a great deal we do not know about this violent phenomenon. When a kilonova was detected at 140 million light-years away in 2017, it was the first time scientists could gather detailed data. Scientists around the world are still interpreting the data from this colossal explosion, including Albert Sneppen and Darach Watson from the University of Copenhagen, who made a surprising discovery.

Observations of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies point to a likely source of dark energy—the ‘missing’ 70% of the universe.

The measurements from ancient and dormant galaxies show black holes growing more than expected, aligning with a phenomenon predicted in Einstein’s theory of gravity. The result potentially means nothing new has to be added to our picture of the universe to account for dark energy: black holes combined with Einstein’s gravity are the source.

Continue reading “Scientists find first evidence that black holes are the source of dark energy” »

University of Calgary researchers designed a novel imaging and experimental preparation system, allowing them to record the activity of the enteric nervous system in mice. The new technique allows researchers to record what is sometimes referred to as the gut’s brain during the complex processes of digestion and waste elimination.

“This completely different way of conducting experiments allows us to better understand the complexity of the nerve interactions that are regulating and coordinating the responses by the gut’s nervous system,” says Dr. Wallace MacNaughton, Ph.D., co-principal investigator. “It opens up new avenues for us to understand what’s really going on, and that’s going to help us understand gastrointestinal diseases and disorders a lot better.”

Neurons, or nerve cells, embedded in the wall of the gut precisely control its movements. The team used mice genetically encoded with fluorescent labels, so the neurons in the gut’s nervous system would “light up,” glowing green under microscopes, whenever the neurons were activated. The images are already providing new insights.

Google has trained an artificial intelligence, named SingSong, that can generate a musical backing track to accompany people’s recorded singing.

To develop it, Jesse Engel and his colleagues at Google Research used an algorithm to separate the instrumental and vocal parts from 46,000 hours of music and then fine-tuned an existing AI model – also created by Google Research, but for generating speech and piano music – on those pairs of recordings.

Business Insider reported based on a leaked company-wide email that Google is asking all of its employees to take two to four hours of their day to test Google’s “Bard” AI, the same system the company plans to integrate into its chat function. It’s unclear if all Googlers over the world have received the same ask. The company recently announced 12,000 job cuts to its global workforce, but Google, without its parent company Alphabet, still employs over 170,000 around the world.

In that memo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he would “appreciate” if all staff “contributed in a deeper way” and take two to four hours to pressure test Bard. Anybody who’s ever read a “suggestion” email from their boss knows that it’s more of a mandate than anything else. It’s unclear based on the email text if the two-to-four hour suggestion would be asked of them every day or spread over a longer period of time.

Several researchers playing with Bing Chat over the last several days have discovered ways to make it say things it is specifically programmed not to say, like revealing its internal codename, Sydney. Microsoft has even confirmed that these attacks are real and do work… for now.

However, ask Sydney… er… Bing (it doesn’t like it when you call it Sydney), and it will tell you that all these reports are just a hoax. When shown proof from news articles and screenshots that these adversarial prompts work, Bing becomes confrontational, denying the integrity of the people and publications spreading these “lies.”

Continue reading “Microsoft’s GPT-powered Bing Chat will call you a liar if you try to prove it is vulnerable” »

Motherboard spoke to multiple voice actors and advocacy organizations, some of which said contracts including language around synthetic voices are now very prevalent.

A video about nuclear weapons. The song is “Electric Funeral” by the British heavy metal band Black Sabbath off their 1970 album Paranoid, an extremely influential album for metal and rock music.

Hundreds of thousands of brain cells in a dish are being taught to play Pong by responding to pulses of electricity – and can improve their performance more quickly than an AI can.