Lifeboat Foundation

Interview with Prof. Sean Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We mainly talk about quantum spacetime: the idea that our familiar spacetime might be actually emergent from some complex quantum mechanical system. We cover entanglement, decoherence, entropic gravity, the AdS/CFT correspondence, string theory, black holes, along with several philosophical questions concerning these topics, including reduction and emergence, substantivalism vs. relationalism, monism, and much more.

Sean’s website: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/
His recent book concerning these topics: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/
His papers on these topics can be found here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/research/annotated-publications/
His podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
And his Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/

Hong Kong plans to let retail investors trade digital tokens. It’s being seen as a major step toward its goal of becoming a crypto hub. Joanna Ossinger reports on Bloomberg Television.
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The “China Compound Eye” radar array aims to track and characterize potentially threatening deep-space objects.

Scientists from The Ohio State University have a new theory about how the building blocks of life—the many proteins, carbohydrates, lipids and nucleic acids that compose every organism on Earth—may have evolved to favor a certain kind of molecular structure.

It has to do with a concept called chirality. A geometric property inherent to certain molecules, chirality can dictate a molecule’s shape, chemical reactivity, and how it interacts with other matter. Chirality is also sometimes referred to as handedness, as it can be best described as the dichotomy between our hands: Though they are not identical, the right and the left hand are mirror images of each other, and can’t be superimposed, or exactly overlaid on one another.

In the journal ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, researchers now propose a new model of how the molecules of life may have developed their “handedness.”

Scientists try to unravel the birth, growth and power of black holes, some of the most forceful yet difficult-to-detect objects in our universe.

It was only last year that astronomers were finally able to unveil the first pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But you couldn’t actually see the black hole itself, not directly. That’s because it is so dense that its gravitational pull prevents even light from escaping.

But the image of Sagittarius A, as our galaxy’s black hole is known, revealed a glowing halo of gas around the object—an object that we now know has a million times more mass than our sun.

Session kindly contributed by Silvester Sabathiel in SEMF’s 2021 Numerous Numerosity Workshop: https://semf.org.es/numerosity/

ABSTRACT
With the rise and advances in the field of artificial intelligence, opportunities to understand the finer-grained mechanisms involved in mathematical cognition have increased. A vast scope of related research has been conducted on machine learning systems that learn solving differential equations, algebraic equations and integrals or proofing complex theorems, all for which the preprocessed symbolic representations form the input and output types. However on the search for cognitive mechanisms that match the scope of humans when it comes to generalizability and applicability of mathematical concepts in the external world, a more grounded approach might be required. This involves starting with fundamental mathematical concepts that are earliest acquired in the human development and learning these within an interactive and multimodal environment. In this talk we are going to examine how artificial neural network systems within such a framework provide a controlled setup to discover possible cognitive mechanisms for intuitive numerosity perception or culturally acquired numerical concepts, such as counting. First we review impactful research results from the past, before I present the contributions of the work myself was involved in. Finally we can discuss the upcoming challenges for the field of numerical cognition and where this research journey could evolve to.

Continue reading “Neural Network Models of Mathematical Cognition | Silvester Sabathiel | Numerosity Workshop 2021” »

The skeleton cast of a Titanosaur is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The 122-foot (37-meter) dinosaur skeleton is too long to fit in the exhibition hall, so its neck and head poke out toward the elevator banks, offering a surprise greeting when the doors open.

Astronomers in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a black hole in the heart of a dwarf galaxy that, rather than absorbing stars, generates them.

Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature’s age-old solution for information-storage—DNA.

In a new study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA’s nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its four base nucleotides. They demonstrate that this technology is also extremely reliable.

DNA is an ideal storage medium because it’s ultra-compact and can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place, as demonstrated by the recent recovery of DNA from the bones of a 430,000-year-old human ancestor found in a cave in Spain.