Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2882

Metrological institutions around the world administer our time using atomic clocks based on the natural oscillations of atoms. These clocks, pivotal for applications like satellite navigation or data transfer, have recently been improved by using ever higher oscillation frequencies in optical atomic clocks.

Now, scientists at the University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences led by Christian Roos show how a particular way of creating entanglement can be used to further improve the accuracy of measurements integral to an optical atomic clock’s function. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

Observations of are always subject to a certain statistical uncertainty. “This is due to the nature of the quantum world,” explains Johannes Franke from Christian Roos’ team. “Entanglement can help us reduce these errors.”

Read more | >

What happens in femtoseconds in nature can now be observed in milliseconds in the lab.

Scientists at the university of sydney.

The University of Sydney is a public research university located in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded in 1,850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world. The University of Sydney has a strong focus on research and offers a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate programs across a variety of disciplines, including arts, business, engineering, law, medicine, and science.

Read more | >

When the meteor that Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University calls IM1 streaked across the sky on 8 January 2014, it was nothing special.

Yes, at half a meter in diameter, it was big enough to put on a nice show for people on the ground, ending in a rapid series of explosions high in the atmosphere.

“There were some reports of flashes in the sky, and there was probably a boom, although I’ve never heard anyone say that,” says Loeb’s colleague, Rob McCallum of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read more | >

That was fast.

The Columbus Dispatch, a newspaper serving the Columbus, Ohio area, has suspended its AI efforts after its AI-powered sports writing bot was caught churning out horrible, robotic articles about local sports, Axios reports.

The Dispatch — which is notably owned by USA Today publisher Gannett — only started publishing the AI-generated sports pieces on August 18, using the bot to drum up quick-hit stories about the winners and losers in regional high school football and soccer matches. And though the paper’s ethics disclosure states that all AI-spun content featured in its reporting “must be verified for accuracy and factuality before being used in reporting,” we’d be surprised if a single human eye was laid on these articles before publishing.

Read more | >

A biological pathway through which myelin, the protective coating on nerve fibers, can be repaired and regenerated has been discovered in a new study. The ramifications of this finding could be far-reaching for those with neurological diseases affecting myelin, many of which are currently untreatable.

If the axons that shoot out from the cell bodies of neurons are like electrical wires, you can think of the myelin sheath as the insulating plastic outer coating. In the brain, these sheathed nerve fibers make up most of the tissue known as white matter, but axons throughout the body are also coated in myelin.

The myelin sheath’s main functions are to protect the axon, to ensure electrical nerve impulses can travel quickly down it, and to maintain the strength of these impulses as they travel over what can be very long distances.

Read more | >

This post is also available in: he עברית (Hebrew)

At a crucial time when the development and deployment of AI are rapidly evolving, experts are looking at ways we can use quantum computing to protect AI from its vulnerabilities.

Machine learning is a field of artificial intelligence where computer models become experts in various tasks by consuming large amounts of data, instead of a human explicitly programming their level of expertise. These algorithms do not need to be taught but rather learn from seeing examples, similar to how a child learns.

Read more | >