Lifeboat Foundation

A new study led by researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities is providing new insights into how next-generation electronics, including memory components in computers, breakdown or degrade over time. Understanding the reasons for degradation could help improve efficiency of data storage solutions.

The research is published in ACS Nano (“Uncovering Atomic Migrations Behind Magnetic Tunnel Junction Breakdown”).

For the first time, researchers were able to observe a “pinhole” within a device and observe how it degrades in real-time. (Image: Mkhoyan Lab, University of Minnesota)

Humans have been trying to cheat death for thousands of years. Myths about elixirs promising immortality span various cultures, as do real concoctions that often did more harm than good. One of the most misguided attempts at creating a potion for immortality involved the first emperor of China and mercury pills. In his obsession with finding a formula that would grant him eternal life, Qin Shi Huang downed mercury and other toxic substances nearly two millennia ago, believing his alchemists had hit upon the perfect magical tonic. Unsurprisingly, he died prematurely at age 49.

Archeologists have discovered another 2,000-year-old “elixir for immortality” that sheds light on the true cost of chasing down eternal life.

While excavating the tomb of a Western Han noble family in China’s Henan province in 2018, researchers unearthed a bronze pot. At first, the team thought the liquid inside was wine, but more recently determined that it was an alchemist’s formulation: a yellow liquid containing potassium nitrate and alunite. These two ingredients are cited in ancient Taoist texts as ingredients for immortality. Potassium nitrate is an inorganic salt used today as a natural source of nitrate, and is a useful ingredient in food preservatives, fertilizer, and fireworks. Alunite is a mineral that forms in volcanic or sedimentary environments when sulfur-rich minerals oxidize. It has historically been used to make alum, which is important for water purification, tanning, and dyeing.

A new series delves into the big questions surrounding the nature of our universe.

The technology combines automatic sail control with real-time wind monitoring:

MOL and Chevron are equipping a new LNG carrier with the Wind Challenger, the world’s first wind-assisted LNG vessel, due in 2026.

Continue reading “World’s first LNG carrier with Wind Challenger set for 2026 delivery” »

Ground control to Major Tom: T-Mobile and Starlink team up on the first emergency alert via satellite, enabling delivery to areas with no cell service.

A team of researchers from Texas A&M University, Sandia National Lab — Livermore, and Stanford University are taking lessons from the brain to design materials for more efficient computing. The new class of materials discovered is the first of their kind – mimicking the behavior of an axon by spontaneously propagating an electrical signal as it travels along a transmission line. These findings could be critical to the future of computing and artificial intelligence.

This study was published in Nature (“Axon-like active signal transmission”).

Any electrical signal propagating in a metallic conductor loses amplitude due to the metal’s natural resistance. Modern computer processing (CPU) and graphic processing units can contain around 30 miles of fine copper wires moving electrical signals around within the chip. These losses quickly add up, requiring amplifiers to maintain the pulse integrity. These design constraints impact the performance of current interconnect-dense chips.

AI may equal human intelligence without matching the true nature of our experiences.

By Christof Koch

A future where the thinking capabilities of computers approach our own is quickly coming into view. We feel ever more powerful machine-learning (ML) algorithms breathing down our necks. Rapid progress in coming decades will bring about machines with human-level intelligence capable of speech and reasoning, with a myriad of contributions to economics, politics and, inevitably, warcraft. The birth of true artificial intelligence will profoundly affect humankind’s future, including whether it has one.

12K likes, — kanekallaway on September 12, 2024: “OpenAI just launched something massive. The first model of its a kind…” o1” designed for deep reasoning. General AI reasoning has always been the white whale of the space. Whoever figured out how to build advanced models that could reason through multi-step problems on their own, would lay the rails for the path to AGI. It’s still way too early to say if this model will do it, but based on the demos and early feedback, there is something super advanced here. o1 is different from all previous versions of GPT because it thinks before it answers, like a human would. Then, the model lays out its complex logic path to get to an answer.

A novel scattering-mitigation scheme, using only an integrating sphere, is experimentally shown to recover nearly 50% of mutual information in two-mode squeezed states, despite large photon losses.

https://journals.aps.org/login?rt=https%3A%2F%2Fjournals.aps…XQuantum.5.