New Yorkers are fighting back against a proposed regulation on Pizza ovens.
New York City officials threatened to crack down on coal and wood-burning pizza ovens. Under the proposed regulation, owners would have to spend as much as $20,000 to purchase a filtration device that cuts emissions by 75%. New York City Mayor Eric Adams says the necessity of restrictions on coal and wood-burning ovens has never been more clear after Canadian wildfire smoke engulfed the city. Inside Edition’s Ann Mercogliano has more.
Scientists have made an important step toward developing computers advanced enough to simulate complex natural phenomena at the quantum level. While these types of simulations are too cumbersome or outright impossible for classical computers to handle, photonics-based quantum computing systems could provide a solution.
A team of researchers from the University of Rochester’s Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences developed a new chip-scale optical quantum simulation system that could help make such a system feasible. The team, led by Qiang Lin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and optics, published their findings in Nature Photonics.
Lin’s team ran the simulations in a synthetic space that mimics the physical world by controlling the frequency, or color, of quantum entangled photons as time elapses. This approach differs from the traditional photonics-based computing methods in which the paths of photons are controlled, and also drastically reduces the physical footprint and resource requirements.
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Causely, an artificial intelligence startup led by CEO and founder Ellen Rubin, announced today the limited early-access launch of its Causal AI platform for enterprise data. The company aims to revolutionize how businesses troubleshoot operational issues and manage application performance using Causal AI technology.
The company also announced today that it has raised $8.8 million in seed funding led by 645 Ventures, with participation from founding investor Amity Ventures, and including new investors GlassWing Ventures and Tau Ventures. The funding will enable Causely to build its Causal AI platform for IT and expand its offerings to a wider range of IT problems and scenarios. The financing also brings the company’s total funding to over $11 million since it was founded in 2022.
National Geographic, a magazine renowned for its photojournalism and wildlife photography, has laid off the last of its remaining staff writers and a number of other employees, according to multiple departing staff writers. The move signals a possible decline for the publication.
The 19 affected employees—which The Washington Post reports included staff writers and members of the audio team—were made aware of the reduction back in April, which was also when parent company Disney announced widespread layoffs.
While multiple laid-off staffers have publicly stated that all staff writers have been let go, there appears to be mixed messaging — an internal source familiar with the situation told PetaPixel that this layoff did not affect “all writers”, as has been reported, and that the magazine continues to employ staff “writers/editors”. However, this may simply refer to the elimination of dedicated writing roles — The Post reports that “article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors.”
Physicists in France have figured out how to optimise an advanced type of electric rocket thruster that uses a stream of plasma travelling at 72,420 km/h (45,000 mph) to propel spacecraft forward, allowing them to run on 100 million times less fuel than conventional chemical rockets.
Known as a Hall thruster, these engines have been operating in space since 1971, and are now routinely flown on communication satellites and space probes to adjust their orbits when needed. These things are awesome, and scientists want to use them to get humans to Mars, except there’s one — rather large — problem: the current lifespan of a Hall thruster is around 10,000 operation hours, and that’s way too short for most space exploration missions, which require upwards of 50,000 hours.
Hall thrusters work just like regular ion thrusters, which blast a stream of charged ions from an anode to a cathode (positively and negatively charged electrodes), where they get neutralised by a beam of electrons. This causes the elections to shoot one way, and the attached rocket to shoot another, propelling it forward.
As sci-fi fans will attest, scenes of the distant future aren’t too difficult to imagine. We’ve got fleets of intergalactic ships exploring the inscrutable vastness of space. We’ve got legions of hardy settlers terraforming strange, new worlds. There’s a great galactic chain of humanity forged through will, knowledge, and intellect stretching across the Milky Way and beyond. At least, that’s one version. Some would describe a brutal, militaristic future for humanity, or one of disembodied consciousnesses and networks of planet-spanning artificial intelligence. But in each version, there’s one crucial element that humanity can’t do without: energy.
Energy is such a fundamental, critical component to civilization — off-world or not — that Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964 labeled spacefaring civilizations based on how much energy they consumed; the higher the ranking, the more advanced, as Space.com explains. We’re talking far, far beyond crude fuel like oil and coal. Earth isn’t even a Type I civilization because we haven’t harnessed all the energy available on our own planet. By contrast, a Type II civilization would be able to build an energy-harnessing structure like a Dyson sphere around its own sun, as described in Popular Mechanics. After all, all those intergalactic ships, stations, settlements, etc., need power from somewhere, same as they need materials.
So what if there was some nigh-infinite, nigh-magical source of energy that permeated the entire universe? What if it could be tapped at will, from anywhere at any time? That’s zero-point energy in a nutshell.
The brain comprises billions of interconnected neurons that transmit and process information and allow it to act as a highly sophisticated information processing system. To make it as efficient as possible, the brain develops multiple modules tasked with different functions, like perception and body control. Within a single area, neurons form multiple clusters and function as modules—an important trait that has remained essentially unchanged throughout evolution.
Still, many unanswered questions remain regarding how the specific structure of the brain’s network, such as the modular structure, works together with the physical and chemical properties of neurons to process information.
Reservoir computing is a computational model inspired by the brain’s powers, where the reservoir comprises a large number of interconnected nodes that transform input signals into a more complex representation.
