Lifeboat Foundation

A year ago, astronomers discovered a powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB) lasting nearly two minutes, dubbed GRB 211211A. Now, that unusual event is upending the long-standing assumption that longer GRBs are the distinctive signature of a massive star going supernova. Instead, two independent teams of scientists identified the source as a so-called “kilonova,” triggered by the merger of two neutron stars, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Because neutron star mergers were assumed to only produce short GRBs, the discovery of a hybrid event involving a kilonova with a long GRB is quite surprising.

“This detection breaks our standard idea of gamma-ray bursts,” said co-author Eve Chase, a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We can no longer assume that all short-duration bursts come from neutron-star mergers, while long-duration bursts come from supernovae. We now realize that gamma-ray bursts are much harder to classify. This detection pushes our understanding of gamma-ray bursts to the limits.”

As we’ve reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. The first gamma-ray bursts were observed in the late 1960s, thanks to the launching of the Vela satellites by the US. They were meant to detect telltale gamma-ray signatures of nuclear weapons tests in the wake of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The US feared that the Soviets were conducting secret nuclear tests, violating the treaty. In July 1967, two of those satellites picked up a flash of gamma radiation that was clearly not the signature of a nuclear weapons test.

In a press conference that Ars attended today, Department of Defense officials discussed the benefits of partnering with Google, Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon to build the Pentagon’s new cloud computing network. The multi-cloud strategy was described as a necessary move to keep military personnel current as technology has progressed and officials’ familiarity with cloud technology has matured.

Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Skinner said that this Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract—worth $9 billion—would help quickly expand cloud capabilities across all defense departments. He described new accelerator capabilities like preconfigured templates and infrastructure as code that will make it so that even “people who don’t understand cloud can leverage cloud” technologies. Such capabilities could help troops on the ground easily access data gathered by unmanned aircraft or space communications satellites.

“JWCC is a multiple-award contract vehicle that will provide the DOD the opportunity to acquire commercial cloud capabilities and services directly from the commercial Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) at the speed of mission, at all classification levels, from headquarters to the tactical edge,” DOD’s press release said.

Many people think about science in a fairly simplistic way: collect evidence, formulate a theory, test the theory. By this method, it is claimed, science can achieve objective, rational knowledge about the workings of reality. In this presentation I will question the validity of this understanding of science. I will consider some of the key controversies in philosophy of science, including the problem of induction, the theory-ladenness of observation, the nature of scientific explanation, theory choice, and scientific realism, giving an overview of some of the main questions and arguments from major thinkers like Popper, Quine, Kuhn, Hempel, and Feyerabend. I will argue that philosophy of science paints a much richer and messier picture of the relationship between science and truth than many people commonly imagine, and that a familiarity with the key issues in the philosophy of science is vital for a proper understanding of the power and limits of scientific thinking.

Slides to the presentation available here: http://www.slideshare.net/adam_ford/the-shaky-foundations-of…ames-fodor.

Continue reading “James Fodor — The Shaky Foundations of Science: An Overview of the Big Issues” »

Earth has been hit by an intense, unusual blast of light that could change our understanding of the universe, scientists have said.

Late last year, scientists spotted a 50-second-long blast of energy coming towards Earth, known as a gamma-ray burst or GRB, which are the most powerful explosions in the universe. Immediately, researchers started looking for the afterglow that such blasts leave behind, with that visible light being useful to find where the blast has come from.

Humanity Augmented: https://youtu.be/Hc2FMNMPiNQ

Mankind has always looked for ways to reduce manual labor and repetitive tasks. To that end, and in the absence of technology, civilization exploited various me-thods, often by taking advantage of their fellow humans. Robots, as a potential solution, have long fascinated mankind, capturing our imagination for centuries. Even in Greek mythology, the god Hephaestus had « mechanical » servants. But not until recently, has artificial intelligence finally progressed to a level that will become more and more life-changing for the future of humanity.
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Continue reading “Future of Humanity: AI & Robotics | Free Documentary” »

Scientists with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have developed a method that helps to fine-tune the control of particles using ultrasonic waves according to new research, which they say expands our understanding of the field of acoustic levitation.

The levitation of objects, once a phenomenon seen only in science fiction and fantasy, now represents a field in acoustics with practical applications in multiple research areas, industries, and even among hobbyists. However, the use of high-intensity sound waves to suspend small objects in the air is nothing new. The theoretical basis for overcoming gravity with the help of acoustic radiation pressure goes as far back as the 1930s, when researcher Louis King first studied the suspension of particles in the field of a sound wave, and how this demonstrates acoustic radiation force being exerted against them.

Later calculations beginning in the 1950s helped to further refine our understanding of the acoustic radiation force produced by the scattering of sound waves. However, the modern foundation for acoustic levitation science draws mainly from the work of superconductivity pioneer Lev. P. Gorkov, who was the first to synthesize previous studies and provide a solid mathematical basis for the phenomenon.

Candian artist Patrick Doan discusses his art, cyberpunk philosophy, and his recent trip to Vietnam.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs), a subclass of denoising diffusion models, have recently acquired prominence because they make generating images with high fidelity, diversity, and resolution possible. These models enable fine-grained control of the image production process at inference time (e.g., by utilizing text prompts) when combined with a conditioning mechanism. Large, multi-modal datasets like LAION5B, which contain billions of real image-text pairs, are frequently used to train such models. Given the proper pre-training, LDMs can be used for many downstream activities and are sometimes referred to as foundation models (FM).

LDMs can be deployed to end users more easily because their denoising process operates in a relatively low-dimensional latent space and requires only modest hardware resources. As a result of these models’ exceptional generating capabilities, high-fidelity synthetic datasets can be produced and added to conventional supervised machine learning pipelines in situations where training data is scarce. This offers a potential solution to the shortage of carefully curated, highly annotated medical imaging datasets. Such datasets require disciplined preparation and considerable work from skilled medical professionals who can decipher minor but semantically significant visual elements.

Despite the shortage of sizable, carefully maintained, publicly accessible medical imaging datasets, a text-based radiology report often thoroughly explains the pertinent medical data contained in the imaging tests. This “byproduct” of medical decision-making can be used to extract labels that can be used for downstream activities automatically. However, it still demands a more limited problem formulation than might otherwise be possible to describe in natural human language. By prompting pertinent medical terms or concepts of interest, pre-trained text conditional LDMs could be used to synthesize synthetic medical imaging data intuitively.

Have you ever wondered what makes you intelligent? How are you able to see, hear, think, read, sing, solve problems, and perform any number of intelligent tasks?

Your brain learns a model of the world, and this model recreates the structure of everything you know. Everything you do and experience is based on this model. Intelligence is the ability to create this model of the world.

Continue reading “How the Brain Works: The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence | Numenta” »