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The discovery of the quantum Hall effects in the 1980s revealed the existence of novel states of matter called “Laughlin states,” in honor of the American Nobel prize winner who successfully characterized them theoretically. These exotic states specifically emerge in 2D materials, at very low temperature and in the presence of an extremely strong magnetic field.

In a Laughlin state, electrons form a peculiar liquid, where each electron dances around its congeners while avoiding them as much as possible. Exciting such a generates collective states that physicists associate with fictitious particles, whose properties drastically differ from : these “anyons” carry a fractional charge (a fraction of the elementary charge) and they surprisingly defy the standard classification of particles in terms of bosons or fermions.

For many years, physicists have explored the possibility of realizing Laughlin states in other types of systems than those offered by solid-state materials, in view of further analyzing their peculiar properties. However, the required ingredients (the 2D nature of the system, the intense magnetic field, the strong correlations among the particles) has proved extremely challenging.

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According to a new study, crows possess the cognitive ability for one of the linguistic elements that make human language so complex.

In the early 2000s, Noam Chomsky and other linguists thought that if there was one thing that belonged specifically to human language, it was recursion, and that this was what distinguished human language from animal communication. As it turns out, this is not the case: a 2020 study proved that rhesus monkeys can do the thing too, and a newly published study shows that crows can also do recursion.

OK, so what’s recursion? It’s the capacity to recognize paired elements in larger sequences – something that has been claimed as one of the key features of human symbolic competence. Consider this example: “The rat the cat chased ran.” Although the phrase is a bit confusing, adult humans easily get that it was the rat that ran and the cat that chased. Recursion is exactly this: pairing the elements “rat” to “ran” and “cat” to “chased”.

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A Tesla software hacker has found an ‘Elon Mode’ driving feature that seems to allow Tesla vehicles with Full Self-Driving to operate without any driver monitoring.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk might have his very own supersecret driver mode that enables hands-free driving in Tesla vehicles.

The hidden feature, aptly named “Elon Mode,” was discovered by a Tesla software hacker known online as @greentheonly. The anonymous hacker has dug deep into the vehicle code for years and uncovered things like how Tesla can lock you out of using your power seats or the center camera in the Model 3 before it was officially activated.

After finding and enabling Elon Mode, greentheonly ventured out to test the system… More.

Continue reading “Tesla hacker discovers secret “Elon Mode” for hands-free Full Self-Driving” | >

A new model will allow robots to mimic human actions fast. Scientists are using this model to train robots so that they could do daily chores just like the way we do.

Are you among those who often dream of a day when a robot will do all the everyday household chores for you? A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has figured out how to turn your dream into reality.

In their latest study, they proposed a model that allowed them to train robots to do household tasks by showing them videos of people doing ordinary activities in their homes, like picking up the phone, opening a drawer, etc.

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Microsoft today announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer, using the topological qubits the company’s researchers have been working on for quite a few years now. There are still plenty of intermediary milestones to be reached, but Krysta Svore, Microsoft’s VP of advanced quantum development, told us that the company believes that it will take fewer than 10 years to build a quantum supercomputer using these qubits that will be able to perform a reliable one million quantum operations per second. That’s a new measurement Microsoft is introducing as the overall industry aims to move beyond the current era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing.

We think… More.

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today put its stake in the ground and discussed its progress in building a quantum computer and giving developers tools to experiment with this new computing paradigm on their existing machines.

There’s a lot to untangle here, and few people will claim that they understand the details of quantum computing. What Microsoft has done, though, is focus on a different aspect of how quantum computing can work — and that may just allow it to get a jump on IBM, Google and other competitors that are also looking at this space. The main difference between what Microsoft is doing is that its system is based on advances in topology that the company previously discussed. Most of the theoretical work behind this comes from Fields Medal-recipient Michael Freedman, who joined Microsoft Research in 1997, and his team.

Continue reading “Microsoft places its bets on quantum computing” | >

DeepMind’s co-founder believes the Turing test is an outdated method to test AI intelligence. In his book, he suggests a new idea in which AI chatbots have to turn $100,000 into $1 million.

A co-founder of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind thinks AI chatbots like ChatGPT should be tested on their ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million in a “modern Turing test” that measures human-like intelligence.

Mustafa Suleyman, formerly head of applied AI at DeepMind and now CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, is releasing a new book called “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”

Mustafa Suleyman said the original Turing Test is outdated because it’s “unclear” whether it’s a “meaningful milestone” for AI intelligence anymore.

Continue reading “DeepMind’s co-founder suggested testing an AI chatbot’s ability to turn 0,000 into

DeepMind’s co-founder believes the Turing test is an outdated method to test AI intelligence. In his book, he suggests a new idea in which AI chatbots have to turn $100,000 into $1 million.

A co-founder of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind thinks AI chatbots like ChatGPT should be tested on their ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million in a “modern Turing test” that measures human-like intelligence.

Mustafa Suleyman, formerly head of applied AI at DeepMind and now CEO and co-founder of Inflection AI, is releasing a new book called “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma.”

Mustafa Suleyman said the original Turing Test is outdated because it’s “unclear” whether it’s a “meaningful milestone” for AI intelligence anymore. million to measure human-like intelligence” | >

The foremost physiological effect of psychedelics in the brain is to significantly reduce activity in multiple brain areas, which contradicts the mainstream reductionist expectation. Physicalist neuroscientists have proposed that an increase in brain noise explains the subjective richness of a psychedelic experience, but a psychedelic experience isn’t akin to TV static, argues Bernardo Kastrup.

Before 2012, the generally accepted wisdom in neuroscience was that psychedelic substances—which lead to unfathomably rich experiential states—stimulate neuronal activity and light up the brain like a Christmas tree. Modern neuroimaging, however, now shows that they do precisely the opposite: the foremost physiological effect of psychedelics in the brain is to significantly reduce activity in multiple brain areas, while increasing it nowhere in the brain beyond measurement error. This has been consistently demonstrated for multiple psychedelic substances (psilocybin, LSD, DMT), with the use of multiple neuroimaging technologies (EEG, MEG, fMRI), and by a variety of different research groups (in Switzerland, Brazil, the United Kingdom, etc.). Neuroscientist Prof. Edward F. Kelly and I published an essay on Scientific American providing an overview of, and references to, many of these studies.

These results contradict the mainstream metaphysics of physicalism for obvious reasons: experience is supposed to be generated by metabolic neuronal activity. A dead person with no metabolism experiences nothing because their brain has no activity. A living person does because their brain does have metabolic activity—or so the story goes. And since neuronal activity supposedly causes experiences, there can be nothing to experience but what can be traced back to patterns of neuronal activity (otherwise, one would have to speak of disembodied experience). Ergo, richer, more intense experience—such as the psychedelic state—should be accompanied by increased activity somewhere in the brain; for it is this increase that supposedly causes the increased richness and intensity of the experience.

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Cultured meat starts with the extraction of cells from an animal’s tissue, be it a pig, cow, chicken, fish, or any other animal we consume. The cell extraction doesn’t kill or even harm the animal. The cells are mixed with a cocktail of nutrients, oxygen, and moisture inside large bioreactors. Mimicking the environment inside an animal’s body, the bioreactors are kept at a warm temperature, and the cells inside divide, multiply, and mature. Waste products are regularly removed to keep the environment pure.

Once the cells have reached maturity—that is, grown into small chunks of muscle-like material—they’re harvested from the bioreactors to be refined and shaped into a final product. This can involve anything from extrusion cooking and molding to 3D printing and adding in artificial fat.

JBS says the factory it’s building in Spain will be able to produce more than 1,000 metric tons of cultivated beef per year, and could expand capacity to 4,000 metric tons per year in the medium term. That’s smaller than Believer Meats’ facility in the US, which will have an annual production capacity of 10,000 metric tons. But what’s noteworthy about the JBS factory is that it’s focused on producing beef.

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On this day 52 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Here’s what they said about “The Overview Effect” and how it transforms the way you think forever.

Have you heard of the overview effect? It’s an interesting phenomenon that, for the time being, is exclusively reserved for astronauts. It refers to the overwhelming feeling astronauts get when witnessing for the first time the Earth from space.

It was first experienced by Yuri Gagarin in April 1961 when he became the first human to orbit the Earth. The event led him to marvel at Earth’s beauty, saying, “People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty, and not destroy it.”

Eight years later, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, all astronauts walking on the Moon, also reported feeling a profound and stunning sense of clarity when first witnessing the Earth from so far.

Continue reading “The Overview Effect: It will transform how you think forever” | >