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Dec 8, 2022

Transforming Robots Help to Transfer Skills

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

How do you teach a new robot old tricks?

Dec 8, 2022

New controversial theory suggests that our past, present and future all exist simultaneously

Posted by in categories: alien life, futurism

Here’s an interesting thought. What if you were told that everything in your life has already been planned out?

Even stranger, what if your past, present, and future are all happening right at this moment?

An astonishing new theory known as the “block universe” theory claims that time does not actually “flow like a river”, but rather, everything is ever-present.

Dec 8, 2022

Building blocks for life may be able to form in radioactive meteorites

Posted by in categories: chemistry, space

Amino acids have been found in meteorites, and now an experiment shows how they might have been created by chemical reactions in these space rocks.

Dec 8, 2022

Astronomers have just watched the most powerful explosion ever seen

Posted by in category: cosmology

This type of gamma ray burst (GRB) is thought to occur when a massive star explodes in a supernova, leaving behind a black hole. The explosion creates an extraordinary jet of light which makes up the GRB itself, and then the supernova causes a dimmer afterglow. This particular GRB appears so bright partially because it is about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth, making it one of the closest GRBs ever spotted in addition to being the brightest.

“If we look at all of the gamma ray bursts that have been detected, this one stands apart,” says Jillian Rastinejad at Northwestern University in Illinois. “Informally, we’ve been calling it the BOAT – the brightest of all time.” She and her colleagues calculated that a GRB this bright is expected to occur only once every thousand years or so.

Dec 8, 2022

A weird gamma ray burst doesn’t fit our understanding of the cosmos

Posted by in category: cosmology

Astronomers have spotted a strange blast of gamma radiation from space that defies categorisation, and it may mean a gap in our understanding of how black holes form.

Dec 8, 2022

How to edit the genes of nature’s master manipulators

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, chemistry, genetics

CRISPR, the Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technology, is poised to have a profound impact on the fields of microbiology and medicine yet again.

A team led by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and her longtime collaborator Jill Banfield has developed a clever tool to edit the genomes of bacteria-infecting viruses called bacteriophages using a rare form of CRISPR. The ability to easily engineer custom-designed —which has long eluded the —could help researchers control microbiomes without antibiotics or harsh chemicals, and treat dangerous drug-resistant infections. A paper describing the work was recently published in Nature Microbiology.

“Bacteriophages are some of the most abundant and diverse biological entities on Earth. Unlike prior approaches, this editing strategy works against the tremendous genetic diversity of bacteriophages,” said first author Benjamin Adler, a postdoctoral fellow in Doudna’s lab. “There are so many exciting directions here—discovery is literally at our fingertips.”

Dec 8, 2022

‘Quantum time flip’ makes light move simultaneously forward and backward in time

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

After recombining the superposed photons by sending them through another crystal, the team measured the photon polarization across a number of repeated experiments. They found a quantum interference pattern, a pattern of light and dark stripes that could exist only if the photon had been split and was moving in both time directions.

“The superposition of processes we realized is more akin to an object spinning clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time,” Strömberg said. The researchers created their time-flipped photon out of intellectual curiosity, but follow-up experiments showed that time flips can be paired with reversible logic gates to enable simultaneous computation in either direction, thus opening the way for quantum processors with greatly enhanced processing power.

Theoretical possibilities also sprout from the work. A future theory of quantum gravity, which would unite general relativity and quantum mechanics, should include particles of mixed time orientations like the one in this experiment, and could enable the researchers to peer into some of the universe’s most mysterious phenomena.

Dec 8, 2022

The process algebra model: A new way of constructing reality

Posted by in categories: biological, mathematics, particle physics, quantum physics

The concept of ‘anti-realism’ is widely seen as a fact of life for many physicists studying the mysterious effects of quantum mechanics. However, it also seems to contradict the assumptions of many other fields of research. In his research, Dr William Sulis at McMaster University in Canada explores the issue from a new perspective, by using a novel mathematical toolset named the ‘process algebra model’. In suggesting that reality itself is generated by interacting processes more fundamental than quantum particles, his theories could improve researchers’ understanding of fundamental processes in a wide variety of fields.

The concept of ‘locality’ states that objects and processes can only be influenced by other objects and processes in their immediate surroundings. It is a fundamental aspect of many fields of research and underpins all of the most complex systems we observe in nature, including living organisms. “Biologists and psychologists have known for centuries that the physical world is dominated by processes which are characterized by factors including transformation, interdependence, and information”, Dr Sulis explains. “Organisms are born, develop, continually exchange physical components and information with their environment, and eventually die.”

Beyond biology, the principle of locality also extends to Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Since the speed of light sets a fundamental speed limit on all processes in the universe, the theory states that no process can occur if it has not been triggered by another event in its past, at a close enough distance for light to travel between them within the time separating them. In general, these theories are unified by a concept which physicists call ‘realism’. Yet despite this seemingly intuitive rule, physicists have increasingly come to accept the idea that it doesn’t present a full description of how all processes unfold.

Dec 8, 2022

Salton Sea dust triggers lung inflammation, shows research

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

The Salton Sea, the body of water in Southern California’s Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley, is shrinking over time as the planet warms and exposing more lakebed and new sources of dust in the process. High levels of dust already plague the region, a situation likely to worsen as the sea continues to shrink due to climate change.

Not surprisingly, the communities surrounding the Salton Sea have high rates of childhood asthma (20–22.4%)—much higher than the California average of 14.5%.

A University of California-Riverside (UCR) mouse study, led by Dr. David Lo, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences in the School of Medicine, has found that dust collected at sites near the Salton Sea triggered lung neutrophil in mice. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cells that help fight infection.

Dec 8, 2022

The hidden danger of ChatGPT and generative AI

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, information science, robotics/AI

Check out the on-demand sessions from the Low-Code/No-Code Summit to learn how to successfully innovate and achieve efficiency by upskilling and scaling citizen developers. Watch now.

Since OpenAI launched its early demo of ChatGPT last Wednesday, the tool already has over a million users, according to CEO Sam Altman — a milestone, he points out, that took GPT-3 nearly 24 months to get to and DALL-E over 2 months.

The “interactive, conversational model,” based on the company’s GPT-3.5 text-generator, certainly has the tech world in full swoon mode. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, tweeted that “ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.” Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham tweeted that “clearly something big is happening.” Alberto Romero, author of The Algorithmic Bridge, calls it “by far, the best chatbot in the world.” And even Elon Musk weighed in, tweeting that ChatGPT is “scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.”