Lifeboat Foundation

In a new study, scientists say that a particle that links to a fifth dimension can explain dark matter.

The “warped extra dimension” (WED) is a trademark of a popular physics model that was first introduced in 1999. This research, which was published in The European Physical Journal C, is the first to use the theory to explain the long-standing dark matter problem in particle physics.

The idea of dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe, is the basis for what we know about how the universe works. Dark matter is like a pinch-hitter that helps scientists figure out how gravity works. Without a “x factor” of dark matter, many things would dissolve or fall apart. Even so, dark matter doesn’t change the particles we can see and “feel,” so it must have other special qualities as well.

Welcome to the exponential upward curve phase of the Technological Singularity, folks.

Three months before ChatGPT debuted in November, Facebook’s parent company Meta released a similar chatbot. But unlike the phenomenon that ChatGPT instantly became, with more than a million users in its first five days, Meta’s Blenderbot was boring, said Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun.

“The reason it was boring was because it was made safe,” LeCun said last week at a forum hosted by AI consulting company Collective[i]. He blamed the tepid public response on Meta being “overly careful about content moderation,” like directing the chatbot to change the subject if a user asked about religion. ChatGPT, on the other hand, will converse about the concept of falsehoods in the Quran, write a prayer for a rabbi to deliver to Congress and compare God to a flyswatter.

Continue reading “Big Tech was moving cautiously on AI. Then came ChatGPT” »

It was cheaper to fuel a gas-powered car for 100 miles than it was to charge a comparable electric vehicle in late 2022, according to Anderson Economic Group.

Edited by Rob Appleby and Connie Potter (Comma Press)

IN The Ogre, the Monk and the Maiden, Margaret Drabble’s ingenious story for the new sci-fi anthology Collision, a character called Jaz works on “the interface of language and quantum physics”. Jaz’s speciality is “the speaking of the inexpressible”. Science fiction authors have long grappled with translating cutting-edge research – much of it grounded in what Drabble calls “the Esperanto of Equations” – into everyday language and engaging plots.

Researchers have been working for many years to comprehend the relationship between brain structure, functional connectivity, and intelligence. A recent study provides the most comprehensive understanding to date of how different regions of the brain and neural networks contribute to a person’s problem-solving ability in a variety of contexts, a trait known as general intelligence.

The researchers recently published their findings in the journal Human Brain Mapping.

The research, led by Aron Barbey, a professor of psychology, bioengineering, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and first author Evan Anderson, a researcher for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. working at the Air Force Research Laboratory, employed the technique of “connectome-based predictive modeling” to evaluate five theories on how the brain leads to intelligence.

Russia is one of the top three countries with the largest nuclear arsenal. However, it has struggled to catch up with America’s latest ICBM technologies during the last decade.

But all that is about to change with the nation’s latest addition to its vast arsenal: the state-of-the-art Satan 2 or Sarmat bomb.

Continue reading “Russia Says 16,000mph Satan-2 Nuke is Ready” »

In 2011, archaeologists uncovered one of the most — if not the most — pristine dinosaur fossils yet: a near-whole ankylosaur, complete with its jagged spikes, most of its limbs, armor coating, and some of its guts and stomach contents. The most amazing detail, though? Its uncannily preserved face and skin.

It took Mark Mitchell, a technician at Royal Tyrell Museum, an absurd 7,000 hours and nearly six years to meticulously exhume the fossil by delicately chipping away at the surrounding stone. For his efforts, he had the newly discovered specie of nodosaur — a type of ankylosaur — named after him: Borealopelta markmitchelli.

“During preparation, I would piece together the blocks like a puzzle, and the animal started to really take shape,” Mitchell said in a new interview with Ars Technica, describing the painstaking process.

A study published by The Planetary Science Journal in 2020 suggests that Psyche is made almost entirely of iron and nickel. This metallic composition sets it apart from other asteroids that are usually comprised of rock or ice, and could suggest it was originally part of a planetary core. That would not only represent a momentous discovery, it’s key to Psyche’s potential astronomical value: NASA scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton calculated that the iron in the asteroid alone could be worth as much as $10 quintillion, which is $10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (yes, a 20-figure sum). For context, the entire global economy is worth roughly $110 trillion as of writing. However, more recent research out of the University of Arizona suggests that the asteroid might not be as metallic or dense as once thought. Psyche could actually be closer to a rubble pile, rather than an exposed planetary core, the research claims. If true, this would devalue the asteroid. NASA’s upcoming mission should settle the debate about Pysche’s composition for once and all.

Of course, Psyche isn’t the only valuable rock in space. NASA has previously said the belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter holds mineral wealth equivalent to about $100 billion for every individual on Earth. Mining the precious metals within each asteroid and successfully getting them back down to earth is the hard part. Then you have the whole supply and demand conundrum that could drive the price of specific metals up or down. We’ll leave the complexities of space mining for another day.

Continue reading “This Rare Asteroid May Be Worth 70,000 Times the Global Economy. Now NASA Is Sending a Spaceship to Explore It” »

Scientists have developed a minuscule brain implant smaller than a human hair which allows people to control computers with their minds. The chip is developed by Precision Neuroscience and works along similar principles to those of Elon Musk’s Neuralink company, though the Precision chip sits on the brain rather than in the tissue.