Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Researchers say laughter may have been preserved by natural selection to assist with human survival.

Source: The Conversation.

A woman in labor is having a terrible time and suddenly shouts out: “Shouldn’t! Wouldn’t! Couldn’t! Didn’t! Can’t!”

Quantum computers have the potential to vastly exceed the capabilities of conventional computers for certain tasks. But there is still a long way to go before they can help to solve real-world problems. Many applications require quantum processors with millions of quantum bits. Today’s prototypes merely come up with a few of these compute units.

“Currently, each individual qubit is connected via several signal lines to control units about the size of a cupboard. That still works for a few qubits. But it no longer makes sense if you want to put millions of qubits on the chip. Because that’ s necessary for quantum error correction,” says Dr. Lars Schreiber from the JARA Institute for Quantum Information at Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University.

At some point, the number of signal lines becomes a bottleneck. The lines take up too much space compared to the size of the tiny qubits. And a quantum chip cannot have millions of inputs and outputs—a modern classical chip only contains about 2,000 of these. Together with colleagues at Forschungszentrum Jülich and RWTH Aachen University, Schreiber has been conducting research for several years to find a solution to this problem.

Brain-computer interfaces may have a profound effect on people with limited mobility or other disabilities, but experts say they also introduce privacy issues that must be mitigated.

Science may be getting closer to figuring out where consciousness resides in the brain. New research demonstrates the significance of certain kinds of neural connections in identifying consciousness.

Jun Kitazono, a corresponding author of the study and project researcher at the Department of General Systems Studies at the University of Tokyo, conducted the study, which was published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

“Where in the brain consciousness resides has been one of the biggest questions in science,” said Associate Professor Masafumi Oizumi, corresponding author and head of the lab conducting the study. “Although we have not reached a conclusive answer, much empirical evidence has been accumulated in the course of searching for the minimal mechanisms sufficient for conscious experience, or the neural correlates of consciousness.”

According to recent studies, viruses are taking use of their abilities to keep an eye on their surroundings.

Scientists from Google DeepMind have been awarded a $3 million prize for developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that has predicted how nearly every known protein folds into its 3D shape.

One of this year’s Breakthrough Prizes in Life Sciences went to Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, which created the protein-predicting program known as AlphaFold, and John Jumper, a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation announced (opens in new tab) Thursday (Sept. 22).

After 45 years of voicing one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, James Earl Jones has said goodbye to Darth Vader. At 91, the legendary actor recently told Disney he was “looking into winding down this particular character.” That forced the company to ask itself how do you even replace Jones? The answer Disney eventually settled on, with the actor’s consent, involved an AI program.

If you’ve seen any of the recent Star Wars shows, you’ve heard the work of Respeecher. It’s a Ukrainian startup that uses archival recordings and a “proprietary AI algorithm” to create new dialogue featuring the voices of “performers from long ago.” In the case of Jones, the company worked with Lucasfilm to recreate his voice as it had sounded when film audiences first heard Darth Vader in 1977.

The gas giant Jupiter is coming the closest it has come to Earth in 59 years this Monday and will be particularly visible because it coincides with another event called opposition.

When in opposition, a planet is on the opposite side of Earth from the sun, so you could draw a straight line from the sun to Earth to Jupiter, all in alignment. Jupiter’s opposition happens every 13 months. Looking from the Earth, when the sun sets in the west, Jupiter will rise in the east, directly opposite. During opposition, planets appear at their biggest and brightest.

Separately, Jupiter is coming closer to Earth than it has since 1963. Because of Earth’s and Jupiter’s differing orbits around the sun, they don’t pass each other at the same distance each time. When it’s closest on Monday, Jupiter will be about 367 million miles from Earth, according to NASA. At its farthest, it’s 600 million miles away.

The James Webb Space Telescope continues to show off like that kid in high school who could juggle bowling pins. Though, this time, instead of peering…