Lifeboat Foundation

Berkeley Lab Researchers Record Successful Startup of LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility

An innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector – the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment – has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results. LZ is located deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) and is led by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The take-home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations,” he said.

Cryptocurrency hacks are increasing. Here’s how the government tries to track, freeze, and seize the stolen money before it disappears out of reach.

This graph shows the worldwide economic losses from weather-related events, from 1970 through to the present day, with a future trend projected out to 2060.

The data here is from Swiss Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, and is adjusted for inflation at 2021 prices. It excludes non-weather disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.

A significant gap exists between the total economic damages and the losses protected by insurance. For example, the worldwide figure for weather-related disasters in 2021 amounted to $233.27 billion, of which insurance covered “only” $101.12 billion.

A diagnostic technique for the Ebola virus uses a micro-ring resonator and a biomarker to quickly identify the presence of the virus in blood samples.

The World Health Organization has confirmed two cases of the deadly Marburg virus disease in Ghana. Here’s what to know about the Ebola relative.

A carbon-neutral synthesis of kerosene, or jet fuel, has been produced by scientists, made by combining sunlight with water.

5% of human emissions are generated through kerosene use in aviation, which currently has no alternative for long haul jetting.

It consists of 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate solar radiation into a solar reactor on top of a tower built at IMDEA Energy Institute in Madrid back in 2017.

From Human to Artificial General Intelligence

Humans have an almost unbounded set of skills and knowledge, and quickly learn new information without needing to be re-engineered to do so. It is conceivable that an AGI can be built using an approach that is fundamentally different from human intelligence. However, as three longtime researchers in AI and cognitive science, our approach is to draw inspiration and insights from the structure of the human mind. We are working toward AGI by trying to better understand the human mind, and better understand the human mind by working toward AGI.

From research in neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology, we know that the human brain is neither a huge homogeneous set of neurons nor a massive set of task-specific programs that each solves a single problem. Instead, it is a set of regions with different properties that support the basic cognitive capabilities that together form the human mind.

We think of data storage as a modern problem, but even ancient civilizations kept records. While much of the world used stone tablets or other media that didn’t survive the centuries, the Incas used something called quipu which encoded numeric data in strings using knots. Now the ancient system of recording numbers has inspired a new way to encode qubits in a quantum computer.

With quipu, knots in a string represent a number. By analogy, a conventional qubit would be as if you used a string to form a 0 or 1 shape on a tabletop. A breeze or other “noise” would easily disturb your equation. But knots stay tied even if you pick the strings up and move them around. The new qubits are the same, encoding data in the topology of the material.

In practice, Quantinuum’s H1 processor uses 10 ytterbium ions trapped by lasers pulsing in a Fibonacci sequence. If you consider a conventional qubit to be a one-dimensional affair — the qubit’s state — this new system acts like a two-dimensional system, where the second dimension is time. This is easier to construct than conventional 2D quantum structures but offers at least some of the same inherent error resilience.

Throughout life, cells of the body acquire somatic mutations. In frozen post-mortem human brains, researchers from Yale University have found that somatic, or non-inherited, mutations are considerably more likely to accumulate in roughly 6% of brains, and these “hypermutable” brains are typically 40 years of age or older.

The behavior, comparable to clonal hematopoiesis in the bone marrow that can result in blood cancer in elderly people, is attributed to cell lines with mutations that outcompete other cell lines.

This is the first large-scale study of somatic mutations in human brains. Scientists were not expecting to find this hypermutability in older populations.