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Will a machine learning AI be the way we find out we are not alone in the Universe?

In a January 2023 published paper in Nature Astronomy, a collaboration by authors from universities in Toronto, Canada, Berkeley in California, Manchester in the United Kingdom, Malta, Queensland and Western Australia, and the SETI Institute, created a machine learning algorithm variational autoencoder, a type of neural network that learns through the unsupervised study of unlabelled data. They used it to try and find technosignatures contained within 150 Terabytes of radio traffic from 820 nearby stars. The data source came from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. This data had previously been searched in 2017 using traditional techniques.

Radio signals are abundant throughout the Universe and they represent the most effective way for us to find out if we are a solo act or one of many technical civilizations. Our contribution to radio traffic has been going on for more than a century which means an alien civilization within a hundred light-years from us with technology similar to ours can now detect us.

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has been using radio telescopes and receiving antennae since 1960 in a search to detect signals coming from space in patterns similar to what we produce. So far, however, it has proven to be harder than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. That’s why the application of AI to the vast amounts of radio traffic coming from space is seen as a step up in our efforts to detect alien intelligence. It seems ironic that an AI may be the way we first discover alien intelligence originating from distant solar systems. And it may be that those alien species are using their own AIs to be doing the same.

Continue reading “Will AI Make First Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence?” | >

A geomagnetic storm caused by a series of recent explosive events on the sun has brought spectacular auroras to parts of Earth in recent days.

Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles above our planet have also been enjoying the amazing light show, with ISS inhabitant Josh Cassada sharing a stunning image that he captured just recently.

“Absolutely unreal,” Cassada tweeted alongside the image, which shows not only the gorgeous greens of the aurora, but also city lights on Earth, and part of the space station.

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Is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? The answer is yes. So there you have it—the answer is yes. This was my response to a question I was asked to address in a recent AEON piece (https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference). What follows is based upon the notes for that essay, with a special focus on self-organization, self-evidencing and self-modeling. I will try to substantiate my (polemic) answer from the perspective of a physicist. In brief, the argument goes as follows: if we want to talk about creatures, like ourselves, then we have to identify the characteristic behaviors they must exhibit. This is fairly easy to do by noting that living systems return to a set of attracting states time and time again. Mathematically, this implies the existence of a Lyapunov function that turns out to be model evidence (i.e., self-evidence) in Bayesian statistics or surprise (i.e., self-information) in information theory. This means that all biological processes can be construed as performing some form of inference, from evolution through to conscious processing. If this is the case, at what point do we invoke consciousness? The proposal on offer here is that the mind comes into being when self-evidencing has a temporal thickness or counterfactual depth, which grounds inferences about the consequences of my action. On this view, consciousness is nothing more than inference about my future; namely, the self-evidencing consequences of what I could do.

There are many phenomena in the natural sciences that are predicated on the notion of “self”; namely, self-information, self-organization, self-assembly, self-evidencing, self-modeling, self-consciousness and self-awareness. To what extent does one entail the others? This essay tries to unpack the relationship among these phenomena from first (variational) principles. Its conclusion can be summarized as follows: living implies the existence of “lived” states that are frequented in a characteristic way. This mandates the optimization of a mathematical function called “surprise” (or self-information) in information theory and “evidence” in statistics. This means that biological processes can be construed as an inference process; from evolution through to conscious processing. So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action.

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NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is an all-sky survey mission that will discover thousands of exoplanets around nearby bright stars. TESS launched April 18, 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

- and Yes TESS found a second exoplanet like Earth over 60 million light years away. A link about it is in this one.

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Skyrmions are extremely small with diameters in the nanoscale, and they behave as particles suited for information storage and logic technologies. In 1961, Tony Skyrme formulated a manifestation of the first topological defect to model a particle and coined it as skyrmions. Such particles with topologically stable configurations can launch a promising route toward establishing high-density magnetic and phononic (a discrete unit of quantum vibrational mechanical energy) information processing routes.

In a new report published in Science Advances, Liyun Cao and a team of researchers at the University of Lorraine CNRS, France, experimentally developed phononic skyrmions as new topological structures by using the three-dimensional (3D) hybrid spin of . The researchers observed the frequency-independent spin configurations and their progression toward the formation of ultra-broadband phononic skyrmions that could be produced on any solid structure.

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The results of new experiments indicate that surface-adsorbed water molecules are responsible for contact electrification in granular matter, a finding that challenges established models of this phenomenon.

When two surfaces come into contact, they can exchange electrical charge. This fundamental phenomenon is linked to some of humankind’s earliest scientific experiments—reports suggest that the ancient Greeks uncovered static electricity after rubbing various materials together. Numerous physical processes are at play when two objects touch. But the mechanism underpinning charge exchange—which is known as contact electrification—has bedeviled scientists for centuries [1]. New experiments by Galien Grosjean and Scott Waitukaitis of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria now bring welcome clarity in this field [2]. By levitating a single particle and measuring its charge after consecutive collisions with a surface, the researchers were able to uncover a connection between contact electrification and water molecules on the particle and the surface.

When large numbers of insulating particles, such as grains of sand or particles of flour, collide or rub past each other, enormous electric potentials can build up. Such potentials can have dramatic consequences, leading to spectacular discharges, such as the lightning flashes seen during a sandstorm or a volcanic-ash eruption. Closer to home, such discharges can ignite flammable dusts or disrupt powder flows [3, 4]. But a mystery surrounds this contact electrification: How can identical particles exchange charge? In other words, Why does one of the particles become a donor of charge and the other an acceptor?

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Inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis have complex disease mechanisms that can differ from patient to patient with the same diagnosis. This means that currently available drugs have little effect on many patients. Using so-called digital twins, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have now obtained a deeper understanding of the “off and on” proteins that control these diseases. The study, which is published in Cell Reports Medicine, can lead to more personalized drug therapies.

Many patients with inflammatory diseases such as , Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, never feel fully healthy despite being on medication. It is a problem that causes significant suffering and expense.

In an inflammatory disease, thousands of genes alter the way they interact in different organs and cell types. Moreover, the varies from one patient to another with the same diagnosis, and even within the same patient at different times.

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