51 of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit on Friday (Feb. 17), acing the first of two orbital missions the company has planned for the day.
The Starlink craft rode atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base at 2:12 p.m. EST (1912 GMT; 11:12 a.m. local California time).
A software program that ingests gigabytes of text can automatically generate whole paragraphs so natural they sound like a person wrote them. OpenAI’s GPT-3 is all the rage. What is it, what can it do, and where is it going?
A DIY hacker equipped with a Flipper Zero and old security camera managed to build a Mobile Infrared Trasmitter to bypass red lights.
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Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the genes that we’ve lost along the way.
Thanks to these illustrators for their wonderful hominin illustrations featured throughout this episode!
Julio Lacerda: https://twitter.com/JulioTheArtist.
Fabrizio de Rossi: https://www.facebook.com/ArtofFabricious/
Jack Byrley: https://twitter.com/bedupolker.
This video features this Paleogeographic Map: Scotese, C.R., 2019. Plate Tectonics, Paleogeography, and Ice Ages, YouTube video: https://youtu.be/UevnAq1MTVA.
Produced in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios.
A second problem is the risk of technological job loss. This is not a new worry; people have been complaining about it since the loom, and the arguments surrounding it have become stylized: critics are Luddites who hate progress. Whither the chandlers, the lamplighters, the hansom cabbies? When technology closes one door, it opens another, and the flow of human energy and talent is simply redirected. As Joseph Schumpeter famously said, it is all just part of the creative destruction of capitalism. Even the looming prospect of self-driving trucks putting 3.5 million US truck drivers out of a job is business as usual. Unemployed truckers can just learn to code instead, right?
Those familiar replies make sense only if there are always things left for people to do, jobs that can’t be automated or done by computers. Now AI is coming for the knowledge economy as well, and the domain of humans-only jobs is dwindling absolutely, not merely morphing into something new. The truckers can learn to code, and when AI takes that over, coders can… do something or other. On the other hand, while technological unemployment may be long-term, its problematicity might be short-term. If our AI future is genuinely as unpredictable and as revolutionary as I suspect, then even the sort of economic system we will have in that future is unknown.
A third problem is the threat of student dishonesty. During a conversation about GPT-3, a math professor told me “welcome to my world.” Mathematicians have long fought a losing battle against tools like Photomath, which allows students to snap a photo of their homework and then instantly solves it for them, showing all the needed steps. Now AI has come for the humanities and indeed for everyone. I have seen many university faculty insist that AI surely could not respond to their hyper-specific writing prompts, or assert that at best an AI could only write a barely passing paper, or appeal to this or that software that claims to spot AI products. Other researchers are trying to develop encrypted watermarks to identify AI output. All of this desperate optimism smacks of nothing more than the first stage of grief: denial.
A fully-connected annealer extendable to a multi-chip system and featuring a multi-policy mechanism has been designed by Tokyo Tech researchers to solve a broad class of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems relevant to real-world scenarios quickly and efficiently. Named Amorphica, the annealer has the ability to fine-tune parameters according to a specific target CO problem and has potential applications in logistics, finance, machine learning, and so on.
The modern world has grown accustomed to an efficient delivery of goods right at our doorsteps. But did you know that realizing such an efficiency requires solving a mathematical problem, namely what is the best possible route between all the destinations? Known as the “traveling salesman problem,” this belongs to a class of mathematical problems known as “combinatorial optimization” (CO) problems.
As the number of destinations increases, the number of possible routes grows exponentially, and a brute force method based on exhaustive search for the best route becomes impractical. Instead, an approach called “annealing computation” is adopted to find the best route quickly without an exhaustive search.
To study how stars and planets are born we have to look at star cradles hidden in cool clouds of dust. Far-infrared telescopes are able to pierce through those clouds. Conventionally, niobium nitride bolometers are used as the detectors, despite their low operating temperature of 4 Kelvin (−269° Celsius).
Now Yuner Gan (SRON/RUG), together with a team of scientists at SRON, TU Delft, Chalmers University and RUG, has developed a new type of bolometer, made of magnesium diboride, with an operating temperature of 20 Kelvin or above. This can significantly reduce the cost, complexity, weight and volume of the space instruments.
Conventional, superconducting niobium nitride (NbN) hot electron bolometers (HEBs) are so far the most sensitive heterodyne detectors for high-resolution spectroscopy at far-infrared frequencies. Heterodyne detectors take advantage of a local oscillator to convert a terahertz line into a gigahertz line.
When optical beams, consisting of photons, travel through fibers, they cause vibrations that generate acoustic waves, consisting of phonons. The phenomenon, called Brillouin scattering, has been harnessed by researchers to optomechanically “couple” acoustic waves with light waves. This coupling allows information carried by photons to be transduced, or converted, to the phonons, which travel nearly a million times more slowly than light waves.
Opto-acoustic coupling has enabled researchers to read and manipulate the transduced information more easily. To date, however, many of the Brillouin scattering techniques researchers have used rely on standard fiber geometries that cause acoustic waves to die out quickly, limiting the efficacy of the coupling.
Now, using an optical fiber with a micron-sized waist, University of Rochester researchers have demonstrated how to couple propagating optical waves and long-lived acoustic waves, with strong optical-acoustic interactions.
