Lifeboat Foundation

The solution as to why gravity is so weak may come from taking a closer look at the Higgs boson.

Living organisms offer extensive diversity in terms of their phenotypes, metabolic processes, and adaptation to various niches. However, the basic building blocks that create this diversity are remarkably similar. How can we advance our understanding of the fascinating mechanisms that drive biological complexity and how can we harness biological components to build entirely new materials and devices?

A new Special Issue from ACS Synthetic Biology will focus on this dynamic topic, including contributions that deconstruct as well as build up and mimic biological systems. The resulting work serves both to test our scientific understanding and to extend known biology to develop new concepts and applications. The issue will be led by Associate Editor Michael Jewett with Guest Editors Kate Adamala, Marileen Dogterom, and Neha Kamat.

The table also shows the average normalized rank of transfer learning approaches. Hyperparameter transfer learning uses evaluation data from past HPO tasks in order to warmstart the current HPO task, which can result in significant speed-ups in practice.

Syne Tune supports transfer-learning-based HPO via an abstraction that maps a scheduler and transfer learning data to a warmstarted instance of the former. We consider the bounding-box and quantile-based ASHA, respectively referred to as ASHA-BB and ASHA-CTS. We also consider a zero-shot approach (ZS), which greedily selects hyperparameter configurations that complement previously considered ones, based on historical performances; and RUSH, which warmstarts ASHA with the best configurations found for previous tasks. As expected, we find that transfer learning approaches accelerate HPO.

Our experiments show that Syne Tune makes research on automated machine learning more efficient, reliable, and trustworthy. By making simulation on tabulated benchmarks a first-class citizen, it makes hyperparameter optimization accessible to researchers without massive computation budgets. By supporting advanced use cases, such as hyperparameter transfer learning, it allows better problem solving in practice.

What would happen if you fell into a black hole? Join James Beacham, particle physicist at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, as he explores what happens when the fabric of reality – physical or societal – gets twisted beyond recognition.

Watch the Q&A with James here: https://youtu.be/Q37oEB4bNSI
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Continue reading “The other end of a black hole — with James Beacham” »

Why is there something rather than nothing? And what does ‘nothing’ really mean? More than a philosophical musing, understanding nothing may be the key to unlocking deep mysteries of the universe, from dark energy to why particles have mass. Journalist John Hockenberry hosts Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, esteemed cosmologist John Barrow, and leading physicists Paul Davies and George Ellis as they explore physics, philosophy and the nothing they share.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “NOTHING: The Science of Emptiness” »

Sometimes you need to display a number nice and large, making it easily readable at a good distance. [Lewis] has just the thing for that: a big expandable 7-segment display.

The build is modular, allowing it to be extended from 2 to 10 digits and beyond. The digits themselves are made of 3D-printed parts assembled onto acrylic. These can then be ganged up in a wooden frame for displaying larger numbers with more digits. Individual elements are lit by addressable LEDs, and the project can be built using an Arduino Nano or an ESP8266 for control. The latter opens up possibilities for controlling the screen over WiFi, which could prove useful.

Continue reading “You Can Build A Giant 7-Segment Display Of Your Very Own” »

On the road to a quantum internet, researchers demonstrate entanglement of two memory elements located 12.5 km apart in an urban environment.

On the road to a quantum internet, researchers demonstrate entanglement of two memory elements located 12.5 km apart in an urban environment.

A bio-inspired detector the size of a US penny can identify the unique odor profiles of different gases, something that could help in detecting food freshness and product counterfeits and in designing new cosmetics.