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Nov 11, 2022

Don’t understand Elon Musk? Here’s the theory that makes simple sense of a complicated man

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, neuroscience

This describes the essential Musk — with the caveat that it leaves out his autism and emotional fragility. He has the right philosophy and the brains to make serious progress, but with some surprisingly unexpected naïve schoolboy level mistakes and misunderstandings about human nature. Regardless, he will learn from them.


We may have cracked the code.

Nov 11, 2022

Chemists create an ‘artificial photosynthesis’ system ten times more efficient than existing systems

Posted by in categories: chemistry, climatology, solar power, sustainability

For the past two centuries, humans have relied on fossil fuels for concentrated energy; hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis packed into a convenient, energy-dense substance. But that supply is finite, and fossil fuel consumption has tremendous negative impact on Earth’s climate.

“The biggest challenge many people don’t realize is that even nature has no solution for the amount of energy we use,” said University of Chicago chemist Wenbin Lin. Not even is that good, he said: “We will have to do better than nature, and that’s scary.”

One possible option scientists are exploring is “”—reworking a plant’s system to make our own kinds of fuels. However, the chemical equipment in a single leaf is incredibly complex, and not so easy to turn to our own purposes.

Nov 11, 2022

This child was treated for a rare genetic disease while in the womb

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Babies born with infantile-onset Pompe disease typically have enlarged hearts and weak muscles. But 1-year-old Ayla has a normal heart and walks.

Nov 11, 2022

As Machines Get Smarter, Evidence They Learn Like Us

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Studies show that computer models called “neural networks” behave strikingly similar to actual brains when performing certain tasks, suggesting the two may learn in the same way.

Nov 11, 2022

A Brain-Inspired Chip Can Run AI With Far Less Energy

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

An energy-efficient chip called NeuRRAM fixes an old design flaw to run large-scale AI algorithms on smaller devices, reaching the same accuracy as wasteful digital computers.

Nov 11, 2022

New Theory Cracks Open the Black Box of Deep Learning

Posted by in categories: information science, robotics/AI

A new idea is helping to explain the puzzling success of today’s artificial-intelligence algorithms — and might also explain how human brains learn.

Nov 11, 2022

AI Use Potentially Dangerous “Shortcuts” To Solve Complex Recognition Tasks

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The researchers revealed that deep convolutional neural networks were insensitive to configural object properties.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) do not view things in the same way that humans do (through configural shape perception), which might be harmful in real-world AI applications. This is according to Professor James Elder, co-author of a York University study recently published in the journal iScience.

The study, which conducted by Elder, who holds the York Research Chair in Human and Computer Vision and is Co-Director of York’s Centre for AI & Society, and Nicholas Baker, an assistant psychology professor at Loyola College in Chicago and a former VISTA postdoctoral fellow at York, finds that deep learning models fail to capture the configural nature of human shape perception.

Nov 11, 2022

How reality is shaped by the speed of light

Posted by in category: futurism

But it gets weirder.

The light from the table sitting just one meter away from you is also taking some time to reach you. Since its half as far away as the chair, you are seeing it as it was 330 picoseconds ago. That’s half as far back in the past as the chair. Ok, fine, but they both appear to you in the now. What you perceive as the “now” is really layer after layer of light reaching your eye from many different moments in the past. Your “now” is an overlapping mosaic of “thens.” What you imagine to be the real world existing simultaneously with you is really a patchwork of moments from different pasts. You never live in the world as it is. You only experience it as it was, a tapestry of past vintages.

Nov 11, 2022

Antarctic ice catches neutrinos from a distant black hole

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

The IceCube observatory detected 80 of the elusive particles from the heart of spiral galaxy NGC 1,068, also called the Squid Galaxy.

Nov 11, 2022

New antibiotic achieves success in clinical trial

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

If QPX9003 makes it through Phase II and III clinical trials and onto the market, it will be the first new lipopeptide antibiotic that targets Gram-negative bacteria in over 60 years.


QPX9003, a new antibiotic for Gram-negative bacteria, has achieved success in a Phase I clinical trial.