Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 39

A small team of AI engineers at Zoom Communications has developed a new approach to training AI systems that uses far fewer resources than the standard approach now in use. The team has published their results on the arXiv preprint server.

The new approach developed at Zoom is called Chain of Draft (CoD), an update of the traditional approach now in use called Chain of Thought (CoT). CoT uses a step-by-step approach to solving a problem, similar in many ways to human problem-solving. The research team noted that CoT tends to generate more steps than are needed to solve a problem and found a way to reduce them.

Humans do not usually think about every step involved in solving a problem, especially if they are writing them down, because some steps are seen as basic knowledge. Instead, they jump over or combine some of them. The result is a list of essential steps.

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Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You’re in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.

Warp drives are staples of science fiction. And in 1994, they became a part of science fact. That’s when Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who was inspired by Star Trek, decided to see if it was possible to build a warp drive. Not like actually build one with wrenches and pipes, but to see if it was even possible to be allowed to build a warp drive given our current knowledge of physics.

Physics is just a mathematical exploration of the natural universe, and the natural universe appears to play by certain rules. Certain actions are allowed, and other actions are not allowed. And the actions that are allowed have to proceed in a certain orderly fashion. Physics tries to capture all of those rules and express them in mathematical form. So Alcubierre wondered: does our knowledge of how nature works permit a warp drive or not?

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Quantum computers, devices that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical computers in some complex optimization and computational tasks. However, before these systems can be adopted on a large-scale, some technical challenges will need to be overcome.

One of these challenges is the effective connection of qubits, which operate at cryogenic temperatures, with external controllers that operate at higher temperatures. Existing methods to connect these components rely on coaxial cables or optical interconnects, both of which are not ideal as they introduce excessive heat and noise.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently set out to overcome the limitations of these approaches for connecting qubits and controllers, addressing common complaints about existing connecting cables. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, introduces a new wireless terahertz (THz) cryogenic interconnect based on complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology, which was found to minimize heat in while effectively transferring .

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A drug-resistant type of bacteria that has adapted to health care settings evolved in the past several years to weaponize an antimicrobial genetic tool, eliminating its cousins and replacing them as the dominant strain. University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine scientists made the discovery when combing through local hospital data—and then confirmed that it was a global phenomenon.

The finding, published in Nature Microbiology, may be the impetus for new approaches in developing therapeutics against some of the world’s deadliest . It also validates a new use for a system developed at Pitt and UPMC that couples genomic sequencing with computer algorithms to rapidly detect infectious disease outbreaks.

“Our lab has a front row seat to the parade of pathogens that move through the ,” said senior author Daria Van Tyne, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine in Pitt’s Division of Infectious Diseases. “And when we took a step back and zoomed out, it quickly became apparent that big changes were afoot with one of the world’s more difficult-to-treat bacteria.”

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Increasing energy demands and problems associated with burning fossil fuels have heightened interest in more sustainable energy sources, such as sunlight. But there are still areas where carbon-based fuel remains the standard, such as in the aviation industry. To address this need, scientists have been working to devise a way to use sunlight to generate solar-thermal heating that could then drive the chemical reactions that are needed to make jet fuel with net-zero carbon emissions.

Now, a team at Caltech that is part of a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub known as the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, or LiSA, has developed such a solar-thermal heating system on a small scale and demonstrated that it can successfully drive an important reaction for jet fuel production.

Completely powered by solar energy, the so-called photothermocatalytic reactor incorporates a spectrally selective solar absorber to maximize the generation of solar-thermal heating. The modular design of the reactor takes advantage of current fabrication technologies and existing silicon solar panel production infrastructure.

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