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The rate at which the universe is currently expanding is known as the Hubble Rate. In recent years, different measurements have given different results for the Hubble rate, a discrepancy between theory and observation that’s been called the “Hubble tension”. Now, a team of astrophysicists claims the Hubble tension is gone and it’s the fault of supernovae data. Let’s have a look.

Continue reading “A Huge Cosmology Problem Might Just Have Disappeared” »

Paper on the hubble tension.

Wendy L. Freedman and Barry F. Madore JCAP11(2023)050 DOI 10.1088÷1475−7516÷2023÷11÷050

One way to manage the unsustainable energy requirements of the computing sector is to fundamentally change the way we compute. Superconductors could let us do just that.

Superconductors offer the possibility of drastically lowering energy consumption because they do not dissipate energy when passing current. True, superconductors work only at cryogenic temperatures, requiring some cooling overhead. But in exchange, they offer virtually zero-resistance interconnects, digital logic built on ultrashort pulses that require minimal energy, and the capacity for incredible computing density due to easy 3D chip stacking.

Are the advantages enough to overcome the cost of cryogenic cooling? Our work suggests they most certainly are. As the scale of computing resources gets larger, the marginal cost of the cooling overhead gets smaller. Our research shows that starting at around 10 ¹⁶ floating-point operations per second (tens of petaflops) the superconducting computer handily becomes more power efficient than its classical cousin. This is exactly the scale of typical high-performance computers today, so the time for a superconducting supercomputer is now.

Predicted way back in the 1960s, the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 completed the Standard Model. Here’s why it remains fascinating.

System charts the evolution of complex quantum states.

The illusion of AI consciousness: why gpt-4o and other chatbots are not conscious.

• Shannon Vallor, an AI expert and contributor to DeepMind, discusses the latest developments in generative AI, particularly OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, and warns of the dangers of the illusion of artificial consciousness.

Continue reading “The dangerous illusion of AI consciousness” »

OpenAI’s “next frontier model” is expected to replace the GPT-4 model powering ChatGPT.

Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection.

Today, black holes form either when a massive star collapses or when heavy objects merge. However, scientists suspect that smaller “primordial” black holes, including some with masses similar to Earth’s, could have formed in the first chaotic moments of the early universe.

“Detecting a population of Earth-mass primordial black holes would be an incredible step for both astronomy and particle physics because these objects can’t be formed by any known physical process,” said William DeRocco, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz who led a study about how Roman could reveal them.

A new study demonstrates that just a handful of “forgotten” biochemical reactions are needed to transform simple geochemical compounds into the complex molecules of life.

The origin of life on Earth has long been a mystery that has eluded scientists. A key question is how much of the history of life on Earth is lost to time. It is quite common for a single species to “phase out” using a biochemical reaction, and if this happens across enough species, such reactions could effectively be “forgotten” by life on Earth. But if the history of biochemistry is rife with forgotten reactions, would there be any way to tell?

This question inspired researchers from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) in the USA. They reasoned that forgotten chemistry would appear as discontinuities or “breaks” in the path that chemistry takes from simple geochemical molecules to complex biological molecules.