In this video we discuss the different types of civilizations mention in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. This video wont have any major spoilers for the series.
Art: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16JYYq4_SqGtPirGfSc6otg_a…sp=sharing.
Continue reading “The Species That Eats The Universe | Culture” »
Before a machine-learning model can complete a task, such as identifying cancer in medical images, the model must be trained. Training image classification models typically involves showing the model millions of example images gathered into a massive dataset.
However, using real image data can raise practical and ethical concerns: The images could run afoul of copyright laws, violate people’s privacy, or be biased against a certain racial or ethnic group. To avoid these pitfalls, researchers can use image generation programs to create synthetic data for model training. But these techniques are limited because expert knowledge is often needed to hand-design an image generation program that can create effective training data.
Researchers from MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and elsewhere took a different approach. Instead of designing customized image generation programs for a particular training task, they gathered a dataset of 21,000 publicly available programs from the internet. Then they used this large collection of basic image generation programs to train a computer vision model.
Inspired by the results of a game-playing neural network, mathematicians have been making unexpected advances on an age-old math problem.
Summary: Researchers have identified two new genes, ATP8B4 and ABCA1, that are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. The genes impact the brain’s immune system and cholesterol processing, leading to an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: Cardiff University.
Two new genes that raise a person’s risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease have been discovered by researchers.
Microsoft said today that security vulnerabilities found to impact a web server discontinued since 2005 have been used to target and compromise organizations in the energy sector.
As cybersecurity company Recorded Future revealed in a report published in April, state-backed Chinese hacking groups (including one traced as RedEcho) targeted multiple Indian electrical grid operators, compromising an Indian national emergency response system and the subsidiary of a multinational logistics company.
The attackers gained access to the internal networks of the hacked entities via Internet-exposed cameras on their networks as command-and-control servers.
Ukraine’s grid operator Ukrenergo said that emergency power cuts were being enacted in all Ukrainian regions after widespread Russian attacks on infrastructure on Wednesday.
Ukrenergo, commenting in a statement on Facebook, said power cuts were needed to prevent further technical failures in the energy system after severe damage from repeated strikes since mid-October.
Using radial velocity measurements, astronomers from Japan and China have detected a new exoplanet orbiting a G-type giant star. The newfound alien world is similar in mass to Jupiter but much hotter than the solar system’s biggest planet. The discovery is reported in a paper published November 12 on the arXiv pre-print server.
The radial velocity (RV) method to detect an exoplanet is based on the detection of variations in the velocity of the central star, due to the changing direction of the gravitational pull from an unseen exoplanet as it orbits the star. Thanks to this technique, more than 600 exoplanets have been detected so far.
Now, a group of astronomers led by Huan-Yu Teng of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Tokyo, Japan, reports the finding of a new giant planet as a result of RV measurements using the HIgh Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (HIDES) at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory (OAO) in Japan. The planet orbits a deeply evolved solar-mass G-type giant star known as HD 167,768, located some 353 light years away.
SpaceX sent one of its first-stage boosters skyward for the 11th time on Tuesday evening. However, unlike its 10 previous flights, this time it didn’t return.
The mission launched from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 9:57 p.m. ET, lighting up the night sky as the Falcon 9 rocket roared toward space.
Thirty-five minutes after leaving the launchpad, the Falcon 9’s second stage deployed a communications satellite to a geosynchronous transfer orbit for French satellite operator Eutelsat.
Visit our sponsor, Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/IsaacArthur/
The ability to link mind and machine has long been the realm of science fiction, but now improvements in our understanding may allow us to network brain to computer in the near future. Companies like Neurolink have begun to explore how to link our neurons to machine, and we’ll explore now such neural interfaces might function and how they might change our lives.
Neurolink Paper, “An integrated brain-machine interface platform with thousands of channels”: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/703801v1
