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The NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures.

NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system.

Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the Sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique. With the increased focus on “planetary defense,” as it has come to be called, NASA has been interested in the mission, which was initially proposed in 2005, for some time.

Continue reading “NASA’s plan to identify dangerous asteroids takes a major step forward” | >

We are living a data revolution in the biomedical field, and scientific research is advancing at an unprecedented speed to improve modern medicine. One of the key aspects of such medicine is the tailoring of treatments to each patient, by analising the specific changes that led to disease along with the unique characteristics with which the person was born. The use of supercomputers is essential to make sense of the vast amounts of data, and to simulate aspects of our bodies to calculate for instance which drug is more appropriate for each patient for a given disease.

This video showcases some of the research done at the Life Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, contributing to a better understanding of our bodies in health and disease, and to a future where a Human Digital Twin can help to live healthier and longer.

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Greg Yang is a mathematician and AI researcher at Microsoft Research who for the past several years has done incredibly original theoretical work in the understanding of large artificial neural networks. Greg received his bachelors in mathematics from Harvard University in 2018 and while there won the Hoopes prize for best undergraduate thesis. He also received an Honorable Mention for the Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student in 2018 and was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians in 2019.

In this episode, we get a sample of Greg’s work, which goes under the name “Tensor Programs” and currently spans five highly technical papers. The route chosen to compress Tensor Programs into the scope of a conversational video is to place its main concepts under the umbrella of one larger, central, and time-tested idea: that of taking a large N limit. This occurs most famously in the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, which then play a fundamental role in the branch of mathematics known as Random Matrix Theory (RMT). We review this foundational material and then show how Tensor Programs (TP) generalizes this classical work, offering new proofs of RMT. We conclude with the applications of Tensor Programs to a (rare!) rigorous theory of neural networks.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/timothynguyen.

Part I. Introduction.

Continue reading “Greg Yang | Large N Limits: Random Matrices & Neural Networks | The Cartesian Cafe w/ Timothy Nguyen” | >

Although dark matter is a central part of the standard cosmological model, it’s not without its issues. There continue to be nagging mysteries about the stuff, not the least of which is the fact that scientists have found no direct particle evidence of it. Despite numerous searches, we have yet to detect dark matter particles. So some astronomers favor an alternative, such as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND) or modified gravity model. And a new study of galactic rotation seems to support them.

The idea of MoND was inspired by galactic rotation. Most of the visible matter in a galaxy is clustered in the middle, so you’d expect that stars closer to the center would have faster orbital speeds than stars farther away, similar to the planets of our solar system. We observe that stars in a galaxy all rotate at about the same speed. The rotation curve is essentially flat rather than dropping off. The dark matter solution is that galaxies are surrounded by a halo of invisible matter, but in 1983 Mordehai Milgrom argued that our gravitational model must be wrong.

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Australian scientists have created the most detailed map ever of the communication links between the hippocampus, the brain’s memory control center, and the rest of the brain, potentially revolutionizing our understanding of human memory.

“We were surprised to find fewer connections between the hippocampus and frontal cortical areas, and more connections with early visual processing areas than we expected to see,” said Dr. Marshall Dalton, a Research Fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. “Although, this makes sense considering the hippocampus plays an important role not only in memory but also imagination and our ability to construct mental images in our mind’s eye.”

Located within the brain, the hippocampus is a complex structure that resembles a seahorse. It is essential for the brain and plays a crucial role in memory formation as well as the transfer of memories from short-term to long-term storage. In addition to these functions, the hippocampus also plays a role in navigation, the ability to imagine future or fictitious experiences, the creation of mental imagery, and even in visual perception and decision-making.

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It’s all part of an in-space manufacturing initiative that could drastically reduce costs for future space missions.

A new experiment does away with one of the biggest hindrances manufacturers face here on Earth — Gravity.

MIT scientists are collaborating with NASA to build test parts in space as part of a research program aimed at unleashing the full potential of microgravity manufacturing.

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Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said it would be “a mistake” to use ChatGPT for anything important.

Microsoft aims to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot into its Bing search engine in order to boost its user count and rival Google, as per a report from The Information.

Could OpenAI enhance Microsoft’s search engine credibility?

Picture alliance/Getty Images.

Continue reading “Microsoft aims to boost its search engine with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to rival Google” | >

Just like the distant galaxies, the deep seas continue to bring us wonder and awe.

Beyond every shoreline lies a sea, a seemingly uniform body of water with turbulent, ceaseless movement that joins the coastlines into a continuous whole, showing no sign of the borders and labels we set upon it. In many ways, these large bodies of water are as mysterious to us as the distant galaxies and stars in the cosmos. But they are also right here, in the midst of our own world and interacting with our planet’s atmosphere as a realm of hidden objects, shadowy dreams, and deep sea creatures.

Do you ever think about the creatures that lie deep below the seas?

EXTREME-PHOTOGRAPHER/iStock.

Continue reading “Deep sea creatures: the amazing under-explored part of the world” | >