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Jun 24, 2024
Conscious AI
Posted by Dan Breeden in categories: food, life extension, robotics/AI, sustainability
Plus, Turing also showed that achieving universality doesn’t require anything fancy. The basic equipment of a universal machine is just not more advanced than a kid’s abacus — operations like incrementing, decrementing, and conditional jumping are all it takes to create software of any complexity: be it a calculator, Minecraft, or an AI chatbot.
Likewise, consciousness might just be an emergent property of the software running AGI, much like how the hardware of a universal machine gives rise to its capabilities. Personally, I don’t buy into the idea of something sitting on top of the physical human brain — no immortal soul or astral “I” floating around in higher dimensions. It’s all just flesh and bone. Think of it like an anthill: this incredibly complex system doesn’t need some divine spirit to explain its organized society, impressive architecture, or mushroom farms. The anthill’s intricate behaviour, often referred to as a superorganism, emerges from the interactions of its individual ants without needing to be reduced to them. Similarly, a single ant wandering around in a terrarium won’t tell you much about the anthill as a whole. Brain neurons are like those ants — pretty dumb on their own, but get around 86 billion of them together, and suddenly you’ve got “I” with all its experiences, dreams, and… consciousness.
So basically, if something can think, it can also think about itself. That means consciousness is a natural part of thinking — it just comes with the territory. And if you think about it, this also means you can’t really have thinking without consciousness, which brings us back to the whole Skynet thing.
Jun 23, 2024
Can Black Holes Be Created From Pure Light? New Paper Challenges Theory
Posted by Paul Battista in category: cosmology
Squeeze enough stuff into one spot, space-time itself will pucker up in a sweet cosmic kiss known as a black hole.
As far as Einstein’s sums are concerned, that ‘stuff’ includes the massless glow of electromagnetic radiation. Given E = mc2, which describes the equivalence between mass and energy, the energy of light itself should – in theory – be capable of creating a black hole if enough of it is concentrated in one spot.
Before you crack out the big-gun lasers and punch some holes into the Universe’s floorboards, there’s one thing researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and the University of Waterloo in Canada want you to know.
Jun 23, 2024
Human trials to begin for new teeth regeneration drug
Posted by Paul Battista in category: biotech/medical
Scientists at Kyoto University Hospital will conduct the first human trial of the drug from September 2024 to August 2025. In tests on ferrets and mice, the drug worked with no notable side effects, Popular Mechanics reported.
The drug will be used on 30 men between 30–64 who are missing at least one molar. From there, researchers will expand the study to those with partial edentulism, or those missing one to five permanent teeth.
Jun 23, 2024
The Cosmological Constant Problem: a Crisis in Physics
Posted by Dan Breeden in categories: cosmology, quantum physics
What is Dark Energy? A mysterious substance that fills space and causes it to expand is Dark Energy .70% of the universe’s energy is in the form of ‘dark energy’
Jun 23, 2024
Scientists discover that people who live past 90 have key differences in their blood
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biotech/medical, genetics, life extension
Centenarians have become the fastest-growing demographic group in the world, with numbers approximately doubling every 10 years since the 1970s.
Many researchers have sought out the factors and contributors that determine a long and healthy life. The dissolution isn’t new either, with Plato and Aristotle writing about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.
Understanding what is behind living a longer life involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact.
Jun 23, 2024
‘Space hairdryer’ regenerates heart tissue in study | BBC News
Posted by Raphael Ramos in categories: biotech/medical, media & arts
Gentle shockwaves can help regenerate heart tissue.
Jun 23, 2024
This Autonomous Solar-Powered Aircraft Will Fly for 90 Days Straight
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: Elon Musk, government, robotics/AI, security, sustainability, transportation
face_with_colon_three year 2021.
The solar aircraft is made by a Spanish-American aerospace startup called Skydweller Aero. Based in Oklahoma City, the company raised $32 million in its Series A funding round, led by Italian aerospace firm Leonardo.
Continue reading “This Autonomous Solar-Powered Aircraft Will Fly for 90 Days Straight” »
Jun 23, 2024
Comparison of Discrete Variable and Continuous Variable Quantum Key Distribution Protocols with Phase Noise in the Thermal-Loss Channel
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in category: quantum physics
Sebastian P. Kish1,2, Patrick J. Gleeson2, Angus Walsh2, Ping Koy Lam3,2, and Syed M. Assad3,2
1Data61, CSIRO, Marsfield, NSW, Australia. 2 Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Department of Quantum Science and Technology, Research School of Physics, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia. 3 Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore, 138,634, Singapore.
Get full text pdfRead on arXiv VanityComment on Fermat’s library.
Jun 23, 2024
To solve global water scarcity, we need to get more serious about desalination
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: energy, sustainability
Earth’s H2O is 97 percent seawater, and most of the remaining 3 percent is inaccessible, frozen in glaciers or permafrost. Only a small portion, about half of a percent, exists as freshwater in aquifers and rivers that humans can tap into. A process called, however, allows us to dip into the oceans to satisfy our thirst.
Desal has been around for decades and is used to make both seawater and salty groundwater drinkable. But scientists think that it will become increasingly important in a warmer, drier future. In a recent UN-led review, researchers stated that “‘conventional’ sources of water such as rainfall, snowmelt and river runoff captured in lakes, rivers, and aquifers are no longer sufficient to meet human demands in water-scarce areas.”
During a media roundtable at the 2019 American Geophysical Union conference, Peter Fiske, director of the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, discussed why we might need to more strongly consider this technology—at times written off for its high costs and energy use—to stabilize water supplies in the future. Here’s what you need to know.