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Could psychedelics make you more creative? Shift your mind, connect you to others, and help you access a younger, more malleable version of yourself? Activist Rick Doblin, neuroscientist Gül Dölen, and musician Reggie Watts join Brian Greene for a mind-bending and multidisciplinary conversation about the promises and pitfalls of these “magic” molecules and their impact on creativity, connection, and consciousness.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participants:
Rick Doblin.
Gül Dölen.
Reggie Watts.

Moderator:

Continue reading “Psychedelics: Chemicals, Consciousness, and Creativity” | >

Plenty of potential solutions have been put forward to deal with the problem, but they all face a similar problem at the first step: how to track the debris they’re attempting to eliminate. Enter a new idea from researchers in Iran — using a novel type of radar to detect and track space debris before it becomes a danger.

The novel type of radar is called inverse synthetic aperture radar, or ISAR. As one might expect from the name, it’s the opposite of synthetic aperture radar (SAR). SAR has become much more prominent lately, especially by satellites attempting to collect data about the Earth, especially terrain data that might be useful for geospatial mapping.

SAR uses the motion of its platform (i.e., a satellite) to recreate a larger, “synthetic” aperture by using the area the platform covers as it moves compared to the object it is imaging as its aperture size. That might sound confusing but think of it as a way to take multiple images of an object from different angles and then reconstruct a single three-dimensional image from those combined images.

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The study’s findings could play a crucial role in developing a complex brain.

A common feature that connects humans and octopuses has only recently been revealed. It may sound a little bit quirky to you, but not to scientists.

Published very recently in Science Advances today, a team led by Nikolaus Rajewsky of the Max Delbrück Center has now shown that their evolution is linked to a dramatic expansion of their microRNA repertoire.

As said in the statement, the last known common ancestor of humans and cephalopods is a rudimentary wormlike animal with low intelligence and basic eyespots, which can be found if we travel far enough back in evolutionary history.

Continue reading “Breakthrough study reveals that human and octopus brains have common features” | >

Huawei, ZTE, Hytera Communications Corp., Hikvision, and Dahua have made it to the list.

United States has prohibited selling and importing new Huawei and ZTE telecommunications devices due to “national security concerns.”

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved new regulations that forbade the sale and import of new Huawei and ZTE, according to the documents released by the agency on Friday.

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The business mogul’s opening up to more ‘free speech’ on Twitter may have ruffled some feathers.

Elon Musk might have just hinted at making Tesla phones (Tesla Pi) a reality if Apple and Google were to “boot” Twitter from their app stores.

“If Apple & Google boot Twitter from their app stores, @elonmusk should produce his own smartphone,” Liz Wheeler, a video podcaster, said in a Twitter thread on Friday.

Muhammed selim korkutata / anadolu agency/getty images.

Continue reading “Tesla phones an ‘alternative’ if Apple and Google ‘boot’ Twitter, Musk responds” | >

Analysts and e-commerce leaders have been predicting a muted online holiday shopping season this year, with sales in the first three weeks of November essentially flat over a year ago due to a weaker economy, inflation, and more people returning to shopping in stores again in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But on the face of it, the Thanksgiving long weekend appears to be more buoyant than expected — albeit growth has definitely slowed down this year after the pandemic-period boom.

Black Friday broke $9 billion in sales for the first time yesterday, with online sales of $9.12 billion, according to figures from Adobe Analytics. This is a record figure for the day, and up 2.3% on sales figures a year ago, and slightly higher than Adobe had estimated leading up to the day. Adobe doesn’t break out volumes in its report, so it’s hard to know if those figures are due to items simply costing more this year because of inflation, or if the higher numbers are a result of more buying.

Black Friday is a key focus for those gauging how the e-commerce market, and consumer confidence, are both faring in what is the most important and biggest period for shopping in the year.

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Amazon will shut down its food delivery business in India by the end of the year, the retailer said Friday, retreating from a $20 billion vertical it entered less than three years ago.

The retailer will shut down the food delivery business, called Amazon Food, on December 29 in India. It launched Food in India in May 2020 in parts of Bengaluru. The company later expanded the service across the city, tying up with additional restaurants, but it never heavily promoted or marketed the platform.

“Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe,” the company said at the time of Food launch.

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On September 14, 1956, IBM announced the 305 and 650 RAMAC (Random Access Memory Accounting) “data processing machines,” incorporating the first-ever disk storage product. The 305 came with fifty 24-inch disks for a total capacity of 5 megabytes, weighed 1 ton, and could be leased for $3,200 per month.

In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better data storage medium than punch-cards.

The information explosion (a term first used in 1941, according to the Oxford English Dictionary) has turned into the big digital data explosion. And the data explosion enabled deep learning, an advanced data analysis method, to perform today’s AI breakthroughs in image identification and natural language processing.

The RAMAC became obsolete within a few years of its introduction as the vacuum tubes powering it were replaced by transistors. Today, disk drives still serve as the primary containers for digital data, but solid-state drives (flash memory), first used in mobile devices, are fast replacing disk drives even in today’s successors of the RAMAC, supporting large-scale business operations.

Continue reading “History Of AI In 33 Breakthroughs: Digital Storage” | >

The story of the damage done to the world’s biodiversity is a tale of decline spanning thousands of years. Can the world seize its chance to change the narrative?

The story of the biodiversity crisis starts with a cold-case murder mystery that is tens of thousands of years old. When humans started spreading across the globe they discovered a world full of huge, mythical-sounding mammals called “megafauna”, but by the end of the Pleistocene, one by one, these large animals had disappeared. There is no smoking gun and evidence from ancient crime scenes is — unsurprisingly — patchy. But what investigators have learned suggests a prime suspect: humans.

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