Lifeboat Foundation

The tetra-neutron – experiment finds evidence for a long-sought particle comprising four neutrons.

While all atomic nuclei except hydrogen are composed of protons and neutrons, physicists have been searching for a particle consisting of two, three, or four neutrons for over half a century. Experiments by a team of physicists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) at the accelerator laboratory on the Garching research campus now indicate that a particle comprising four bound neutrons may well exist.

While nuclear physicists agree that there are no systems in the universe made of only protons, they have been searching for particles comprising two, three, or four neutrons for more than 50 years.

Astronomers possibly solve the mystery of how the enormous Oort cloud, with over 100 billion comet-like objects, was formed.

The coronavirus pandemic and travel bans have accelerated interest in holographic communication.

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0,” where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.

Novel theorem demonstrates convolutional neural networks can always be trained on quantum computers, overcoming threat of ‘barren plateaus’ in optimization problems.

Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as “barren plateaus” has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.

“The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not,” said Marco Cerezo, coauthor of the paper titled “Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks,” published recently by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing 0, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. “We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters.”

But wait, should we believe it?

An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” The AI, it seems, agreed.

Continue reading “Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about… itself” »

The company belatedly gets into the race to build bigger, better language models despite ethical concerns.

A team at Harvard has documented a new state of matter which could advance quantum technology.

Physicists from Harvard University have documented a new state of matter which could significantly advance quantum technology, according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science earlier this month.

The state of matter they found is called quantum spin liquid, which has special properties that produce long-range quantum entanglement — a phenomenon in which particles’ states are connected even when the particles are separated by distance.

Quantum spin liquid was first predicted by physicist Philip W. Anderson about 50 years ago, in 1973, but has never been observed in experiments.

Scientists know that Martian dust storms drive the planet’s ongoing dehydration, but just how the water gets to the upper atmosphere remains a mystery.