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Rats love to dance đŸ•ș:3

The team had two alternate hypotheses: The first was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would be determined by the time constant of the body. This is different between species and much faster for compared to humans (think of how quickly a rat can scuttle). The second was that the optimal tempo would instead be determined by the time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species.

“After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain,” said Takahashi. “This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”

The rats were fitted with wireless, miniature accelerometers, which could measure the slightest head movements. Human participants also wore accelerometers on headphones. They were then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, at four different tempos: Seventy-five percent, 100%, 200% and 400% of the original speed.

Continue reading “Rats bopping to the beat in video demonstrate innate beat synchronization in animals for the first time” | >

Two different groups have tested a seemingly counter-intuitive property of the quantum world: That it’s possible to put a photon, a particle of light, in a superposition of states going forward and backward in time. This is not time travel and won’t lead to communicating with the past – but it is an intriguing demonstration of how time can be thought to work at a quantum level.

Unless you have a TARDIS or a DeLorean, time only flows in one direction (forward) for us. This annoying little fact that protects us from all sorts of paradoxes is called the arrow of time. It is believed to be related to the concept of entropy (which always increases in an isolated system like the universe) but it doesn’t seem to be as fundamental at the quantum level.

Instead, something that appears to be fundamental is the so-called CPT symmetry (charge, parity, and time reversal symmetry). This holds for all physical phenomena, and if a combination of two of them is violated (such as famously the CP violations) there ought to be a violation in time symmetry as well.

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Early on Thursday morning, Hurricane Nicole made landfall near Vero Beach on Florida’s eastern coast. Because Nicole had a very large eye, nearly 60 miles in diameter, its strongest winds were located well to the north of this landfalling position.

As a result of this, Kennedy Space Center took some of the most intense wind gusts from Nicole late on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. While such winds from a Category 1 hurricane are unlikely to damage facilities, they are of concern because the space agency left its Artemis I mission—consisting of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft—exposed on a pad at Launch Complex-39B. The pad is a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

How intense were the winds? The National Weather Service hosts data from NASA sensors attached to this launch pad’s three lighting towers on a public website. It can be a little difficult to interpret the readings because there are sensors at altitudes varying from 132 feet to 457 feet. Most of the publicly available data appears to come from an altitude of about 230 feet, however, which would represent the area of the Space Launch System rocket where the core stage is attached to the upper stage. The entire stack reaches a height of about 370 feet above the ground.

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Giant Stars are often considered too hot and short lived to colonize, but it may be that they shall be the most powerful and pivotal systems in a future galaxy.

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Continue reading “Colonizing Giant Stars” | >

Commercial Holograms may soon get into the hand of regular consumers with the help of the biggest Hologram company called Lightfield. Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other applications. In principle, it is possible to make a hologram for any type of a light field.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 No longer just Science Fiction.
00:45 What is a hologram?
02:28 How do these new Holograms work?
05:56 The Future of Entertainment?
08:17 Last Words.
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#holograms #ai #technology

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In this bonus interview for the series Science Uprising, computer scientist and AI expert Selmer Bringsjord provides a wide-ranging discussion of artificial intelligence (AI) and its capabilities. Bringsjord addresses three features humans possess that AI machines won’t be able to duplicate in his view: consciousness, cognition, and genuine creativity.

Selmer Bringsjord is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Director of the Rensselaer AI and Reasoning Laboratory. He and his colleagues have developed the “Lovelace Test” to evaluate whether machine intelligence has resulted in mind or consciousness.

Watch episodes of Science Uprising, plus bonus video interviews with experts from each episode at https://scienceuprising.com/.

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Continue reading “Three Things AI Machines Won’t Be Able to Achieve” | >

A team of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with a colleague from Institute for Basic Science, both in the Republic of Korea, has found an easy way to create an electronic network inside a polymer. They used an acoustic field to connect liquid metal dots.

In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their technique and its possible uses. Ruirui Qiao and Shi-Yang Tang with the University of Queensland in Australia and the University of Birmingham, in the U.K., respectively, have published a Perspectives piece in the same journal outlining the work done by the team.

As have become mainstream, consumers have demanded more ease of use. One such call is for devices to be bendable and/or stretchable. It is believed such a change would make them fit more easily and naturally in pockets or purses—and they might be more comfortable in the hands, as well.

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This describes the essential Musk — with the caveat that it leaves out his autism and emotional fragility. He has the right philosophy and the brains to make serious progress, but with some surprisingly unexpected naïve schoolboy level mistakes and misunderstandings about human nature. Regardless, he will learn from them.

We may have cracked the code.

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