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Harvard University on Tuesday launched the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, a new University-wide initiative standing at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, seeking fundamental principles that underlie both human and machine intelligence. The fruits of discoveries will flow in both directions, enhancing understanding of how humans think, perceive the world around them, make decisions, and learn, thereby advancing the rapidly evolving field of AI.

The institute will be funded by a $500 million gift from Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, which was announced Tuesday by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The gift will support 10 new faculty appointments, significant new computing infrastructure, and resources to allow students to flow between labs in pursuit of ideas and knowledge. The institute’s name honors Zuckerberg’s mother, Karen Kempner Zuckerberg, and her parents — Zuckerberg’s grandparents — Sidney and Gertrude Kempner. Chan and Zuckerberg have given generously to Harvard in the past, supporting students, faculty, and researchers in a range of areas, including around public service, literacy, and cures.

“The Kempner Institute at Harvard represents a remarkable opportunity to bring together approaches and expertise in biological and cognitive science with machine learning, statistics, and computer science to make real progress in understanding how the human brain works to improve how we address disease, create new therapies, and advance our understanding of the human body and the world more broadly,” said President Larry Bacow.

Elon Musk says Neuralink is just waiting on FDA approval for its first human trials, which will be conducted among those with severe spinal injuries. Musk said he is sure the chip will help them walk.

Special thanks to a whole bunch of people from Optimism and Flashbots for discussion and thought that went into this piece, and Karl Floersch, Phil Daian, Hasu and Alex Obadia for feedback and review.

NASA has warned that a giant asteroid bigger than the Eiffel Tower will break into Earth’s orbit in just over a week.

The 1,082-foot space rock is heading our way and should skim past us on December 11.

NASA has its eye on Asteroid 4,660 Nereus because it’s well over 492 feet long and will come within 4.6 million miles of Earth.

Designed as a network-addressable display, this 2,048-pixel LED matrix runs at nearly 30 FPS thanks to some clever compression.

British utility SSE and Norwegian energy giant Equinor announced late last week that they have secured financing to proceed with the construction of the $3.98 billion Dogger Bank C offshore wind farm off England’s northeast coast.

Dogger Bank C offshore wind farm, along with Dogger Bank A and Dogger Bank B, is due to become the largest offshore wind farm in the world upon completion, with an installed capacity of 3.6 gigawatts (GW). Each phase is 1.2 GW.

Dogger Bank C will generate around 6,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity a year when completed in 2026.

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The US Space Force installed a high tech new radar system this week that it says will be able to detect objects the size of baseballs in orbit.

The massive monitoring system, dubbed the Long Range Discrimination Radar (LRDR), is located at the Clear Space Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, according to The Anchorage Daily News. The radar is slated to support the US missile defense system and provide reconnaissance data in space.

“Today marks an extremely important milestone for US homeland defense,” US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) director Jon Hill said in a press release yesterday. “The LRDR has finished construction, and we can now begin the testing phase that will lead to the full operational use of this vital system.”

Working with two teams of mathematicians, DeepMind engineered an algorithm that can look across different mathematical fields and spot connections that previously escaped the human mind. The AI doesn’t do all the work—when fed sufficient data, it finds patterns. These patterns are then passed on to human mathematicians to guide their intuition and creativity towards new laws of nature.

“I was not expecting to have some of my preconceptions turned on their head,” said Dr. Marc Lackenby at the University of Oxford, one of the scientists collaborating with DeepMind, to Nature, where the study was published.

The AI comes just a few months after DeepMind’s previous triumph in solving a 50-year-old challenge in biology. This is different. For the first time, machine learning is aiming at the core of mathematics—a science for spotting patterns that eventually leads to formally-proven ideas, or theorems, about how our world works. It also emphasized collaboration between machine and man in bridging observations to working theorems.