Summary: Electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome representational drift.
Source: MIT
A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons.
Russia has asked China for military support, including drones, as well as economic assistance for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, according to conversations CNN had with two US officials.
The requests came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of the officials said. That official declined to detail the Chinese reaction but indicated that the Chinese had responded.
Potential assistance from the Chinese would be a significant development in Russia’s invasion. It could upend the hold Ukrainian forces still have in the country as well as provide a counterweight to the harsh sanctions imposed on Russia’s economy.
China’s lunar rover has beamed back a new image of the ‘dark side’ of the moon showing the winding path it has taken over the surface.
The Yutu-2 rover arrived on the moon three years ago on Change’e 4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.
Continue reading “China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover sends image from ‘dark side’ of the moon” »
Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during rest state.
Summary: Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during resting state.
Source: KNAW
Continue reading “Open-Access Dataset of Macaque Brain Published” »
A Microsoft Research team has introduced a “simple yet effective” method that dramatically improves stability in transformer models with just a few lines of code change.
Large-scale transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and in recent years have also demonstrated their impressive few-shot and zero-shot learning capabilities, making them a popular architectural choice for machine learning researchers. However, despite soaring parameter counts that now reach billions and even trillions, the layer depth of transformers remains restricted by problems with training instability.
In their new paper DeepNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000 Layers, the Microsoft team proposes DeepNorm, a novel normalization function that improves the stability of transformers to enable scaling that is an order of magnitude deeper (more than 1,000 layers) than previous deep transformers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=M_p6Z_Qm1_s
Identifying the shape of massive astronomical object is not a simple task. Even with recent observations of gravitational waves the mass and angular momentum of the object remain known with large uncertainty. Moreover, it exists exotic objects, as wormholes who can mimic the shape of black holes for example. The gravitational spectrum of wormholes has a wide range of interpretations. A current challenge addressed by researcher R. A. Konoplya consists of mathematically describing wormholes in order to be able to eventually identify them in the space.
According to current theory a wormhole is a theoretical passage through space-time that could create shortcuts in the universe. The original wormhole solution was discovered by Einstein and Rosen (ER) in 1935 and later John Wheeler has shown their importance in quantum gravity. It was then discovered that it was possible to construct “traversable” wormhole solutions since the ER=EPR proposal. It also appears the quantum fluctuations of the space-time are such that a tiny wormhole could connect Planckian pixel with the entanglement mechanism of quantum space-time itself.
Time only moves forward—or does it?
Physicists refer to this idea as the “arrow of time,” and the idea of unidirectional time seems to hold true for life and objects on a human scale. But on a quantum scale, things seem to work differently, even strangely.
For physicists, the arrow of time is dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder (or entropy) increases over time. The transfer of heat is a perfect example of this. On a chilly day, you’d expect your coffee to get colder if the air around it is cooler. Heat scatters in the presence of lower temperatures; it doesn’t concentrate.
Approximately 11 weeks after the process began, SpaceX has finished stacking its newest Super Heavy booster prototype – the first of its kind intended to host 33 new Raptor V2 engines.
Designed to launch Starship’s massive, namesake upper stage part of the way to orbit, Super Heavy is in many ways simpler than Starship but just as complex and unprecedented in others. Ignoring SpaceX’s unusual plans to have boosters land on huge mechanical arms installed on a skyscraper-sized tower, Super Heavy is ‘merely’ a large vertical-launch, vertical-landing liquid rocket booster – the likes of which SpaceX already has extensive experience with through Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. What mainly sets Super Heavy apart is its sheer scale.
Measuring around 69 meters (~225 ft) from tip to tail, Super Heavy – just one of two Starship stages – is almost as tall as an entire two-stage Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket. At nine meters (~30 ft) wide, a single Super Heavy booster – effectively a giant steel tube – should be able to store at least six or seven times as much propellant as Falcon 9 and about two to three times as much as Falcon Heavy. Engine count and peak thrust are similarly staggering.
Companies are lining up to try to hire coders who have been caught up in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Some 2 million-plus Ukrainian citizens have been displaced in recent weeks, with some of them possessing in-demand technical skills.
Dozens of companies have posted over 500 job ads for tech roles on a website called Remote Ukraine that’s been set up to help firms around the world hire Ukrainians. The companies are mostly from Europe but some are also from the likes of U.S. and Canada.
There have been some other high profile hacks recently.
Ubisoft says it experienced a “cyber security incident” last week that temporarily disrupted some games, systems, and services. The company does not believe player personal information was exposed. An entity seemingly representing the hacking group LAPSUS$ is taking responsibility.
