Lifeboat Foundation

Specifically, the release says, carriers would simply have to provide unlocking services 60 days after activation. A welcome standard, but it may run afoul of today’s phone and wireless markets.

For instance, although the dreaded two-year contract is no longer forced on most consumers, many still opt for them to lock in the price and get other benefits. And perhaps more to the point, the phones themselves are often paid for in what amount to installment plans: You get a phone for “free” and then pay it off over the next few years.

The NPRM is the stage of FCC rulemaking where it has a draft rule but has not yet solicited public feedback. On July 18, the agency will publish the full document and open up commentary on the above issues. And you can be sure there will be some squawking from mobile providers!

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies — that are amassing large caches of brain data — are not. Based on a study by The Neurorights Foundation, two-thirds of them are already sharing or selling the data with third parties. The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

This is why Pauzauskie, Medical Director of The Neurorights Foundation, led the passage of a first-in-the-nation law in Colorado. It includes biological or brain data in the State Privacy Act, similar to fingerprints if the data is being used to identify people.

“This is a first step, but we still have a long way to go,” he says.

The universe is a massive place, with galaxies well beyond our own. However, some also hypothesize that there may be more than one universe. The multiverse theory essentially suggests that our universe is just one of many branching and infinite universes. These universes are believed to have appeared just after the Big Bang, and now, scientists may be closer than ever to proving this theory is correct.

The idea of a multiverse existing has gained a lot of following over the past several years—not only in entertainment avenues like the Marvel Cinematic Universe but also in the scientific community, especially since the 1980s when inflation—a period when the universe suddenly expanded—was invented. Inflation is the main explanation for why the universe is so smooth and flat. It also predicts the existence of several independent universes beyond our own.

But inflation isn’t the only route that scientists have looked at to prove the multiverse theory. Others have looked at alternatives called cyclic universes, which basically say the universe is on an unending cycle of ballooning and then compressing. It still focuses on that multiple universe prospect—though it focuses on them appearing at different times.

“Supergranules are a significant component of the heat transport mechanisms of the sun, but they present a serious challenge for scientists to understand,” said Dr. Shravan Hanasoge.

How does the Sun’s interior function and produce the energy needed to allow life to exist on the Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by New York University Abu Dhabi (NYU Abu Dhabi) investigated how the Sun delivers heat from its interior to the surface, also known as convection, through its supergranules, whose individual structures have diameters three times greater than the Earth. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the Sun’s convection processes while also challenging previous hypotheses about the Sun’s convection, as well.

For the study, the researchers conducted one of the most in-depth analyses of the Sun’s supergranuales using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, to examine approximately 23,000 supergranules across the Sun’s surface. The team used sound waves to examine the supergranules’ interiors, which previous studies have also done, as well. Through this, the team was able to measure upflows and downflows with incredible precision compared to past studies.

Continue reading “Revealing the Interior Structure of the Sun’s Supergranules” »

…a new neural network based on GPT-4 finds errors in its work and fixes them.

CriticGPT, a model based on GPT-4, writes critiques of ChatGPT responses to help human trainers spot mistakes during RLHF

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Could we identify an alien terraformed planet through the detection of greenhouse gases? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated whether artificial greenhouse gases could be detected from an exoplanet whose alien inhabitants could be attempting to terraform that world, either from trying to control its climate or terraforming an uninhabitable planet into a habitable one. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the criteria and methods for identifying an extraterrestrial civilization, especially with the number of confirmed exoplanets increasing almost weekly.

“For us, these gases are bad because we don’t want to increase warming” said Dr. Edward Schwieterman, who is an Assistant Professor of Astrobiology at the University of California Riverside and lead author of the study. “But they’d be good for a civilization that perhaps wanted to forestall an impending ice age or terraform an otherwise-uninhabitable planet in their system, as humans have proposed for Mars.”

A group of physicists specialized in solid-state physics from the University of Cologne and international collaborators have examined crystals made from the material BaCO₂V₂O₈ in the Cologne laboratory.

They discovered that the magnetic elementary excitations in the crystal are held together not only by attraction, but also by repulsive interactions. However, this results in a lower stability, making the observation of such repulsively bound states all the more surprising.

The results of the study, “Experimental observation of repulsively bound magnons,” are published in Nature.

Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars had a term for the world as it appears, the “manifest image.” This is the world as we perceive it. In it, an apple is an apple, something red or green with a certain shape, a range of sizes, a thing that we can eat, or throw.

The manifest image can be contrasted with the scientific image of the world. Where the manifest image has colors, the scientific one has electromagnetic radiation of certain wavelengths. Where the manifest image has solid objects, like apples, the scientific image has mostly empty space, with clusters of elementary particles, held together in configurations due to a small number of fundamental interactions.

The scientific image is often radically different from the manifest image, although how different it is depends on what level of organization is being examined. For many purposes, including scientific ones, the manifest image, which is itself a predictive theory of the world at a certain level or organization, works just fine. For example, an ethologist, someone who studies animal behavior, can generally do so without having to concern themselves about quantum fields and their interactions.

In one of the final chapters of his book: Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, David Chalmers asks, have we fallen from the Garden of Eden? “Eden” in this case is a metaphor for living in a world where everything is as it seems, matching our pre-theoretical view of reality.

In Eden, everything exists in a three dimensional Euclidean space. And time flows from one moment to the next with an absolute now across all of space. In Eden, color is an intrinsic property of objects, so the apple really is red. And objects like rocks are truly solid. In Eden, we have free will in the classic contra-causal sense of that term.

Once we lived in Eden. But then there was a fall. We ate of the Tree of Science and were cast out.