Lifeboat Foundation

Interactive Brokers — seen as the e-broker with some of the most sophisticated clientele — is slated to start trading cryptocurrencies on its platform in the coming months.

“Customers certainly are asking for [crypto trading] and we expect to be ready to offer it to them by the end of the summer,” Interactive Brokers Chairman and CEO Thomas Peterffy said Wednesday at the Piper Sandler Global Exchange & FinTech Conference.

Investors, both retail and institutional, have poured into bitcoin and other digital assets in 2021. Bitcoin’s price has soared to above $34000 from the $9000 in June of 2020. The price of bitcoin has experienced wild volatility recently due to headlines on a China crackdown, Elon Musk and investors taking excessive risk.

In their decades-long chase to create artificial intelligence, computer scientists have designed and developed all kinds of complicated mechanisms and technologies to replicate vision, language, reasoning, motor skills, and other abilities associated with intelligent life. While these efforts have resulted in AI systems that can efficiently solve specific problems in limited environments, they fall short of developing the kind of general intelligence seen in humans and animals.

In a new paper submitted to the peer-reviewed Artificial Intelligence journal, scientists at U.K.-based AI lab DeepMind argue that intelligence and its associated abilities will emerge not from formulating and solving complicated problems but by sticking to a simple but powerful principle: reward maximization.

Continue reading “DeepMind says reinforcement learning is enough to reach general AI” »

Circa 2020 o,.o.

Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic properties, dialing them from insulating, through semiconducting, all the way to highly conductive, or metallic. This can be induced dynamically and reversed at will, with no degradation of the diamond material.

The research, though still at an early proof-of-concept stage, may open up a wide array of potential applications, including new kinds of broadband solar cells, highly efficient LEDs and power electronics, and new optical devices or quantum sensors, the researchers say.

Continue reading “Turning diamond into metal” »

In a major scientific leap, University of Queensland researchers have created a quantum microscope that can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.

This paves the way for applications in biotechnology, and could extend far beyond this into areas ranging from navigation to medical imaging.

The microscope is powered by the science of quantum entanglement, an effect Einstein described as “spooky interactions at a distance.”

Circa 2015 o.o…

You are special and important and also irrelevant and meaningless.

Summary: Higher sugar diets during childhood increase the risk for obesity, cognitive impairments, and attention deficits as adults, a new study reports.

Source: Queensland University of Technology.

Children who consume too much sugar could be at greater risk of becoming obese, hyperactive, and cognitively impaired, as adults, according to the results of a new study of mice led by QUT and published by Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Shenzhou-12 manned spacecraft and Long March 2F Y12 carrier rocket were rolled out to the launch pad on Wednesday, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said. Pre-launch preparations for the mission are underway.

The three astronauts who will take the Shenzhou-12 manned spacecraft to China’s Tianhe space station core cabin in June are now under Level-2 quarantine, with all related work having entered a final sprint stage, Yang Liwei, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office and the country’s first astronaut revealed.

Yang, who went into space in the Shenzhou-5 craft on October 15, 2003, made the remarks during an interview with state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) on Saturday, following the successful launch of the Tianzhou-2 cargo craft earlier in the day.

According to Yang, the three astronauts of the Shenzhou-12 mission, who were selected from China’s first and second batch of astronauts, will stay in space for three months, during which they will conduct tasks including repair and maintenance, appliance switch and scientific operation of payloads.

A ball of gas around the Milky Way’s black hole has sparked a new debate. Could it be a massive puff of dark matter?

The orbit of S2 and its stellar companions indicated that they were circling around a massive object, about 4 million times the mass of the Sun. Although astronomers could not directly see the object, they knew it could only be one thing.

Continue reading “Scientists debate the existence of the Milky Ways supermassive black hole” »