Lifeboat Foundation

Memristive and nanoionic devices have recently emerged as leading candidates for neuromorphic computing architectures. While top-down fabrication based on conventional bulk materials has enabled many early neuromorphic devices and circuits, bottom-up approaches based on low-dimensional nanomaterials have shown novel device functionality that often better mimics a biological neuron. In addition, the chemical, structural and compositional tunability of low-dimensional nanomaterials coupled with the permutational flexibility enabled by van der Waals heterostructures offers significant opportunities for artificial neural networks. In this Review, we present a critical survey of emerging neuromorphic devices and architectures enabled by quantum dots, metal nanoparticles, polymers, nanotubes, nanowires, two-dimensional layered materials and van der Waals heterojunctions with a particular emphasis on bio-inspired device responses that are uniquely enabled by low-dimensional topology, quantum confinement and interfaces. We also provide a forward-looking perspective on the opportunities and challenges of neuromorphic nanoelectronic materials in comparison with more mature technologies based on traditional bulk electronic materials.

Euler’s Identity:

The most beautiful equation in mathematics that combines five of the most important constants of nature: 0, 1, π, e and i, with the three fundamental operations: addition, multiplication and exponentiation.

It’s mystical.

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Leonardo DiCaprio’s dream.

Stars at the Milky Way’s center stay young forever, scientists claim, by feeding off dark matter particles that are abundant there.

Public voting will decide who gets to fly to space on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital vehicle.

“SoftBank was founded for what purpose? For what purpose was Masa Son born? It may sound strange, but I think I was born to realize ASI. I am super serious about it.” — Masayoshi Son.

SoftBank Group Corp.’s big-talking founder Masayoshi Son is back, this time with plans to bring about an era of artificial super-intelligence.

Proteins are the building blocks of life, involved in virtually every biological process. Understanding how proteins interact with each other is crucial for deciphering the complexities of cellular functions, and has significant implications for drug development and the treatment of diseases.

Generative models have had remarkable success in various applications, from image and video generation to composing music and to language modeling. The problem is that we are lacking in theory, when it comes to the capabilities and limitations of generative models; understandably, this gap can seriously affect how we develop and use them down the line.

One of the main challenges has been the ability to effectively pick samples from complicated data patterns, especially given the limitations of traditional methods when dealing with the kind of high-dimensional and complex data commonly encountered in modern AI applications.

Now, a team of scientists led by Florent Krzakala and Lenka Zdeborová at EPFL has investigated the efficiency of modern neural network-based generative models. The study, published in PNAS, compares these contemporary methods against traditional sampling techniques, focusing on a specific class of probability distributions related to spin glasses and statistical inference problems.

The detailed calculations demonstrate that black holes of 10 solar masses may comprise at most 1.2% of dark matter, 100 solar mass black holes—3.0% of dark matter, and 1,000 solar mass black holes—11% of dark matter.

“Our observations indicate that primordial black holes cannot comprise a significant fraction of the dark matter, and simultaneously, explain the observed black hole merger rates measured by LIGO and Virgo,” says Prof. Udalski.

Therefore, other explanations are needed for massive black holes detected by LIGO and Virgo. According to one hypothesis, they formed as a product of the evolution of massive, low-metallicity stars. Another possibility involves mergers of less massive objects in dense stellar environments, such as globular clusters.

On June 25, China’s Chang’e-6 (CE-6) lunar probe is set to return to Earth, carrying the first surface samples collected from the farside of the moon. In anticipation of this historic event, scientists from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are publishing their predictions for the unique materials that may be found in the CE-6 samples in the journal The Innovation.