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“Conscious processing is overestimated,” lead author Michael Herzog said in a press release. “You should give more weight to the dark, unconscious processing period. You just believe that you are conscious at each moment of time.”

When we ride a bike, Herzog mused, our bodies automatically make minute adjustments to keep from falling over without consciously thinking about it. But even with his team’s two-step model, some of the secondary questions surrounding the ancient debate remain. Questions about how long these discrete moments of consciousness last, or how they differ among people, don’t have answers.

“The question for what consciousness is needed and what can be done without conscious? We have no idea,” Herzog said.

Continue reading “Psychophysicists: Your Brain Might Not Be as Conscious as You Think” | >

MILLIONS of owners of the Samsung Galaxy smartphone face a security threat.

Those with an Android version 9 through 12 are at risk.

Researchers at Kryptowire published a report detailing how they discovered a serious vulnerability in the pre-installed Phone app across multiple models that could enable a hacker to take control of someone’s phone, Forbes reported.

Continue reading “Warning for Samsung users as pre-installed app could let hacker control phone” | >

NASA astronaut Doug Hurley reminisced on what it was like working with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk before he flew on a historic flight to space and back in 2020.

In an interview with Fox News, Hurley spoke about his impressions of Musk, the billionaire space race, and a new Netflix documentary, “Return to Space” which follows Hurley’s journey and that of fellow astronaut Bob Behnken as they embarked on the first human SpaceX mission to the International Space Station.

In May 2020, Musk and SpaceX made history after the company successfully launched two astronauts into space aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship. Shortly after, the astronauts’ ship docked at the International Space Station.

Continue reading “Elon Musk has a ‘very human side to him,’ according to a NASA astronaut who completed a SpaceX mission” | >

There are ways around this, but they don’t have the exciting scalability story and worse, they have to rely on a rather non-tech crutch: human input. Smaller language models fine-tuned with actual human-written answers are ultimately better at generating less biased text than a much larger, more powerful system.

And further complicating matters is that models like OpenAI’s GPT-3 don’t always generate text that’s particularly useful because they’re trained to basically “autocomplete” sentences based on a huge trove of text scraped from the internet. They have no knowledge of what a user is asking it to do and what responses they are looking for. “In other words, these models aren’t aligned with their users,” OpenAI said.

Any test of this idea would be to see what happens with pared-down models and a little human input to keep those trimmed neural networks more…humane. This is exactly what OpenAI did with GPT-3 recently when it contracted 40 human contractors to help steer the model’s behavior.

Continue reading “Why OpenAI recruited human contractors to improve GPT-3” | >

The image from the Hubble Space Telescope shared this week shows a “serpentine” galaxy with winding, snake-like spiral arms, and is appropriately enough located in the constellation of Serpens, or The Snake. Technically known as NGC 5,921, the galaxy is located 80 million light-years away.

The galaxy NGC 5,921 is a type called a barred spiral galaxy, like our Milky Way. The bar refers to the strip of bright light across the center of the galaxy, which is a region of dust and gas where many stars are born — hence why it glows brightly. Around half of known galaxies have bars, and researchers think that they develop as galaxies get older and dust and gas are drawn in toward their center by gravity.

The image was taken as part of a Hubble study into how the supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies relate to the stars within them. Hubble used its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument to take the image, which was combined with data from the ground-based Gemini Observatory.

Continue reading “Hubble captures spiral galaxy in constellation of Serpens” | >

3D printers may soon get better at producing intricate metal and plastic parts, thanks to new software developed at the University of Michigan that reduces harmful heat buildup in laser powder bed fusion printers.

Called SmartScan, the software demonstrated a 41% improvement in heat distribution and a 47% reduction in deformations in a recent study.

Continue reading “Smarter 3D printing makes better parts faster” | >