Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A new AI model mimics how the prefrontal cortex uses gating to control information flow between different areas of neurons. The system could help in the development of new artificial intelligence technologies that better mimic the human brain.

Source: Salk Institute.

Getting computers to “think” like humans is the holy grail of artificial intelligence, but human brains turn out to be tough acts to follow. The human brain is a master of applying previously learned knowledge to new situations and constantly refining what’s been learned. This ability to be adaptive has been hard to replicate in machines.

Johnson & Johnson said Thursday that late-stage clinical trials for its coronavirus vaccine are now fully enrolled, and expects to release initial data on the shot’s effectiveness by the end of January.

The pharmaceutical company’s single-dose vaccine is in Phase 3 clinical trials that are now fully enrolled, and is already being reviewed by Health Canada.

Sit! Stay! Fetch! Map a Martian cave!

Robotic “Mars Dogs” could use artificial intelligence and sensors to investigate the Martian surface and map hidden lava tunnels.

Electric vehicle start-up Canoo unveiled a new delivery van Thursday ahead of its public debut on the Nasdaq next week.

The futuristic-looking van — known as a multi-purpose delivery vehicle, or MPDV, because of the ways it can be upfitted — is designed for everything from last-mile deliveries to food trucks, according to the California company. It is expected to start at around $33, 000.

“There are many use cases that this vehicle can do,” Canoo Chairman Tony Aquila, a major investor in the company, said during a video unveiling of the MPDV. “We wanted it to look very smart, very modern but at the same time be very affordable.”

The Lightening SuperBike is the fastest production motorcycle in the world, clocking in at 218 MPH. (There are faster bikes, but none of them are street legal.) It recently won the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, beating all competitors, including gasoline-powered bikes. But don’t ask how many cylinders its engine has — this bike is solar powered. Well technically it’s battery-powered, but it charges the batteries with solar energy.

^{Image: SMA America}

Continue reading “World’s Fastest Motorcycle is Solar Powered” »

Quantum computational advantage or supremacy is a long-anticipated milestone toward practical quantum computers. Recent work claimed to have reached this point, but subsequent work managed to speed up the classical simulation and pointed toward a sample size–dependent loophole. Quantum computational advantage, rather than being a one-shot experimental proof, will be the result of a long-term competition between quantum devices and classical simulation. Zhong et al. sent 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer and sampled the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. By obtaining up to 76-photon coincidence, yielding a state space dimension of about 10³⁰, they measured a sampling rate that is about 10¹⁴-fold faster than using state-of-the-art classical simulation strategies and supercomputers.

Science, this issue p. 1460

Quantum computers promise to perform certain tasks that are believed to be intractable to classical computers. Boson sampling is such a task and is considered a strong candidate to demonstrate the quantum computational advantage. We performed Gaussian boson sampling by sending 50 indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a 100-mode ultralow-loss interferometer with full connectivity and random matrix—the whole optical setup is phase-locked—and sampling the output using 100 high-efficiency single-photon detectors. The obtained samples were validated against plausible hypotheses exploiting thermal states, distinguishable photons, and uniform distribution. The photonic quantum computer, Jiuzhang, generates up to 76 output photon clicks, which yields an output state-space dimension of 10³⁰ and a sampling rate that is faster than using the state-of-the-art simulation strategy and supercomputers by a factor of ~10¹⁴.

Similar findings may tell scientists about magnetic fields around exoplanets.

Scientists may have detected radio emissions from a planet orbiting a star beyond our sun for the first time.

The astronomers behind the new research used a radio telescope in the Netherlands to study three different stars known to host exoplanets. The researchers compared what they saw to observations of Jupiter, diluted as if being seen from a star system dozens of light-years away. And one star system stood out: Tau Boötes, which contains at least one exoplanet. If the detection holds up, it could open the door to better understanding the magnetic fields of exoplanets and therefore the exoplanets themselves, the researchers hope.

The Energy Department and National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, have evidence that hackers accessed their networks as part of an extensive espionage operation that has affected at least half a dozen federal agencies, officials directly familiar with the matter said.

On Thursday, DOE and NNSA officials began coordinating notifications about the breach to their congressional oversight bodies after being briefed by Rocky Campione, the chief information officer at DOE.

They found suspicious activity in networks belonging to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico and Washington, the Office of Secure Transportation at NNSA, and the Richland Field Office of the DOE.

Danish company plans to fit ships with small nuclear reactors to send energy to developing countries.