Lifeboat Foundation

The EU’s data protection agencies on Monday called for an outright ban on using artificial intelligence to identify people in public places, pointing to the “extremely high” risks to privacy.

In a non-binding opinion, the two bodies called for a “general ban” on the practice that would include “recognition of faces, gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, keystrokes and other biometric or behavioural signals, in any context”.

Such practices “interfere with fundamental rights and freedoms to such an extent that they may call into question the essence of these rights and freedoms,” the heads of the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor said.

In 2013, François Englert and Peter Higgs won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, which was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle by the A Toroidal LHC Apparatus (ATLAS) and the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiments at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012. The Higgs mode or the Anderson-Higgs mechanism (named after another Nobel Laureate Philip W Anderson), has widespread influence in our current understanding of the physical law for mass ranging from particle physics—the elusive “God particle” Higgs boson discovered in 2012 to the more familiar and important phenomena of superconductors and magnets in condensed matter physics and quantum material research.

The Higgs mode, together with the Goldstone mode, is caused by the spontaneous breaking of continuous symmetries in the various quantum material systems. However, different from the Goldstone mode, which has been widely observed via neutron scattering and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies in quantum magnets or superconductors, the observation of the Higgs mode in the material is much more challenging due to its usual overdamping, which is also the property in its particle physics cousin—the elusive Higgs boson. In order to weaken these damping, two paths have been suggested from the theoretical side, through quantum critical points and dimensional crossover from high dimensions to lower ones. For , people have achieved several remarkable results, whereas there are few successes in.

To fulfill this knowledge gap, from 2020, Mr Chengkang Zhou, then a first-year Ph.D. student, Dr. Zheng Yan and Dr. Zi Yang Meng from the Research Division for Physics and Astronomy of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), designed a dimensional crossover setting via coupled spin chains. They applied the quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulation to investigate the excitation spectra of the problem. Teaming up with Dr. Hanqing Wu from the Sun Yat-Sen University, Professor Kai Sun from the University of Michigan, and Professor Oleg A Starykh from the University of Utah, they observed three different kinds of collective excitation in the quasi-1D limit, including the Goldstone mode, the Higgs mode and the scalar mode. By combining numerical and analytic analyses, they successfully explained these excitations, and in particular, revealed the clear presence of the Higgs mode in the quasi-1D quantum magnetic systems.

Another DeFi project on the Binance Smart Chain has been exploited. This time, attackers nabbed $500000 from Impossible Finance.

In case you need the information.

The CDC designated the delta variant of the coronavirus — first identified in India — as a “variant of concern” June 15, reigniting attention on the race between vaccines and coronavirus variants.

The new classification comes amid mounting evidence that the variant spreads more easily than existing strains and causes more severe infections, the CDC said in a June 15 statement to Becker’s. People infected by the delta variant may have twice the risk of hospitalization of people infected with the alpha variant first identified in the U.K., according to research released this week from Scotland. In May, the U.K.’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies also said the delta variant could be up to 50 percent more transmissible than alpha, which is currently the dominant strain in the U.S., though research is still preliminary.

Continue reading “How vaccines stack up against CDC’s 5 variants of concern” »

I like this one, especially because using recycled materials has no loss in efficacy.

Beating the heat with paper.

Is there a way for IT leaders to be proactive about AI and machine learning without ruffling and rattling an organization of people who want the miracles of AI and ML delivered tomorrow morning? The answer is yes.

“Stationary” has very different meanings at quantum and real-world scales – an object that looks perfectly still to us is actually made up of atoms that are buzzing and bouncing around. Now, scientists have managed to slow down the atoms almost to a complete stop in the largest macro-scale object yet.

The temperature of a given object is directly tied to the motion of its atoms – basically, the hotter something is, the more its atoms jiggle around. By extension, there’s a point where the object is so cold that its atoms come to a complete standstill, a temperature known as absolute zero (−273.15 °C,-459.67 °F).

Scientists have been able to chill atoms and groups of atoms to a fraction above absolute zero for decades now, inducing what’s called the motional ground state. This is a great starting point to then create exotic states of matter, such as supersolids, or fluids that seem to have negative mass.

There are still many unsolved mysteries about the human brain and its development. Now, a novel study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry sheds new light on the neurobiological origins of our individual traits.

Functional connectivity is the coordinated activity – activation or deactivation – through time between separate brain regions, regardless of their physical closeness or the type of neural connections between them. Changes in functional connectivity can be a sign of mental health disorders such as depression, eating disorders, and schizophrenia, and are thought to have developmental origins.

Tesla has unveiled its new supercomputer, which is already the fifth most powerful in the world, and it’s going to be the predecessor of Tesla’s upcoming new Dojo supercomputer.

It is being used to train the neural nets powering Tesla’s Autopilot and upcoming self-driving AI.

Over the last few years, Tesla has had a clear focus on computing power both inside and outside its vehicles.