Bitcoin passed a major milestone on Monday by reaching 90 percent of the total mineable supply as 18.9 million Bitcoin, out of a maximum of 21 million, have been mined and are in circulation in various exchanges.
Recent data show that the remaining mineable Bitcoin amount is at 2.1 million or 10 percent of the total supply. … See more.
Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by “black box” artificial intelligence systems. These use machine learning to figure out patterns within data and make decisions — often without a human giving them any moral basis for how to do it.
Classics of the genre are the credit cards accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women, based simply on which gender got the best credit terms in the past. Or the recruitment AIs that discovered the most accurate tool for candidate selection was to find CVs containing the phrase “field hockey” or the first name “Jared”.
Lightning is one of the most destructive forces of nature, as in 2020 when it sparked the massive California Lightning Complex fires, but it remains hard to predict. A new study led by the University of Washington shows that machine learning—computer algorithms that improve themselves without direct programming by humans—can be used to improve lightning forecasts.
Better lightning forecasts could help to prepare for potential wildfires, improve safety warnings for lightning and create more accurate long-range climate models.
“The best subjects for machine learning are things that we don’t fully understand. And what is something in the atmospheric sciences field that remains poorly understood? Lightning,” said Daehyun Kim, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. “To our knowledge, our work is the first to demonstrate that machine learning algorithms can work for lightning.”
On April 28, 2021, at 933 UT (3:33 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time), NASA’s Parker Solar Probe reached the sun’s extended solar atmosphere, known as the corona, and spent five hours there. The spacecraft is the first to enter the outer boundaries of our sun.
The results, published in Physical Review Letters, were announced in a press conference at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2021 on December 14. The manuscript is open-access and freely available to download.
“This marks the achievement of the primary objective of the Parker mission and a new era for understanding the physics of the corona,” said Justin C. Kasper, the first author, Deputy Chief Technology Officer at BWX Technologies, and a professor at the University of Michigan. The mission is led by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL).
Intel has just announced their plans to continue Moore’s Law well into the next decade which promises us up to a 10x performance and efficiency increase through new hardware semiconductor approaches. For example with the help of 3D CPU Transistors or GAAFET. The breakthroughs revealed at IEDM 2021 demonstrate Intel is on track to continue the advancement and benefits of Moore’s Law well beyond 2025 through its three areas of pathfinding and maybe even beat its competitors TSMC and Samsung in the fab business. – TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Moore’s Law isn’t dead. 01:41 What is Moore’s Law? 03:08 How Intel will continue Moore’s Law. 06:22 Intels Competitors. 09:16 Last Words. – #intel #hardware #mooreslaw
Thieves are getting their hands on some quick and easy cash thanks to a new piece of equipment in town. Kiosks called EcoATM buy used phones. The company touts itself as reducing electronic waste and finding a way to reuse electronics through a simpler and safer way to sell devices. There are 5,000 machines located across the country, including several in northern Nevada. They’re located inside places like Walmart, grocery stores and malls.
A team of researchers affiliated with a large number of institutions in Japan has developed a vaccine that tricks the immune system into removing senescent cells. In their paper published in the journal Nature Aging, the group describes their vaccine, how it works and how effective it was when given to test mice.
Prior research has shown that part of the aging process is the development of senescent cells —cells that outlive their usefulness but fail to die naturally. Instead, they produce chemicals that can lead to inflammation, aging and a host of other ailments. Prior research has shown that senescence occurs when cells stop dividing. Prior research has also shown that senescent cells can lead to tumor growth in some instances and tumor suppression in others. Senescence also plays a role in tissue repair, and its impacts on the body vary depending on factors such as overall health and age. It is suspected that senescence is related to telomere erosion, and in some cases, environmental factors that lead to cell damage. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a vaccine that creates antibodies that attach to senescent cells, marking them for removal by white blood cells.
The team was able to create the vaccine after identifying a protein made in senescent cells but not in healthy active cells. That allowed them to develop a type of vaccine based on the amino acids in the protein. When injected, the vaccine incites the body to produce antibodies that bind only to senescent cells, and that sets off an immune response that involves sending white blood cells to destroy the senescent cells.