Astronomers still don’t know what causes fast radio bursts, but they’re starting to use them to illuminate the space between galaxies.
An X-ray burst (XRB) is a violent explosion that occurs on the surface of a neutron star as it absorbs material from a companion star. During this absorption, increasing temperatures and densities on the surface of the neutron star ignite a cascade of thermonuclear reactions.
A new peptide-carrying magnetic nanoparticle described in Science Advances has resolved both biological and behavioral symptoms in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.
A short peptide disassembles stable pathogenic tau fibrils of Alzheimer’s disease.
Google Research and Google’s AI research lab, DeepMind, have detailed the impressive reach of Med-Gemini, a family of advanced AI models specialized in medicine. It’s a huge advancement in clinical diagnostics with massive real-world potential.
Alembic unveils groundbreaking AI system that eliminates hallucinations in enterprise data analysis, attracting Fortune 500 interest and analyst praise.
Summary: People often view AI-generated answers to ethical questions as superior to those from humans. In the study, participants rated responses from AI and humans without knowing the source, and overwhelmingly favored the AI’s responses in terms of virtuousness, intelligence, and trustworthiness.
This modified moral Turing test, inspired by ChatGPT and similar technologies, indicates that AI might convincingly pass a moral Turing test by exhibiting complex moral reasoning. The findings highlight the growing influence of AI in decision-making processes and the potential implications for societal trust in technology.
UNSW Sydney engineers have utilised sound waves to cut the time it takes to make a cold brew coffee from many hours down to mere minutes.
Fans of cold brew coffee often rave about the smoother, less acidic and less bitter taste compared to a regular hot brew.
There’s just one major problem – it takes anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to fully steep the grounds and allow the flavours to slowly be extracted using only cold water.
Because I am often introduced as a “professional skeptic,” people feel compelled to challenge me with stories about highly improbable events. The implication is that if I cannot offer a satisfactory natural explanation for that particular event, the general principle of supernaturalism is preserved. A common story is the one about having a dream or thought about the death of a friend or relative and then receiving a phone call five minutes later about the unexpected death of that very person.
I cannot always explain such specific incidents, but a principle of probability called the Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials. Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.
In their delightful book Debunked! (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), CERN physicist Georges Charpak and University of Nice physicist Henri Broch show how the application of probability theory to such events is enlightening. In the case of death premonitions, suppose that you know of 10 people a year who die and that you think about each of those people once a year. One year contains 105,120 five-minute intervals during which you might think about each of the 10 people, a probability of one out of 10,512 — certainly an improbable event. Yet there are 295 million Americans. Assume, for the sake of our calculation, that they think like you. That makes 1/10,512 × 295,000,000 = 28,063 people a year, or 77 people a day for whom this improbable premonition becomes probable.
