Lifeboat Foundation

Long before the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment takes its first measurements in an effort to expand our understanding of the universe, a prototype for one of the experiment’s detectors is blazing new trails in neutrino detection technology.

DUNE, currently under construction, will be a massive experiment that spans more than 800 miles. A beam of neutrinos originating at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will pass through a particle detector located on the Fermilab site, then travel through the ground to a huge detector at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota.

The near detector consists of a set of particle detection systems. One of them, known as the ND-LAr, will feature a liquid-argon time projection chamber to record particle tracks; it will be placed inside a container full of liquid argon. When a neutrino collides with one of the particles that make up argon atoms, the collision generates more particles. As each particle created in the collision travels out of the nucleus, it interacts with nearby atoms, stripping off some of their electrons, leading to the production of detectable signals in the form of light and charge.

Supposedly only til next month, Jan. 2024. But, it is why we absolutely must keep heat on full acceleration of AI. There is a clear camp wants to stop it, turn it off and walk it a decade backwards. And that is unacceptable.

A new report by The Information says Google has pushed back the launch of its next-gen AI, Gemini. The company was reportedly planning to introduce the new foundational model in events scheduled for next week, but has quietly delayed it until January after finding it needed to work on its responses to non-English queries.

Humans already work alongside robots in industries such as manufacturing. Now, for knowledge workers, the threat of AI replacement is coming faster than they imagined.

A researcher has just finished writing a scientific paper. She knows her work could benefit from another perspective. Did she overlook something? Or perhaps there’s an application of her research she hadn’t thought of. A second set of eyes would be great, but even the friendliest of collaborators might not be able to spare the time to read all the required background publications to catch up.

Kevin Yager—leader of the electronic nanomaterials group at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—has imagined how recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could aid scientific brainstorming and ideation. To accomplish this, he has developed a chatbot with knowledge in the kinds of science he’s been engaged in.

Rapid advances in AI and ML have given way to programs that can generate creative text and useful software code. These general-purpose chatbots have recently captured the public imagination. Existing chatbots—based on large, diverse language models—lack detailed knowledge of scientific sub-domains. By leveraging a document-retrieval method, Yager’s bot is knowledgeable in areas of nanomaterial science that other bots are not.

A small team of bio-scientists from the University of Rostock’s Institute for Biosciences and Nuremberg Zoo’s Behavioral Ecology and Conservation Lab, both in Germany, has found evidence that bottlenose dolphins can sense electric fields. In their study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, the group tested the ability of two captive bottlenose dolphins to sense a small electric field.

Many creatures in the animal kingdom are able to sense an electric field—some sharks and the platypus, for example—but only one type of marine mammal has been found to have the ability: the Guiana dolphin. In this new effort, the research team wondered if other types of dolphins have the ability.

They chose to study bottlenose dolphins for two reasons: a pair of were available for testing at the nearby Nuremberg Zoo, and prior research suggested that neural cells in the vibrissal crypts situated along the dolphins’ snouts strongly resembled the electric-field detectors observed in sharks.

Amazon announced today they have bought 3 Falcon 9 launches to deliver their Project Kuiper internet satellites to low Earth orbit in mid-2025.

This wouldn’t be the first time SpaceX has launched a competitor satellite as they have now launched 4 times for one of their other competitors, OneWeb, with a total of 136 satellites delivered to orbit.

Amazon recently made the decision to move up the launch of their first Project Kuiper satellites from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket which has faced numerous delays to an Atlas V that launched on October 6th.

The hack, which provided unauthorized access to ‘files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry,’ impacted 0.1% of 23andMe’s users worldwide.

Order vs Disorder, Jordan Peterson’s Yin Yang analogy, & Stephen Wolfram’s 4 classes of cellular automata are explored. The edge of chaos is the phase transition zone between order and disorder which is found across a broad range of complex systems. We discuss Norman Packard, Christopher Langton, John Beggs, Stuart Kauffman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and M. Mitchell Waldrop. Wolfram’s Rule 110 and John Conway’s Game of Life, both Turing complete, make appearances.

0:00 Intro.
0:59 Lambda & Wolfram’s 4 Classes.
3:32 Criticality, Avalanches, & John Beggs.
4:44 Homework? More like FUNwork!
5:08 Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
5:35 Jordan Peterson (Yin-Yang)
9:39 M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity.

Continue reading “Edge of Chaos Theory | Cellular Automata, Wolfram, & Psychology” »

The world’s largest collection of full human genomes has just gone live.

The whole genomes of 500,000 people in the UK Biobank will help researchers to probe our genetic code for links to disease.