Lifeboat Foundation

How do you define consciousness?

Some theories are even duking it out in a mano-a-mano test by imaging the brains of volunteers as they perform different tasks in clinical test centers across the globe.

But unlocking the neural basis of consciousness doesn’t have to be confrontational. Rather, theories can be integrated, wrote the authors, who were part of the Human Brain Project —a massive European endeavor to map and understand the brain—and specialize in decoding brain signals related to consciousness.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Working Towards a Unified Theory of Consciousness” »

Quantum tunneling can explain radioactive decay and also serve applications like microscopy and memory storage.

From UC berkeley, stanford, carnegie mellon, & google deepmind.

Octo.

An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy.

Continue reading “Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy” »

From 13 billion light-years across the gulf of space and time, we’ve just caught a glimpse of the most distant black hole merger discovered yet.

Using JWST, an international team of astronomers has discovered two supermassive black holes, and their attendant galaxies, coming together in a colossal cosmic collision, just 740 million years after the Big Bang.

Continue reading “JWST Spots Most Distant Black Hole Merger Yet” »

From Microsoft.

Towards Modular LLMs by Building and Reusing a Library of LoRAs https://huggingface.co/papers/2405.

The growing number of parameter-efficient adaptations of a base large language model (LLM) calls for studying whether we can reuse such trained adapters to improve performance for…

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The International Energy Agency predicts that artificial intelligence will consume 10 times as much energy in 2026 as it did in 2023.

Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.

Black holes are intriguing astronomical objects that have a gravitational pull so strong that it prevents any object and even light from escaping. While black holes have been the topic of numerous astrophysical studies, their origins and underlying physics remain largely a mystery.

Scientists have discovered that a “single atomic defect” in a layered 2D material can hold onto quantum information for microseconds at room temperature, underscoring the potential of 2D materials in advancing quantum technologies.

The defect, found by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and Cambridge using a thin material called hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), demonstrates spin coherence—a property where an electronic spin can retain quantum information —under ambient conditions. They also found that these spins can be controlled with light.

Up until now, only a few solid-state materials have been able to do this, marking a significant step forward in quantum technologies.

The NA64 experiment started operations at CERN’s SPS North Area in 2016. Its aim is to search for unknown particles from a hypothetical “dark sector.” For these searches, NA64 directs an electron beam onto a fixed target. Researchers then look for unknown dark sector particles produced by collisions between the beam’s electrons and the target’s atomic nuclei.