Lifeboat Foundation

Forget about Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and all the talk about a metaverse. The real future will be a world that is convenient and scary and fantastical — at least according to futurologists. As this year ends, here’s a glimpse at what life might be like … one day.

Facial recognition is already common for phones, but “In 30 years it’s quite possible that you will not use a key or even a credit card. You’ll use your face or iris to make purchases and open locks. Recognition will be that good,” said Martin Ford, author of “Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence will Transform Everything.”

“The scary thing, though, will be if someone hacks your biometric data. Right now you can call the bank to change your pin or cancel a credit card. But you can’t cancel your biometrics.”

We can add suggesting and proving mathematical theorems to the long list of what artificial intelligence is capable of: Mathematicians and AI experts have teamed up to demonstrate how machine learning can open up new avenues to explore in the field.

While mathematicians have been using computers to discover patterns for decades, the increasing power of machine learning means that these networks can work through huge swathes of data and identify patterns that haven’t been spotted before.

In a newly published study, a research team used artificial intelligence systems developed by DeepMind, the same company that has been deploying AI to solve tricky biology problems and improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, to unknot some long-standing math problems.

Continue reading “AI Is Discovering Patterns in Pure Mathematics That Have Never Been Seen Before” »

Ben Goertzel, founder of SingularityNET, sits down with Cryptographic Asset founder Justin O’Connell to discuss the crypto singularity at CoinAgenda 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada at The New York, New York Hotel & Casino.

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Graphene consists of a planar structure, with carbon atoms connected in a hexagonal shape that resembles a beehive. When graphene is reduced to several nanometers (nm) in size, it becomes a graphene quantum dot that exhibits fluorescent and semiconductor properties. Graphene quantum dots can be used in various applications as a novel material, including display screens, solar cells, secondary batteries, bioimaging, lighting, photocatalysis, and sensors. Interest in graphene quantum dots is growing, because recent research has demonstrated that controlling the proportion of heteroatoms (such as nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous) within the carbon structures of certain materials enhances their optical, electrical, and catalytic properties.

Graphene consists of a planar structure, with carbon atoms connected in a hexagonal shape that resembles a beehive. When graphene is reduced to several nanometers (nm) in size, it becomes a graphene quantum dot that exhibits fluorescent and semiconductor properties. Graphene quantum dots can be used in various applications as a novel material, including display screens, solar cells, secondary batteries, bioimaging, lighting, photocatalysis, and sensors. Interest in graphene quantum dots is growing, because recent research has demonstrated that controlling the proportion of heteroatoms (such as nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorous) within the carbon structures of certain materials enhances their optical, electrical, and catalytic properties.

The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Seok-Jin Yoon) reported that the research team led by Dr. Byung-Joon Moon and Dr. Sukang Bae of the Functional Composite Materials Research Center have developed a technique to precisely control the bonding structure of single heteroatoms in the graphene quantum dot, which is a zero-dimensional carbon nanomaterial, through simple chemical reaction control; and that they identified the relevant reaction mechanisms.

With the aim of controlling heteroatom incorporation within the graphene quantum dot, researchers have previously investigated using additives that introduce the heteroatom into the dot after the dot itself has already been synthesized. The dot then had to be purified further, so this method added several steps to the overall fabrication process. Another method that was studied involved the simultaneous use of multiple organic precursors (which are the main ingredients for dot synthesis), along with the additives that contain the heteroatom. However, these methods had significant disadvantages, including reduced crystallinity in the final product and lower overall reaction yield, since several additional purification steps had to be implemented. Furthermore, in order to obtain quantum dots with the chemical compositions desired by manufacturers, various reaction conditions, such as the proportion of additives, would have to be optimized.

Few developments have rocked the biotechnology world or generated as much buzz as the discovery of CRISPR-Cas systems, a breakthrough in gene editing recognized in 2020 with a Nobel Prize. But these systems that naturally occur in bacteria are limited because they can make only small tweaks to genes. In recent years, scientists discovered a different system in bacteria that might lead to even more powerful methods for gene editing, given its unique ability to insert genes or whole sections of DNA in a genome.

New research from The University of Texas at Austin dramatically expands the number of naturally occurring versions of this system, giving researchers a wealth of potential new tools for large-scale gene editing.

Other scientists had identified clusters of genes that use CRISPR to insert themselves into different places in an organism’s genome, dubbed CRISPR-associated transposons (CASTs). Earlier work has shown they can be used to add an entire gene or large DNA sequence to the genome, at least for bacteria.

There’s a big difference between the notions of ‘false vacuum’ and ‘true vacuum’ states. Here’s why we don’t want to live in the former.

Yutu-2 snapped a fuzzy view of something interesting on the horizon.

When it comes to quarks, those of the third generation (the top and bottom) are certainly the most fascinating and intriguing. Metaphorically, we would classify their social life as quite secluded, as they do not mix much with their relatives of the first and second generation. However, as the proper aristocrats of the particle physics world, they enjoy privileged and intense interactions with the Higgs field; it is the intensity of this interaction that eventually determines things like the quantum stability of our Universe. Their social life may also have a dark side, as they could be involved in interactions with dark matter.

This special status of third-generation quarks makes them key players in the search for phenomena not foreseen by the Standard Model. A new result released by the ATLAS Collaboration focuses on models of new phenomena that predict an enhanced yield of collision events with bottom quarks and invisible particles. A second new ATLAS search considers the possible presence of added tau leptons. Together, these results set strong constraints on the production of partners of the b-quarks and of possible dark-matter particles.