Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

A scientist who wrote a leading textbook on artificial intelligence has said experts are “spooked” by their own success in the field, comparing the advance of AI to the development of the atom bomb.

Prof Stuart Russell, the founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, said most experts believed that machines more intelligent than humans would be developed this century, and he called for international treaties to regulate the development of the technology.

Read more | >

In 1,993 deep underground at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, a few flashes of light inside a bus-size tank of oil kicked off a detective story that is yet to reach its conclusion.

The Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) was searching for bursts of radiation created by neutrinos, the lightest and most elusive of all known elementary particles. “Much to our amazement, that’s what we saw,” said Bill Louis, one of the experiment’s leaders.

The problem was that they saw too many. Theorists had postulated that neutrinos might oscillate between types as they fly along — a hypothesis that explained various astronomical observations. LSND had set out to test this idea by aiming a beam of muon neutrinos, one of the three known types, toward the oil tank, and counting the number of electron neutrinos that arrived there. Yet Louis and his team detected far more electron neutrinos arriving in the tank than the simple theory of neutrino oscillations predicted.

Read more | >

Quantum entanglement—or what Albert Einstein once referred to as “spooky action at a distance”— occurs when two quantum particles are connected to each other, even when millions of miles apart. Any observation of one particle affects the other as if they were communicating with each other. When this entanglement involves photons, interesting possibilities emerge, including entangling the photons’ frequencies, the bandwidth of which can be controlled.

Read more | >

An international team of astrophysicists from South Africa, the UK, France and the US have found large variations in the brightness of light seen from around one of the closest black holes in our Galaxy, 9,600 light-years from Earth, which they conclude is caused by a huge warp in its accretion disc.

This object, MAXI J1820+070, erupted as a new X-ray transient in March 2018 and was discovered by a Japanese X-ray telescope onboard the International Space Station. These transients, systems that exhibit violent outbursts, are binary stars, consisting of a low-mass star, similar to our Sun and a much more compact object, which can be a white dwarf 0 neutron star 0 or black hole. In this case, MAXI J1820+070 contains a black hole that is at least 8 times the mass of our Sun.

The first findings have now been published in the international highly ranked journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, whose lead author is Dr. Jessymol Thomas, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO).

Read more | >

A “perfect storm” of several crises, such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, mean many nations are “knocking on famine’s door,” Beasley said.

A small group of ultra-wealthy individuals could help solve world hunger with just a fraction of their net worth, says the director of the United Nations’ World Food Programme.

Billionaires need to “step up now, on a one-time basis”, said David Beasley in an interview on CNN’s Connect the World with Becky Anderson that aired Tuesday — citing specifically the world’s two richest men, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

“$6 billion to help 42 million people that are literally going to die if we don’t reach them. It’s not complicated,” he added.

Continue reading “2% of Elon Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity organization” | >