Astronomers possibly solve the mystery of how the enormous Oort cloud, with over 100 billion comet-like objects, was formed.
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Private space stations are coming. Will they be better than their predecessors?
Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University
A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.
These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0,” where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.
Breakthrough Proof Clears Path for Quantum AI — Overcoming Threat of “Barren Plateaus”
Novel theorem demonstrates convolutional neural networks can always be trained on quantum computers, overcoming threat of ‘barren plateaus’ in optimization problems.
Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as “barren plateaus” has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.
“The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not,” said Marco Cerezo, coauthor of the paper titled “Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks,” published recently by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing 0, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. “We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters.”
Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about… itself
But wait, should we believe it?
An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.
A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” The AI, it seems, agreed.
“AI will never be ethical,” argued the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model, which was notably trained on Wikipedia, Reddit, and millions of English-language news articles published between 2016 and 2019. “It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad.”
Never before seen state of matter could advance quantum tech
Physicists from Harvard University have documented a new state of matter which could significantly advance quantum technology, according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science earlier this month.
The state of matter they found is called quantum spin liquid, which has special properties that produce long-range quantum entanglement — a phenomenon in which particles’ states are connected even when the particles are separated by distance.
Quantum spin liquid was first predicted by physicist Philip W. Anderson about 50 years ago, in 1973, but has never been observed in experiments.
Remember the Sony rootkit scandal? It was almost much worse
That time Rootkitting for Dummies might as well have been in Microsoft’s Plus! Pack.