Circle Oct. 20 on your calendars.
The OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to pull off NASA’s first-ever asteroid-sampling operation on Oct. 20, snagging precious dirt and gravel from a carbon-rich space rock called Bennu.
Physicists at Chalmers, together with colleagues in Russia and Poland, have managed to achieve ultrastrong coupling between light and matter at room temperature. The discovery is of importance for fundamental research and might pave the way for advances within, for example, light sources, nanomachinery, and quantum technology.
A set of two coupled oscillators is one of the most fundamental and abundant systems in physics. It is a very general toy model that describes a plethora of systems ranging from guitar strings, acoustic resonators, and the physics of children’s swings, to molecules and chemical reactions, from gravitationally bound systems to quantum cavity electrodynamics. The degree of coupling between the two oscillators is an important parameter that mostly determines the behavior of the coupled system. However, the question is rarely asked about the upper limit by which two pendula can couple to each other – and what consequences such coupling can have.
The newly presented results, published in Nature Communications, offer a glimpse into the domain of the so-called ultrastrong coupling, wherein the coupling strength becomes comparable to the resonant frequency of the oscillators. The coupling in this work is realized through interaction between light and electrons in a tiny system consisting of two gold mirrors separated by a small distance and plasmonic gold nanorods. On a surface that is a hundred times smaller than the end of a human hair, the researchers have shown that it is possible to create controllable ultrastrong interaction between light and matter at ambient conditions – that is, at room temperature and atmospheric pressure.
But only in the cloud for now.
Nvidia’s Arm wants to win the cloud with per-thread performance.
Circa 2019
OXFORD, Miss. – The University of Mississippi has been issued its fourth patent for a product that could prevent the painful itching and rash due to exposure to poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac.
The compound is based on research conducted in the UM School of Pharmacy and at ElSohly Laboratories Inc. Hapten Sciences, a Memphis-based biopharmaceutical company, obtained a worldwide, exclusive license for the technology from the university in 2010 and has conducted extensive preclinical and clinical development work since then.
Continue reading “University Obtains New Patent for Poison Ivy, Oak Vaccine” »
SinoVac has developed one of the four Chinese vaccines in last-stage human trials as Beijing throws open doors to new production facility.
Tesla’s announcement of a $25,000 car in the next 3 years would mean you could buy a mass-market premium EV for the same price as a regular VW Golf. So why would you purchase the fossil fuel vehicle anymore?
There’s an emerging industry thought to be only science fiction not too long ago that’s close to becoming a reality: space tourism.
The space tourism market has remained nascent for the past two decades, but a handful of companies are looking to change that.
Tesla has purchased additional land at its Giga Texas production facility, reports indicated late Friday.
Deed records from Travis County, Texas, indicate that Tesla has purchased an additional 381-acre piece of land that sits directly adjacent to the 2,100-acre site that the electric automaker purchased earlier in 2020.
The Statesman, a Texas-based news outlet, stated that the additional land was obtained by Tesla on Harold Green Road, which is the same location as its currently-owned piece of property. The report said:
The explosive successes of AI in the last decade or so are typically chalked up to lots of data and lots of computing power. But benchmarks also play a crucial role in driving progress—tests that researchers can pit their AI against to see how advanced it is. For example, ImageNet, a public data set of 14 million images, sets a target for image recognition. MNIST did the same for handwriting recognition and GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) for natural-language processing, leading to breakthrough language models like GPT-3.
A fixed target soon gets overtaken. ImageNet is being updated and GLUE has been replaced by SuperGLUE, a set of harder linguistic tasks. Still, sooner or later researchers will report that their AI has reached superhuman levels, outperforming people in this or that challenge. And that’s a problem if we want benchmarks to keep driving progress.
So Facebook is releasing a new kind of test that pits AIs against humans who do their best to trip them up. Called Dynabench, the test will be as hard as people choose to make it.
Summary: Non-invasive brain stimulation technology may enhance the human system’s ability for rapid and adaptive decision making.
Source: US Army Research Laboratory
Future technology may be able to monitor and modify the brain to produce enhanced team performance, while increasing the efficiency and accuracy of decisions.
