Google has built a quantum computer that makes fewer errors as it is scaled up, and this may pave the way for machines that could solve useful real-world problems for the first time.
Learning and a spectrum of other behavioral competencies allow organisms to rapidly adapt to dynamically changing environmental variations. The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks to understand what systems, besides ones with complex brains, exhibit these capacities. Here, we tested predictions of a general computational framework based on the free energy principle in neuroscience but applied to aneural biological process as established previously, by demonstrating and manipulating pattern recognition in a simple aneural organism, the green algae Volvox. Our studies of the adaptive photoresponse in Volvox reveal that aneural organisms can distinguish between patterned and randomized inputs and indicate how this is achieved mechanistically.
Independent advisers to the US Food and Drug Administration are meeting this week to discuss the regulations, ethics and possibilities of creating an artificial womb to increase the chances that extremely premature babies would survive — and without long-term health problems.
Last month I was involved in a fantastic conference: the 26th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. I think it went really well, and some parts got a fair amount of mainstream coverage, with varying degrees of accuracy.
Clarke’s three laws
Posted in futurism
As crazy or stupid as it may sound to some people there are some dreams and ideas I will never Give up no matter how impossible it may seem now.
One account stated that Clarke’s laws were developed after the editor of his works in French started numbering the author’s assertions. [ 2 ] All three laws appear in Clarke’s essay “Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination”, first published in Profiles of the Future (1962); [ 3 ] however, they were not all published at the same time. Clarke’s first law was proposed in the 1962 edition of the essay, as “Clarke’s Law” in Profiles of the Future.
The second law is offered as a simple observation in the same essay but its status as Clarke’s second law was conferred by others. It was initially a derivative of the first law and formally became Clarke’s second law where the author proposed the third law in the 1973 revision of Profiles of the Future, which included an acknowledgement. [ 4 ] It was also here that Clarke wrote about the third law in these words: “As three laws were good enough for Newton, I have modestly decided to stop there”
Sleep, fasting, exercise, green porridge, black coffee, a healthy social life …
There is an abundance of advice out there on how to live a good, long life. Researchers are working hard to determine why some people live longer than others, and how we get the most out of our increasingly long lives.
One startup is planning to place a nuclear reactor one mile below the Earth’s surface to generate cleaner energy.
A newly developed transistor device has shown exceptional levels of resilience in tests, performing so well, in fact, that it promises to transform the electronics and gadgets we make use of each day.
These tiny toggles are essential in just about every modern day electronic device, involved in storing data and processing information in a binary ‘on’ or ‘off’ state, switching back and forth multiple times a second.
Thanks to its remarkable combination of speed, size, and resilience to wear, this latest design potentially represents a huge upgrade for consumer devices like phones and laptops, as well as the data centers that store all of our information in the cloud.
With mechanical recycling, “if you mix the sandwich bag and the milk jug together and then try to remake an object from that, you can’t make a very good milk jug and you can’t make a very good sandwich bag,” he said. “We’re trying to bring the plastics back to the chemicals from which they’re made in the first place,” Hartwig said.
The researchers use a catalyst, a component of a chemical reaction that makes it go faster, to vaporize both polyethylene and polypropylene plastics — two of the largest volumes of plastics in existence — transforming the solid waste into gases.
The polymers are reduced to their chemical precursors, which can then be reconstructed. In a press release, the university said the process brings “a circular economy for plastics one step closer to reality.”
By the ‘strength’ of a material, we usually mean the degree to which it can withstand deformation by an external force. So, the strongest materials are generally those with high densities because the closer the constituent atoms are, the greater the resistance they have to further compression.