Lifeboat Foundation

On Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma took the stage at the World AI Conference in Shanghai to debate artificial intelligence and its implications for humanity. As expected, Ma took a far more optimistic stance than Musk. Ma encouraged people to have faith in humanity, our creativity, and the future. “I don’t think artificial intelligence is a threat,” he said, to which Musk replied, “I don’t know, man, that’s like, famous last words.” An edited transcript of the discussion follows.

Elon Musk: What are we supposed to say? Just things about AI perhaps? Yeah. Okay. Let’s see.

Jack Ma: The AI, right? Okay, great.

Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.) Science, cool facts, mind, emotion, breakthrough, science.

Their stories are similar to those told in dozens if not hundreds of books and in thousands of interviews with “NDErs,” or “experiencers,” as they call themselves, in the past few decades. Though details and descriptions vary across cultures, the overall tenor of the experience is remarkably similar. Western near-death experiences are the most studied. Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body; spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm; meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God; encountering long-lost relatives or friends; recalling scenes from one’s life; feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love; and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body.

The world is seeing rapid technological advancements and, with that, increasingly wealthy technology titans wanting to invest in cutting-edge ventures. But those things aren’t necessarily new, she says.

Academic Amy Fletcher says the meaning of life is that it stops. So why is Silicon Valley so stuck on subverting that?

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe.

The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed since the Big Bang. However, the two best methods used to measure the Hubble constant do not agree, suggesting our understanding of the structure and history of the universe – called the ‘standard cosmological model’ – may be wrong.

There was, writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science, a disturbance in the Force: “Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.

This European Southern Observatory animation was created to celebrate the opening of the new ESO Supernova Planetarium in Germany. It begins from the home of the new facility in Garching and zooms our to the “End of the Universe”, according to the ESO.

Music: inspiring adventure cinematic background by maryna.

Solar system.

Twenty years ago, NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory beamed back its stunning “First Light” image of Cassiopeia A – but it’s still been checking back in every now and then.

Here’s how the supernova remnant has shifted and flowed in the two decades since go.nasa.gov/30AaeLr

Truthfully, it has been some time since Moore’s law, the propensity for processors to double in transistor count every two years, has been entirely accurate. The fundamental properties of silicon are beginning to limit development and will significantly curtail future performance gains, yet with 50 years and billions invested, it seems preposterous that any ‘beyond-silicon’ technology could power the computers of tomorrow. And yet, Nano might do just that, by harnessing its ability to be designed and built like a regular silicon wafer, while using carbon to net theoretical triple performance at one-third the power.

Nano began life much like all processors, a 150mm wafer with a pattern carved out of it by a regular chip fab. Dipped into a solution of carbon nanotubes bound together like microscopic spaghetti, it re-emerged with its semi-conductive carbon nanotubes stuck in the pattern of transistors and logic gates already etched on it. It then undergoes a process called ‘RINSE,’ removal of incubated nanotubes through selective exfoliation, by being coated with a polymer then dipped in a solvent. This has the effect of reducing the CNT layer to being just one tube, removing the large clumps of CNTs that stick together over 250 times more effectively than previous methods.

One of the challenges facing CNT processors has been difficulty in separating N-type and P-type transistors, which are “on” for 1 bit and “off” for 0 bit and the reverse, respectively. The difference is important for binary computing, and to perfect it, the researchers introduced ‘MIXED,’ metal interface engineering crossed with electrostatic doping. Occurring after RINSE, small platinum or titanium components are added to each transistor, then the wafer is coated in an oxide which acts as a sealant, improving performance. After that, Nano was just about done.

By Michael Le Page

The mimivirus is so enormous it has its own kind of CRISPR-like immune system to defend against the smaller viruses that attack it. A team in France has confirmed how it works by transferring the entire system to a bacterium and tweaking it to destroy a different target.