Lifeboat Foundation

Carbon can be arranged in a number of configurations. When each of its atoms is bonded to three other carbon atoms, it’s relatively soft graphite. Add just one more bond and it becomes one of the hardest minerals known, diamond. Chuck 60 carbon atoms together in a soccerball shape and boom, buckyballs.

But a ring of carbon atoms, where each atom is bonded to just two others, and nothing else? That’s eluded scientists for 50 years. Their best attempts have resulted in a gaseous carbon ring that quickly dissipated.

So it’s a pretty big deal that a team of researchers, from Oxford University and IBM Research, has now created a stable carbon ring.

The Killers, the short film about cryonics shot by Russian director Vlad Kozlov, who works in the USA, won a Best Director prize at the 37th Flickers: Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIIFF).

RIIFF is one of the most important international film festivals supporting independent filmmakers. The festival has been held annually since 1982 during the second week of August and lasts six days. Its main goal is to discover new talents of independent cinema. More than 5,426 independent films selected from more than 68,000 received applications were presented to the public during the time of existence of the festival. In 2019, 321 films from 51 countries were presented at the festival, which was held from August 6 to August 11 in Rhode Island, USA.

Cryonics as the central element of the plot was shown in a film of this level for the first time. The main roles in the film are played by world-famous actors such as Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks) and Franco Nero (Django). The role of Max, the main character, was played by a young and promising American actor Jeff DuJardin, who had previously worked with Vlad Kozlov on the set of Silent Life, the film about the star of silent film Rudolf Valentino. The producers of the film are Vlad Kozlov, Natalia Dar, Yury Ponomarev, Dmitry Pristankov and David Roberson.

Hot Chips 31 is underway this week, with presentations from a number of companies. Intel has decided to use the highly technical conference to discuss a variety of products, including major sessions focused on the company’s AI division. AI and machine learning are viewed as critical areas for the future of computing, and while Intel has tackled these fields with features like DL Boost on Xeon, it’s also building dedicated accelerators for the market.

The NNP-I 1000 (Spring Hill) and the NNP-T (Spring Crest) are intended for two different markets, inference and training. “Training” is the work of creating and teaching a neural network how to process data in the first place. Inference refers to the task of actually running the now-trained neural network model. It requires far more computational horsepower to train a neural network than it does to apply the results of that training to real-world categorization or classification tasks.

Intel’s Spring Crest NNP-T is designed to scale out to an unprecedented degree, with a balance between tensor processing capability, on-package HBM, networking capability, and on-die SRAMs to boost processing performance. The underlying chip is built by TSMC — yes, TSMC — on 16nm, with a 680mm die size and a 1200mm interposer. The entire assembly is 27 billion transistors with 4x8GB stacks of HBM2-2400 memory, 24 Tensor Processing Clusters (TPCs) with a core frequency of up to 1.1GHz. Sixty-four lanes of SerDes HSIO provides 3.58Tbps of aggregate bandwidth and the card supports an x16 PCIe 4.0 connection. Power consumption is expected to be between 150-250W. The chip was built using TSMC’s advanced CoWoS packaging (Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate), and carries 60MB of cache distributed across its various cores. CoWoS competes with Intel’s EMIB, but Intel has decided to build this hardware at TSMC rather than using its own foundries. Performance is estimated at up to 119 TOPS.

Today, we want to spotlight a recent study showing that boosting nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) levels in mice prevents age-related hearing loss.

What is β-Lapachone?

β-Lapachone is a quinone-containing compound that was originally isolated from the lapacho tree in South America. It is worth noting that this tree has been used as a herbal medicine for a number of South and Central American indigenous peoples and that the bark of the tree is sometimes used for making a herbal tea called taheebo.

The semi-annual slow-slip event means dozens of tremors under Puget Sound — and a slightly higher risk of a Cascadia megaquake.

At first, the rough patch on the roof of Mike’s mouth didn’t seem like anything to worry about. It didn’t hurt. But it didn’t go away. His dentist referred him to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, who did a biopsy, which was inconclusive.

In the same decade when gravitational waves and a neutron star merger have been observed, astronomers have now observed what they believe to be the first detection of a black hole swallowing a neutron star.

Last Wednesday, gravitational wave detectors in Italy and the US, called LIGO and Virgo, detected telltale ripples in space and time, traced to an event that happened 8,550 million trillion kilometers away from Earth.

Astronomers are analyzing the data from the detection to confirm the size of the two objects that came together to form such cataclysmic ripples, but the event is likely a black hole eating a neutron star.

High in the Himalayas of India, amid the snow-capped peaks, nestles a mystery. Roopkund Lake is a shallow body of water filled with human bones — the skeletons of hundreds of individuals. It’s these that give the lake its other name, Skeleton Lake, and no one knows how the remains came to be there.

One hypothesis is that some catastrophe, a single event such as a powerful storm, had befallen a large group of people. But DNA analysis of 38 of the skeletons has turned that idea on its head.

The remains appear to come from distinct groups of people from as far as the Mediterranean, and they arrived at the lake several times over a 1,000-year span.

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[Photo: courtesy of Tutanota].