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In fact, in a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science, researchers showed that AI tasked with maximizing returns is actually disproportionately likely to pick an unethical strategy in fairly general conditions. Fortunately, they also showed it’s possible to predict the circumstances in which this is likely to happen, which could guide efforts to modify AI to avoid it.

The fact that AI is likely to pick unethical strategies seems intuitive. There are plenty of unethical business practices that can reap huge rewards if you get away with them, not least because few of your competitors dare use them. There’s a reason companies often bend or even break the rules despite the reputational and regulatory backlash they could face.

Those potential repercussions should be of considerable concern to companies deploying AI solutions, though. While efforts to build ethical principles into AI are already underway, they are nascent and in many contexts there are a vast number of potential strategies to choose from. Often these systems make decisions with little or no human input and it can be hard to predict the circumstances under which they are likely to choose an unethical approach.

After more than a year in a clay-rich region, Curiosity is making a mile-long journey around some deep sand so that it can explore higher up Mount Sharp.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has started a road trip that will continue through the summer across roughly a mile (1.6 kilometers) of terrain. By trip’s end, the rover will be able to ascend to the next section of the 3-mile-tall Martian (5-kilometer-tall) mountain it’s been exploring since 2014, searching for conditions that may have supported ancient microbial life.

Located on the floor of Gale Crater, Mount Sharp is composed of sedimentary layers that built up over time. Each layer helps tell the story about how Mars changed from being more Earth-like — with lakes, streams and a thicker atmosphere — to the nearly-airless, freezing desert it is today.

Wiring a New Path to Scalable Quantum Computing

Last year, Google produced a 53-qubit quantum computer that could perform a specific calculation significantly faster than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Like most of today’s largest quantum computers, this system boasts tens of qubits—the quantum counterparts to bits, which encode information in conventional computers.

To make larger and more useful systems, most of today’s prototypes will have to overcome the challenges of stability and scalability. The latter will require increasing the density of signaling and wiring, which is hard to do without degrading the system’s stability. I believe a new circuit-wiring scheme developed over the last three years by RIKEN’s Superconducting Quantum Electronics Research Team, in collaboration with other institutes, opens the door to scaling up to 100 or more qubits within the next decade. Here, I discuss how.

Researchers from the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Laboratory at Michigan State University (MSU) have taken a major step toward a theoretical first-principles description of neutrinoless double-beta decay. Observing this yet-unconfirmed rare nuclear process would have important implications for particle physics and cosmology. Theoretical simulations are essential to planning and evaluating proposed experiments. The research team presented their results in an article recently published in Physical Review Letters.

FRIB theorists Jiangming Yao, research associate and the lead author of the study, Roland Wirth, research associate, and Heiko Hergert, assistant professor, are members of a topical collaboration on fundamental symmetries and . The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Office of Nuclear Physics is funding the topical collaboration. The theorists joined forces with fellow topical collaboration members from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and external collaborators from the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. Their work marks an important milestone toward a theoretical calculation of neutrinoless double-beta decay rates with fully controlled and quantified uncertainties.

The authors developed the In-Medium Generator-Coordinate Method (IM-GCM). It is a novel approach for modeling the interactions between nucleons that is capable of describing the complex structure of the candidate nuclei for this decay. The first application of IM-GCM to the computation of the neutrinoless double beta decay rate for the nucleus of calcium-48 sets the stage for explorations of the other candidates with controllable theoretical uncertainty.

There are about 33,400 active-duty service members in the Air Force and Space Force, sponsoring more than 55,000 family members enrolled in EFMP.

Kimberly Schuler, the Air Force’s chief for humanitarian, EFMP and expedited transfer reassignments, said in the release that consolidating those components will mean families won’t have to work through a complex process and deal with multiple organizations to get one request answered.

“Your voices were heard,” Schuler said. “Our goal is to improve the customer experience of our airmen and their families during challenging times.”

Charles Goulding and Ryan Donley of R&D Tax Savers discuss 3D printing as it impacts chocolateering.

Chocolate has been around for millennia now, dating as far back as early 1750 B.C., presumably in the area of the Gulf Coast of Vera Cruz where cocoa beverages or chocolate drinks were used in ceremonies by pre-Olmec peoples. Evidence suggests cacao pods may have even been used in alcoholic beverages as early as 1400 B.C. Today, the cacao bean has evolved to encompass a $50 billion chocolate industry worldwide that consists of edible chocolate confections being brought to mass markets.

There are about 33,400 active-duty service members in the Air Force and Space Force, sponsoring more than 55,000 family members enrolled in EFMP.

Kimberly Schuler, the Air Force’s chief for humanitarian, EFMP and expedited transfer reassignments, said in the release that consolidating those components will mean families won’t have to work through a complex process and deal with multiple organizations to get one request answered.

“Your voices were heard,” Schuler said. “Our goal is to improve the customer experience of our airmen and their families during challenging times.”