Lifeboat Foundation

Since 2018 the Zwicky Transient Facility, an international astronomical collaboration based at the Palomar Observatory in California, has scanned the entire sky every two to three nights. As part of this mission, the ZTF’s Bright Transient Survey has been counting and cataloging supernovae—flashes of light in the sky that are the telltale signs of stars dying in spectacular explosions.

On Dec. 4, ZTF researchers—including astronomers at the University of Washington—announced that they have identified more than 10,000 of these stellar events, the largest number ever identified by an astronomical survey.

Continue reading “More than 10,000 supernovae counted in stellar census” »

Google Quantum AI announced that it is moving past the Sycamore era and taking another leap down its roadmap with the introduction of the 105-qubit Willow, a new quantum chip that has achieved a milestone in computational power and error correction, marking a major step toward large-scale, commercially viable quantum computing.

The team, which published their findings in Nature, is also eyeing a quantum device that overcomes the limitations of errors and offers real-world solutions to tough problems, the ultimate destination as they progress along their roadmap.

“The mission of the Google quantum AI team is to build quantum computing for otherwise unsolvable problems,” said Hartmut Neven, a vice president of engineering at Google and founder and manager of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab, at a recent roundtable about the new milestone.” So what problems do we have in mind? The first applications will be modeling and understanding systems where quantum effects are important. So that’s the case for common drug discovery, understanding and designing nuclear fusion reactors, bringing down the enormous energy costs of fertilizer production. But it then extends to multiple other areas, such as quantum machine learning.”

Researchers developed CrystaLLM, an AI model predicting crystal structures without traditional physics-based simulations. By analyzing millions of existing structures, it predicts realistic arrangements of atoms, even for unfamiliar materials.

Satellite technology is impressive. But scientists fear there might be too many filling up our atmosphere. Here’s why.

Honda claims its future EVs will even go as far as 776 miles on a full charge after 2040. There is one big issue, though.

Montreal-based Acrylic Robotics is utilizing a robot’s arm to paint fine art on canvas using AI software that emulates the actual painter’s brush strokes.

The startup showcased its technology with demos at AWS re: Invent, Amazon’s cloud service conference held in Las Vegas, where an AI robot dutifully worked on a painting, or “Auragraph,” live. Holding a brush, it would carefully dip into the different pools of acrylic paint below and then position the brush to apply a stroke at just the right spot.

In a sense, it felt a little like watching an automated assembly, only in a very obvious artistic context. Acrylic Robotics is trying to meld the worlds of artificial intelligence, engineering, robotics and art into a practical form of production. The idea is not to just produce replicas of an artist’s pieces, but to also bring digital creations to canvas without resorting to simple prints. At the same time, the company’s ethical approach is to ensure artists get paid for what they create.

The world’s first urban wind turbine designed by AI has been unveiled in the UK.

Called the Birmingham Blade, the turbine is jointly developed by AI design specialists EvoPhase and precision metal fabricators KwikFab. The turbine is also tailored to the unique wind conditions of a specific geographic area.

EvoPhase claimed that it used its AI-driven design process to generate and test designs for their efficiency at wind speeds found in Birmingham, which, at 3.6 meters/second are substantially lower than the 10 meters/second rating for most turbines.

An international team of scientists using observations from NASA-German satellites found evidence that Earth’s total amount of freshwater dropped abruptly starting in May 2014 and has remained low ever since. Reporting in Surveys in Geophysics, the researchers suggested the shift could indicate Earth’s continents have entered a persistently drier phase.

From 2015 through 2023, satellite measurements showed that the average amount of freshwater stored on land—that includes liquid surface water like lakes and rivers, plus water in aquifers underground—was 290 cubic miles (1,200 cubic km) lower than the average levels from 2002 through 2014, said Matthew Rodell, one of the study authors and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s two and a half times the volume of Lake Erie lost.”

During times of drought, along with the modern expansion of irrigated agriculture, farms and cities must rely more heavily on groundwater, which can lead to a cycle of declining underground water supplies: freshwater supplies become depleted, rain and snow fail to replenish them, and more groundwater is pumped.

Researchers at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) have uncovered that stress changes how our brain encodes and retrieves aversive memories, and discovered a promising new way to restore appropriate memory specificity in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

If you stumble during a presentation, you might feel stressed the next time you have to present because your brain associates your next presentation with that one poor and aversive experience. This type of stress is tied to one memory.

But stress from traumatic events like violence or generalized anxiety disorder can spread far beyond the original event, known as stress-induced aversive memory generalization, where fireworks or car backfires can trigger seemingly unrelated fearful memories and derail your entire day. In the case of PTSD, it can cause much greater negative consequences.