Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Something to look forward to: Improved ray tracing performance is one of the key benefits of Sony’s newly unveiled PlayStation 5 Pro console. Prior to its debut, rumors had long suggested that the mid-generation refresh would incorporate ray tracing technology based on AMD’s upcoming RDNA 4 GPU architecture. Recent comments from PlayStation designer Mark Cerny have all but confirmed these theories.

In a detailed interview with CNET following the reveal of Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro console, designer Mark Cerny confirmed rumors that the device’s ray tracing capabilities are built on an architecture not yet available in AMD’s PC graphics cards. While Cerny didn’t explicitly name RDNA 4, no other viable candidates are known.

Cerny explained that the PS5 Pro leverages new ray tracing feature sets developed by hardware partner AMD for the next stage of its roadmap. Reports earlier this year suggested that RDNA 4 GPUs, expected to launch in 2025, will significantly enhance ray tracing performance compared to RDNA 3, and especially to the RDNA 2 chips that power the original PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles.

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If you’ve ever opened a box from IKEA and wished the pieces inside could somehow spontaneously merge to form a table or chair, then a simple virus could have a thing or two to teach you. Self-assembly of complex molecules is essential for a wide array of biological structures, including proteins, cell membranes, or even entire viruses. Supramolecular chemistry is a field of study that attempts to build large molecules out of a discrete number of…

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The atom’s nucleus could safely store quantum data, with controlled wobbling making it possible:

According to the researchers, the spin state or direction of the spin of a nucleus can be used to hold quantum information.

“This magnetism, the “spin” in quantum language, can be seen as a sort of compass needle that can point in various directions. The orientation of the spin at a given time constitutes a piece of quantum information,” the study authors said.

However, even if you store quantum information inside the spin of a nucleus, it’s challenging to read and manipulate the stored information as the nucleus has a tiny size and is influenced by the activity of surrounding particles.

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Summary: A new study using artificial intelligence has provided novel insights into how the brain predicts future events and processes information. Researchers discovered that the brain’s spontaneous activity, even without external stimuli, plays a critical role in how we think and feel.

By analyzing local field potentials (LFPs), they uncovered how the brain remains active in anticipating possible scenarios, even in a resting state. These findings could lead to better diagnostic tools and treatments for neurological diseases.

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Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of matter in the laboratory – albeit only for the blink of an eye and in a tiny volume.

So far, this has required the world’s most powerful lasers, such as the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California. But there are only a few of these light giants, and the opportunities for experiments are correspondingly rare. A research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), together with colleagues from the European XFEL, has now succeeded in creating and observing extreme conditions with a much smaller laser.

At the heart of the new technology is a copper wire, finer than a human hair, as the group reports in the journal Nature Communications (“Cylindrical compression of thin wires by irradiation with a Joule-class short-pulse laser”).

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