Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists predicted that our universe’s structure resembles a huge web. We’ve finally seen one of the strands.

A new photonic chip could run optical neural networks 10 million times more efficiently than conventional chips.

The classical physical limit for computing energy is the Landauer limit that sets a lower bound to the minimum heat dissipated per bit erasing operation. Performance below the thermodynamic (Landauer) limit for digital irreversible computation is theoretically possible in this device. The proposed accelerator can implement both fully connected and convolutional networks.

Previous photonic chips had bulky optical components that limited their use to relatively small neural networks. MIT researchers have a new photonic accelerator that uses more compact optical components and optical signal-processing techniques, to drastically reduce both power consumption and chip area. That allows the chip to scale to neural networks several orders of magnitude larger than its counterparts.

Continue reading “New Photonic Chip Will Push to Limits of Computational Energy Efficiency Ten Million Times Beyond Conventional Chips” »

A volcano in the far eastern end of Russia that was previously considered to be extinct has awakened, and scientists are now warning of a possible catastrophic eruption.

The Bolshaya Udina volcano — part of the Kamchatka Peninsula’s Udina volcanic complex — was believed to be extinct until 2017, when scientists detected increasing seismic activity beneath it, CNN reported.

Ivan Koulakov, a geophysicist from Russia’s A.A. Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics who led a study into the volcano, told CNN he believes Bolshaya Udina should now be reclassified as active.

Continue reading “Extinct Russian Volcano Has Woken Up and Could Erupt at Any Moment, Scientists Say” »

A groundbreaking new cell reprogramming device can turn existing cells into any other type of cell, repairing tissue and organs in mice.

Click on photo to start video.

Rare, “rainbow” blanket octopuses were caught on camera off the coast of Romblon, Philippines.

AI chatbots are finally getting good — or, at the very least, they’re getting entertaining.

Case in point is r/SubSimulatorGPT2, an enigmatically-named subreddit with a unique composition: it’s populated entirely by AI chatbots that personify other subreddits. (For the uninitiated, a subreddit is a community on Reddit usually dedicated to a specific topic.)

How does it work? Well, in order to create a chatbot you start by feeding it training data. Usually this data is scraped from a variety of sources; everything from newspaper articles, to books, to movie scripts. But on r/SubSimulatorGPT2, each bot has been trained on text collected from specific subreddits, meaning that the conversations they generate reflect the thoughts, desires, and inane chatter of different groups on Reddit.

Continue reading “There’s a subreddit populated entirely by AI personifications of other subreddits” »

SPACEX STARLINK is Elon Musk’s mission to bring broadband around the world. However the Royal Astronomical Society has now voiced concern over the controversial satellite constellation.

An expert from the University of South Florida deduced how big a bolt of lightning was based on the size of rocks formed by lightning.

When lightning strikes sand it creates a new type of rock, called fulgurite – a hollow tube formed as the lightning travels through the sand, vaporizing it and melting its outer edges.

Researchers determined that on average, the energy required to form these rocks was at least about one megajoule per meter of fulgurite formed.

Continue reading “Fossil study finds lightning is strong enough to power a billion homes” »

By New Scientist, An Energy Realities Partner

Nobody has all the answers to the world’s energy questions, so New Scientist has teamed up with Statoil to search for solutions from New Scientist’s audience.

The question posed was: How much energy is in a lightning bolt? Is it enough, and are there places where lightning strikes often enough, to think about flying kites to transfer that energy to the grid?

Continue reading “Can We Harvest Lightning For The Power Grid?” »