Who will take the giant leap for womankind?
ST. LOUIS — As astrophysicists prepare to begin their next decadal survey, other scientists and members of Congress endorsed the overall process even as they suggested some changes.
At a town hall meeting during the 234th meeting of the American Astronomical Society here June 11, leaders of the latest astrophysics decadal survey, dubbed Astro2020, said they’re ready to begin work identifying scientific priorities in the field for the coming decade and what spacecraft and ground-based observatories are best suited for them.
Robert Kennicutt, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and Texas A&M University who serves as co-chair of Astro2020, said the National Academies, which oversees the decadal survey, received more than 450 nominations to serve on the steering committee Astro2020 decadal survey. Ultimately the National Academies selected 20 people, counting Kennicutt and fellow co-chair Fiona Harrison of Caltech, to serve on the committee.
AI Superpowers
Posted in humor, robotics/AI
Turns out that last one was a CGI joke but this one isn’t. Facebook wouldn’t let me delete the post.
Recently, I picked up Kai-Fu Lee’s newest book, AI Superpowers.
Kai-Fu Lee is one of the most plugged-in AI investors on the planet, heading management of over $2 billion AUM between six funds, and over 300 portfolio companies in the U.S. and China.
Drawing from his pioneering work in AI, executive leadership at Microsoft, Apple and Google (where he served as founding president of Google China), and his founding of VC fund Sinovation Ventures, Lee shares invaluable insights about:
Next month, a total solar eclipse will pass over a slice of the South Pacific, Chile, and Argentina—and directly over an observatory in the Andes run by the National Science Foundation.
Astronomers and physicists are now preparing the experiments they plan to run during the eclipse. As with past eclipses, these experiments will focus on observing the Sun, as well as the effects of eclipses on Earth.
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Scientists seeking to understand the mechanism underlying superconductivity in “stripe-ordered” cuprates—copper-oxide materials with alternating areas of electric charge and magnetism—discovered an unusual metallic state when attempting to turn superconductivity off. They found that under the conditions of their experiment, even after the material loses its ability to carry electrical current with no energy loss, it retains some conductivity—and possibly the electron (or hole) pairs required for its superconducting superpower.
“This work provides circumstantial evidence that the stripe-ordered arrangement of charges and magnetism is good for forming the charge-carrier pairs required for superconductivity to emerge,” said John Tranquada, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Tranquada and his co-authors from Brookhaven Lab and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Florida State University, where some of the work was done, describe their findings in a paper just published in Science Advances. A related paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by co-author Alexei Tsvelik, a theorist at Brookhaven Lab, provides insight into the theoretical underpinnings for the observations.
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