Lifeboat Foundation

Yesterday (Sep 5, 2019), the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded $21.6 million US dollars to the scientists behind a stunning achievement. They imaged a black hole. Although the image was announced and released 5 months ago, the story is still unfolding.

Yesterday (Sep 5, 2019), the Breakthrough Prize Foundation awarded $21.6 million US dollars to the scientists behind a stunning achievement. They imaged a black hole. Although the image was announced and released 5 months ago, the story is still unfolding.

The Breakthrough Prize is funded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner. It is the highest-paying science prize for researchers in life science, math, and physics.

There are many black holes in our galaxy and some small ones in our own galactic “neighborhood” . Yet the EHT team* focused on M87, a black hole in the center of another Galaxy, 55 million light years from our solar system.

Continue reading “Stunning 1st image of Black Hole” »

Researchers from SLAC and around the world increasingly use machine learning to handle Big Data produced in modern experiments and to study some of the most fundamental properties of the universe (Symmetry magazine).

Aristo has passed an American eighth grade science test. If you are told Aristo is an earnest kid who loves to read all he can about Faraday and plays the drums you will say so what, big deal.

Aristo, though, is an artificial intelligence program and scientists would like the world to know this is a big deal, as “a benchmark in AI development,” as Melissa Locker called it in Fast Company.

We mean, just think about it. Cade Metz, in The New York Times, has thought about it. “Four years ago, more than 700 computer scientists competed in a contest to build artificial intelligence that could pass an eighth-grade science test. There was $80,000 in prize money on the line. They all flunked. Even the most sophisticated system couldn’t do better than 60% on the test. AI couldn’t match the language and logic skills that students are expected to have when they enter high school.”

This year’s other prizes include four in the life sciences, a special prize in fundamental physics for the invention of supergravity, one winner in mathematics, and a handful of $100,000 awards for early career researchers. Recipients will be honored at an awards gala to be held on November 3 at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and broadcast live on National Geographic.

A record-setting black hole picture and advances in how we perceive pain are among the winners of this year’s $3-million prizes.

A team of scientists at MIT and elsewhere has developed a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), that can read scientific papers and render a plain-English summary in a sentence or two.

Image: Chelsea Turner

A simple treatment to stave off the health problems of old age could be available in five to 12 years. Here’s how it would work.

Near-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors—Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.) Science, cool facts, mind, emotion, breakthrough, science.

Their stories are similar to those told in dozens if not hundreds of books and in thousands of interviews with “NDErs,” or “experiencers,” as they call themselves, in the past few decades. Though details and descriptions vary across cultures, the overall tenor of the experience is remarkably similar. Western near-death experiences are the most studied. Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body; spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm; meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God; encountering long-lost relatives or friends; recalling scenes from one’s life; feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love; and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body.

Solar system.