Gemini 2.0 can generate images and audio, is faster and cheaper to run, and is meant to make AI agents possible.
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Technology offers us many options, including less reliance on others, but what does that entail and how autonomous can a person get?
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Credits:
Off The Grid: Technological Autonomy.
Episode 477; December 12, 2024
Produced, Narrated \& Written: Isaac Arthur.
Editor: Donagh Broderick.
Graphics: Mafic Studios.
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Stellardrone, \
A longevity expert thinks that those who are currently in their 40s may have more than a 50% likelihood of not dying from aging-related causes.
A mathematician at Yonsei University, in Korea, claims to have solved the moving sofa problem. Jineon Baek has posted a 100+-page proof of the problem on the arXiv preprint server.
Most people who have moved their place of residence have encountered the moving sofa problem—it comes up when attempting to carry a couch around a corner. What is the largest couch that can be carried around a given corner without getting stuck? This problem was posited mathematically by mathematician Leo Moser back in 1966, and until now, has remained unsolved.
Moser’s initial thoughts centered on the possibility of developing a proof showing how mathematics could be used to solve any such problem using a given shape of a plane as it was moved around a right-angled corner of an empty space (such as a hallway) that was one unit in width.
If you looked at two snapshots of the same maple tree taken in July and December, you’d see a dramatic change from summer’s full green crown to winter’s bare branches. What those two photos don’t show you, however, is how the change occurred—gradually or all at once? In truth, deciduous trees tend to hold out for an environmental signal—a change in light or temperature—and then shed all their leaves within just a week or two.
When it comes to aging, we may be more like these trees than we realized.
According to new work from Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics, mammals follow a similar aging trajectory at the cellular level. As described in a new paper in Science, lab head Junyue Cao and his colleagues used single-cell sequencing to simultaneously scan more than 21 million cells from every major mouse organ across five stages of life. This enormous collection is now the world’s largest cellular atlas within a single study.
Researchers at Tohoku University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have developed new computing hardware that utilizes a Gaussian probabilistic bit made from a stochastic spintronics device. This innovation is expected to provide an energy-efficient platform for power-hungry generative AI.
As Moore’s Law slows down, domain-specific hardware architectures—such as probabilistic computing with naturally stochastic building blocks—are gaining prominence for addressing computationally hard problems. Similar to how quantum computers are suited for problems rooted in quantum mechanics, probabilistic computers are designed to handle inherently probabilistic algorithms.
These algorithms have applications in areas like combinatorial optimization and statistical machine learning. Notably, the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton for their groundbreaking work in machine learning.
Scientists have used a pair of lasers and a supersonic sheet of gas to accelerate electrons to high energies in less than a foot. The development marks a major step forward in laser-plasma acceleration, a promising method for making compact, high-energy particle accelerators that could have applications in particle physics, medicine, and materials science.
In a new study soon to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, a team of researchers successfully accelerated high-quality beams of electrons to more than 10 billion electronvolts (10 gigaelectronvolts, or GeV) in 30 centimeters. The preprint can be found in the online repository arXiv.
The work was led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), with collaborators at the University of Maryland. The research took place at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator Center (BELLA), which set a world record of 8-GeV electrons in 20 centimeters in 2019. The new experiment not only increases the beam energy, but also produces high-quality beam at this energy level for the first time, paving the way for future high-efficiency machines.
The sun, the essential engine that sustains life on Earth, generates its tremendous energy through the process of nuclear fusion. At the same time, it releases a continuous stream of neutrinos—particles that serve as messengers of its internal dynamics. Although modern neutrino detectors unveil the sun’s present behavior, significant questions linger about its stability over periods of millions of years—a timeframe that spans human evolution and significant climate changes.
Finding answers to this is the goal of the LORandite EXperiment (LOREX) that requires a precise knowledge of the solar neutrino cross section on thallium. This information has now been provided by an international collaboration of scientists using the unique facilities at GSI/FAIR’s Experimental Storage Ring ESR in Darmstadt to obtain an essential measurement that will help to understand the long-term stability of the sun. The results of the measurements have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
LOREX is the only long-time geochemical solar neutrino experiment still actively pursued. Proposed in the 1980s, it aims to measure solar neutrino flux averaged over a remarkable four million years, corresponding to the geological age of the lorandite ore.
Three distinct topological degrees of freedom are used to define all topological spin textures based on out-of-plane and in-plane spin configurations: the topological charge, representing the number of times the magnetization vector m wraps around the unit sphere; the vorticity, which quantifies the angular integration of the magnetic moment along the circumferential direction of a domain wall; and the helicity, defining the swirling direction of in-plane magnetization.
Electrical manipulation of these three degrees of freedom has garnered significant attention due to their potential applications in future spintronic devices. Among these, the helicity of a magnetic skyrmion—a critical topological property—is typically determined by the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI). However, controlling skyrmion helicity remains a formidable challenge.
A team of scientists led by Professor Yan Zhou from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Professor Senfu Zhang from Lanzhou University successfully demonstrated a controllable helicity switching of skyrmions using spin-orbit torque, enhanced by thermal effects.
For those unaware, Whisk3D (original name Blendersito) is Dante’s Symbian-powered version of Blender, which he has been developing since late 2022. The app allows users to upload and model 3D characters on the phone, design game level assets, extrude vertices and edges, create planes, and even connect the phone to a monitor and keyboard for more convenient use.
In a true Blender fashion, Dante’s Whisk3D is open-source and can be accessed via the creator’s GitHub page. You can also support Dante here and check out more jaw-dropping experiments with Nokia-ran Blender over here.