Lifeboat Foundation

“We simply couldn’t have observed these ices without Webb.”

NASA has just revealed a stunning new image of the Chamaeleon I dark molecular cloud captured by its state-of-the-art $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope.

New James Webb image reveals young protostar in a molecular cloud.

Continue reading “James Webb detects complex frozen elements in a molecular cloud” »

Nearly 15,500 people in the U.S. over age 50 are estimated to have VEXAS syndrome.

A rare disorder called VEXAS syndrome has bemused the United States’ health services since 2020. The syndrome was a great mystery until the researchers’ work yielded results.

As stated by NYU Langone Health, with up to 50 percent of sufferers, mostly men, passing away within five years of diagnosis, this illness has a significant mortality rate.

Continue reading “VEXAS: Mysterious disease with high mortality rate detailed in study” »

The technology can detect disorders up to six months earlier than a doctor.

Researchers are using motion capture artificial intelligence technology that brings characters to life in films like Avatar to track the onset of diseases which affect movement, according to a report by the BBC

Continue reading “Researchers use Avatar’s motion AI tech to track rare diseases” »

Stanislav Palamar/iStock.

If the proposed legislation is successful, Arizona will become the first state in the United States to officially recognize Bitcoin as a legal currency. This would have significant implications for the use and acceptance of bitcoin within the state. Not only would individuals and businesses be able to use bitcoin to pay debts, taxes, and other financial obligations, but state agencies would also be able to accept it as payment.

Earlier this month, we reported how a program trained with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) was set to help a defendant contest his case in a U.S. court next month. Instead of addressing the court, the program, which will run on a smartphone, would supply appropriate responses through an earpiece to the defendant, who can then use them in the courtroom.

Teddy Hobbs’ IQ score, which was reported by the Times, places him in the 99.5 percentile for his age.

Teddy Hobbs’ mother, Beth, didn’t know what to make of her two-year-old toddler when he made sounds while playing on his tablet. Later, the parents realized he was sounding out numerals in Mandarin.

Now four, Teddy, of Portishead, Somerset in England, can count to 100 in six non-native languages and is the UK’s youngest member of the high-IQ Mensa society. Mensa is an organization, the largest and oldest high-IQ society, for people who score high on a standardized approved IQ test. Mensa accepts people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on an approved intelligence test.

Whether we realize it or not, cryptography is the fundamental building block on which our digital lives are based. Without sufficient cryptography and the inherent trust that it engenders, every aspect of the digital human condition we know and rely on today would never have come to fruition much less continue to evolve at its current staggering pace. The internet, digital signatures, critical infrastructure, financial systems and even the remote work that helped the world limp along during the recent global pandemic all rely on one critical assumption – that the current encryption employed today is unbreakable by even the most powerful computers in existence. But what if that assumption was not only challenged but realistically compromised?

This is exactly what happened when Peter Shor proposed his algorithm in 1995, dubbed Shor’s Algorithm. The key to unlocking the encryption on which today’s digital security relies is in finding the prime factors of large integers. While factoring is relatively simple with small integers that have only a few digits, factoring integers that have thousands of digits or more is another matter altogether. Shor proposed a polynomial-time quantum algorithm to solve this factoring problem. I’ll leave it to the more qualified mathematicians to explain the theory behind this algorithm but suffice it to say that when coupled with a quantum computer, Shor’s Algorithm drastically reduces the time it would take to factor these larger integers by multiple orders of magnitude.

Prior to Shor’s Algorithm, for example, the most powerful computer today would take millions of years to find the prime factors of a 2048-bit composite integer. Without Shor’s algorithm, even quantum computers would take such an inordinate amount of time to accomplish the task as to render it unusable by bad actors. With Shor’s Algorithm, this same factoring can potentially be accomplished in a matter of hours.

A conversation about artificial intelligence’s current inability to forget and what this means for the right to privacy and user agency. Miguel Luengo-Oroz, AI expert and social entrepreneur, speaks with Ashoka’s Hanae Baruchel. (Full bio below.)

Hanae Baruchel: ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps have been making headlines recently because of their unprecedented ability to have coherent conversations with humans. You had an interaction of your own recently.

Miguel Luengo-Oroz: Yes, I asked GPT-3 “Can neural networks forget?” and its response was that “Artificial intelligence systems, like neural networks, do not have the ability to forget in the same way that humans do. The network may adjust its weights to better fit the new data, which could result in it making different predictions for the same input. However, this is not the same as forgetting in the sense that the network still has access to all of the information it has learned previously, it is just prioritizing the new information more highly.”

Science is hard. Writing about science can be hard too, although it’s almost never as hard as doing actual science. And yet we science writers tend to get the science wrong a lot. This appears to be the case, to a rather stunning extent, in the instance of the reporting this week around new findings that researchers say shows the rotation of Earth’s inner core is slowing down relative to the spin of the mantle above it.

It helps to visualize this: Earth’s inner core is a solid ball that is surrounded by a fluid outer core. This is how it can rotate at a different pace compared to the planet’s outer layers — it’s essentially spinning at its own pace in a molten ocean at the center of our world… More.