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The cosmic optical background (COB) is the visible light emitted by all sources outside of the Milky Way. This faint glow of light, which can only be observed using very precise and sophisticated telescopes, could help astrophysics to learn more about the origins of the universe and what lies beyond our galaxy.

Last year, physicists working at different institutes across the United States published the most precise COB measurements collected so far, gathered by the New Horizons spacecraft, an interplanetary space probe launched by NASA over a decade ago. These measurements suggested that the COB is two times brighter than theoretical predictions.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have recently carried out a theoretical study exploring the possibility that this observed excess light could be caused by the decay of a hypothesized type of dark matter particles, known as axions. In their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, they showed that axions with masses between 8 and 20 eV could potentially account for the excess COB flux measured by the New Horizons team.

The most jaw-dropping pictures of space this year.

From the Pillars of Creation to the Milky Way’s black hole, 2022 has been full of incredible photos from space. Here are the best space pictures of 2022.

I knew my life would be spent trying to tackle the problem of defeating death itself.

Dr. Michael West presents on age reprogramming to induce tissue regeneration (iTR) at RAADfest 2022.

Continue reading “Mike West at RAADfest 2022” »

After six decades we have finally reached controlled fusion “ignition.” Here is how it works and what it means (and doesn’t mean):

At the Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) the National Ignition Facility (NIF) starts with the Injection Laser System (ILS), a ytterbium-doped optical fiber laser (Master Oscillator) that produces a single very lower power, 1,053 nanometer (Infrared Light) beam. This single beam is split into 48 Pre-Amplifiers Modules (PAMs) that create four beams each (192 total). Each PAM conducts a two-stage amplification process via xenon flash lamps.

Self-coding and self-updating AI algorithms appear to be on the horizon. There are talks about Pitchfork AI, a top-secret Google Labs project that can independently code, refactor, and use both its own and other people’s code.

Continue reading “Google Labs unveils Pitchfork, an AI that can convert old code to new code and rewrite itself” »

Devices such as cellphones, laptops and smartwatches are constant companions for most people, spending days and nights in their pocket, on their wrist, or otherwise close at hand.

But when these technologies break down or a newer model hits stores, many people are quick to toss out or replace their device without a second thought. This disposability leads to rising levels of electronic waste—the fastest-growing category of waste, with 40 million tons generated each year.

Continue reading “Scientists create living smartwatch powered by slime mold” »

Human preferences on any topic have become diverse. Coming up with a statement that the majority of the population agrees with seems to be a challenge. Researchers at DeepMind, an AI company, accepted this challenge, trained a large language model, and fine-tuned it. They have to assume that human preferences are static and homogeneous to build the model.

The model generates statements to maximize approval among a group of people with diverse preferences. The research team fine-tuned the 70 billion parameter model, which was provided by thousand moral and political questions, and human written responses were provided for those questions. Then a reward model was trained in order to give weight to different opinions. Their best model was able to achieve more than a 65 percent preference rate.

The model was very sensitive when they tested it by just feeding part of the responses of the group of people then, the rest of the people’s opinion, which was not included, had a significant variance. Thus, the individual contribution of each consensus is equally important. There are many complicated NLP tasks like reading comprehension, fluent language generation, etc., which helped form the foundations for this LLM.

Two years after DeepMind’s revolutionary AI swept a competition for predicting protein structures, researchers are building on AlphaFold’s success.

Over the next decade or more experts say pain treatment will look very different than it does today, with more effective care.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the Federal Government—and it’s up to you to make it work for your mission. Booz Allen can help. We deliver custom, secure solutions that allow government to responsibly unlock its potential.

Our AI experts, scientists, domain experts, and consultants understand the technologies that make AI possible, the policies that make it necessary, the business cases that make it strategic, and the solutions that make it powerful.