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Apr 5, 2022

At 12 years old, this Austin kid is headed to college

Posted by in category: futurism

AUSTIN (KXAN) — At 12 years old, Deep Hayer is already gearing up for college at Austin Community College.

“His understanding of life was much more mature than his peers,” said Rosie Hayer, his mother.

At a young age, Deep’s parents noticed his maturity and his love for learning. In the first grade, he was reading at a seventh-grade level.

Apr 5, 2022

Twitter to appoint Elon Musk to board of directors

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

BREAKING: Tesla CEO Elon Musk is set to be appointed to Twitter’s board of directors after he revealed he held a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, which is the largest of any outside shareholder.


Twitter will appoint Tesla CEO Elon Musk to its board of directors, the company announced Tuesday.

As long as Musk is serving on the board, and for 90 days after, he will not be able to own more than 14.9 percent of Twitter’s stock, Twitter said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Musk’s term on the board will expire at the social media company’s 2024 annual meeting of stockholders.

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Apr 5, 2022

Second Successful Flight for DARPA Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC)

Posted by in category: military

DARPA and its U.S. Air Force partner recently completed a free flight test of the Lockheed Martin version of the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC). The vehicle, after release from a carrier aircraft, was boosted to its Aerojet Rocketdyne scramjet engine ignition envelope. From there, it quickly accelerated to and maintained cruise faster than Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) for an extended period of time. The vehicle reached altitudes greater than 65,000 feet and flew for more than 300 nautical miles.

This is the second successful flight in DARPA’s HAWC program. Last September, a different vehicle configuration from another contractor team also reached hypersonic flight.

“This Lockheed Martin HAWC flight test successfully demonstrated a second design that will allow our warfighters to competitively select the right capabilities to dominate the battlefield,” said Andrew “Tippy” Knoedler, HAWC program manager in DARPA’s Tactical Technology Office. “These achievements increase the level of technical maturity for transitioning HAWC to a service program of record.”

Apr 5, 2022

Are NFTs Bad for the Environment?

Posted by in category: blockchains

Although NFTs are literally just images on the internet, they rack up a lot of emissions. In fact, the average NFT generates 211 kg of CO2, compared to an avera… See more.


NFTs have exploded in popularity in the past year, with sales increasing by 1,700% between December 2020 and February 2021 alone (Nonfungible.com, 2021).

This uptake in digital art has led some artists around the world to earn millions of pounds just from selling one single image.

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Apr 5, 2022

The Fall of Reality Privilege

Posted by in categories: food, sustainability

Consider life in farm-country Nebraska versus NYC. What opportunities will there be for a potential startup founder or an ambitious young writer?

Shit, even the difference between living in New Jersey and NYC is huge.

Apr 5, 2022

Loss of neurons, not lack of sleep, makes Alzheimer’s patients drowsy

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension, neuroscience

The lethargy that many Alzheimer’s patients experience is caused not by a lack of sleep, but rather by the degeneration of a type of neuron that keeps us awake, according to a study that also confirms the tau protein is behind that neurodegeneration.

The study’s findings contradict the common notion that Alzheimer’s patients during the day to make up for a bad night of sleep and point toward potential therapies to help these patients feel more awake.

The data came from study participants who were patients at UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center and volunteered to have their sleep monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) and donate their brains after they died.

Apr 5, 2022

Quantum Mereology: Factorizing Hilbert Space into Subsystems with Quasi-Classical Dynamics

Posted by in categories: information science, quantum physics

We study the question of how to decompose Hilbert space into a preferred tensor-product factorization without any pre-existing structure other than a Hamiltonian operator, in particular the case of a bipartite decomposition into “system” and “environment.” Such a decomposition can be defined by looking for subsystems that exhibit quasi-classical behavior. The correct decomposition is one in which pointer states of the system are relatively robust against environmental monitoring (their entanglement with the environment does not continually and dramatically increase) and remain localized around approximately-classical trajectories. We present an in-principle algorithm for finding such a decomposition by minimizing a combination of entanglement growth and internal spreading of the system. Both of these properties are related to locality in different ways.

Apr 5, 2022

Pathways Language Model (PaLM): Scaling to 540 Billion Parameters for Breakthrough Performance

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

In recent years, large neural networks trained for language understanding and generation have achieved impressive results across a wide range of tasks. GPT-3 first showed that large language models (LLMs) can be used for few-shot learning and can achieve impressive results without large-scale task-specific data collection or model parameter updating. More recent LLMs, such as GLaM, LaMDA, Gopher, and Megatron-Turing NLG, achieved state-of-the-art few-shot results on many tasks by scaling model size, using sparsely activated modules, and training on larger datasets from more diverse sources. Yet much work remains in understanding the capabilities that emerge with few-shot learning as we push the limits of model scale.

Last year Google Research announced our vision for Pathways, a single model that could generalize across domains and tasks while being highly efficient. An important milestone toward realizing this vision was to develop the new Pathways system to orchestrate distributed computation for accelerators. In “PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways”, we introduce the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), a 540-billion parameter, dense decoder-only Transformer model trained with the Pathways system, which enabled us to efficiently train a single model across multiple TPU v4 Pods. We evaluated PaLM on hundreds of language understanding and generation tasks, and found that it achieves state-of-the-art few-shot performance across most tasks, by significant margins in many cases.

Apr 5, 2022

Why Quantum Computing Is Closer Than You Think

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

When I first started looking into quantum computing I had a fairly pessimistic view about its near-term commercial prospects, but I’ve come to think we’re only a few years away from seeing serious returns on the technology.

Apr 5, 2022

CRISPR-free base editors with enhanced activity and expanded targeting scope in mitochondrial and nuclear DNA

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, evolution

Continuously evolved double-stranded DNA deaminases increase the efficiency and targeting scope of all-protein base editors.