Lifeboat Foundation

The Fed is expected to raise interest rates as early as next week to counteract rocketing inflation.

If nuclear fusion reaction – the process that powers the Sun and other stars – could be used on a consistent basis on Earth, it would be a source of virtually unlimited clean energy. But there are still a lot of obstacles to overcome.

U.K.-based nuclear fusion firm Tokamak Energy has demonstrated a world-first with its privately-funded ST40 spherical tokamak, achieving a plasma temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius. This threshold is necessary for the future deployment of commercially successful fusion power. According to the company, this is by far the highest temperature ever achieved in a spherical tokamak and by any privately funded tokamak.

Several government laboratories have reported plasma temperatures above 100 million degrees in conventional tokamaks, including South Korea’s KSTAR reactor and China’s “artificial sun” EAST tokamak reactor. However, Tokamak Energy highlights that its milestone has been achieved in just five years, or a cost of less than £50m ($70m), in a much more compact fusion device. This achievement further substantiates spherical tokamaks as the optimal route to the delivery of clean, secure, low-cost, scalable, and globally deployable commercial fusion energy.

The multi-use rover can autonomously swap payloads, mobilize astronauts, and more.

Summary: Electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome representational drift.

Source: MIT

A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons.

Russia has asked China for military support, including drones, as well as economic assistance for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, according to conversations CNN had with two US officials.

The requests came after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of the officials said. That official declined to detail the Chinese reaction but indicated that the Chinese had responded.

Potential assistance from the Chinese would be a significant development in Russia’s invasion. It could upend the hold Ukrainian forces still have in the country as well as provide a counterweight to the harsh sanctions imposed on Russia’s economy.

China’s lunar rover has beamed back a new image of the ‘dark side’ of the moon showing the winding path it has taken over the surface.

The Yutu-2 rover arrived on the moon three years ago on Change’e 4 — the first spacecraft to ever land on the far side of the moon.

Continue reading “China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover sends image from ‘dark side’ of the moon” »

Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during rest state.

Summary: Researchers have released a new open-access data set recorded from the visual cortex of macaque monkeys during resting state.

Source: KNAW

Continue reading “Open-Access Dataset of Macaque Brain Published” »

A Microsoft Research team has introduced a “simple yet effective” method that dramatically improves stability in transformer models with just a few lines of code change.

Large-scale transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and in recent years have also demonstrated their impressive few-shot and zero-shot learning capabilities, making them a popular architectural choice for machine learning researchers. However, despite soaring parameter counts that now reach billions and even trillions, the layer depth of transformers remains restricted by problems with training instability.

In their new paper DeepNet: Scaling Transformers to 1,000 Layers, the Microsoft team proposes DeepNorm, a novel normalization function that improves the stability of transformers to enable scaling that is an order of magnitude deeper (more than 1,000 layers) than previous deep transformers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=M_p6Z_Qm1_s

Identifying the shape of massive astronomical object is not a simple task. Even with recent observations of gravitational waves the mass and angular momentum of the object remain known with large uncertainty. Moreover, it exists exotic objects, as wormholes who can mimic the shape of black holes for example. The gravitational spectrum of wormholes has a wide range of interpretations. A current challenge addressed by researcher R. A. Konoplya consists of mathematically describing wormholes in order to be able to eventually identify them in the space.

According to current theory a wormhole is a theoretical passage through space-time that could create shortcuts in the universe. The original wormhole solution was discovered by Einstein and Rosen (ER) in 1935 and later John Wheeler has shown their importance in quantum gravity. It was then discovered that it was possible to construct “traversable” wormhole solutions since the ER=EPR proposal. It also appears the quantum fluctuations of the space-time are such that a tiny wormhole could connect Planckian pixel with the entanglement mechanism of quantum space-time itself.