Menu

Blog

Page 5348

Dec 12, 2021

Mystery of the gigantic Oort cloud from deep space explained

Posted by in category: space

Astronomers possibly solve the mystery of how the enormous Oort cloud, with over 100 billion comet-like objects, was formed.

Dec 12, 2021

How hologram tech may soon replace video calls

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, holograms

The coronavirus pandemic and travel bans have accelerated interest in holographic communication.

Dec 12, 2021

Private space stations are coming. Will they be better than their predecessors?

Posted by in categories: government, space travel

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

A new era of space stations is about to kick off. NASA has announced three commercial space station proposals for development, joining an earlier proposal by Axiom Space.

These proposals are the first attempts to create places for humans to live and work in space outside the framework of government space agencies. They’re part of what has been called “Space 4.0,” where space technology is driven by commercial opportunities. Many believe this is what it will take to get humans to Mars and beyond.

Dec 12, 2021

Breakthrough Proof Clears Path for Quantum AI — Overcoming Threat of “Barren Plateaus”

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI

Novel theorem demonstrates convolutional neural networks can always be trained on quantum computers, overcoming threat of ‘barren plateaus’ in optimization problems.

Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as “barren plateaus” has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.

“The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not,” said Marco Cerezo, coauthor of the paper titled “Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks,” published recently by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing 0, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. “We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters.”

Dec 12, 2021

Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about… itself

Posted by in categories: ethics, habitats, robotics/AI

But wait, should we believe it?


An artificial intelligence warning AI researchers about the dangers of AI sounds like the setup of a delightful B movie, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

A professor and a fellow at the University of Oxford came face to face with that reality when they invited an AI to participate in a debate at the Oxford Union on, you guessed it, the ethics of AI. Specifically, as Dr. Alex Connock and Professor Andrew Stephen explain in the Conversation, the prompt was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” The AI, it seems, agreed.

Continue reading “Reddit-trained artificial intelligence warns researchers about… itself” »

Dec 12, 2021

DeepMind debuts a massive language A.I. that beats GPT-3 on some tasks

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, robotics/AI

The company belatedly gets into the race to build bigger, better language models despite ethical concerns.


A team at Harvard has documented a new state of matter which could advance quantum technology.

Dec 12, 2021

Never before seen state of matter could advance quantum tech

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

Physicists from Harvard University have documented a new state of matter which could significantly advance quantum technology, according to a new paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science earlier this month.

The state of matter they found is called quantum spin liquid, which has special properties that produce long-range quantum entanglement — a phenomenon in which particles’ states are connected even when the particles are separated by distance.

Quantum spin liquid was first predicted by physicist Philip W. Anderson about 50 years ago, in 1973, but has never been observed in experiments.

Dec 12, 2021

3 overlooked factors may be why Mars lost its water

Posted by in category: space

Scientists know that Martian dust storms drive the planet’s ongoing dehydration, but just how the water gets to the upper atmosphere remains a mystery.

Dec 12, 2021

A vaccine to eliminate aged cells

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Japanese researchers have demonstrated a vaccine to remove senescent cells in mice. These so-called ‘zombie cells’ are a key driver of the aging process.

Dec 12, 2021

Remember the Sony rootkit scandal? It was almost much worse

Posted by in category: futurism

That time Rootkitting for Dummies might as well have been in Microsoft’s Plus! Pack.