Name: Travis Chen and Brian Femminella
Age: 22 and 21
Location: Seattle, Washington; Los Angeles, California.
Whoever controls AI controls the world
“Most Valuable AI unicorn” goes for IPO.
Continue reading “‘Most valuable’ AI unicorn SenseTime gets Hong Kong IPO — sources” »
Informed consent not something we hear a lot about these days, which is kind of odd, given all the drugs our government currently insists that we take and how often those very same legal concepts are invoked for aboriginal rights and sexual assault cases.
“Informed consent” is a well understood legal doctrine in healthcare, requiring the healthcare provider (traditionally a doctor) to educate patients about the risks, benefits, and alternatives of any given recommended procedure or intervention, allowing the patient to make informed and “voluntary” decisions about whether to undergo the procedure.
Continue reading “Why is No One Talking About ‘Informed Consent?’” »
Researchers at ETH Zurich have discovered major vulnerabilities in DRAM memory devices, which are widely used in computers, tablets and smartphones. The vulnerabilities have now been published together with the National Cyber Security Centre, which for the first time has assigned an identification number for it.
When browsing the internet on a laptop computer or writing messages on a smartphone, we all like to think that we are reasonably safe from hacker attacks as long as we have installed the latest software updates and anti-virus software. But what if the problem lies not with the software, but with the hardware? A team of researchers led by Kaveh Razavi at ETH Zurich, together with colleagues at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Qualcomm Technologies, have recently discovered fundamental vulnerabilities affecting the memory component called DRAM at the heart of all modern computer systems.
The results of their research have now been accepted for publication at a flagship IT security conference, and the Swiss National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number. This is the first time that a CVE identification has been issued by the NCSC in Switzerland (see box below). On a scale of 0 to 10, the severity of the vulnerability has been rated as 9.
JILA researchers have tricked nature by tuning a dense quantum gas of atoms to make a congested “Fermi sea,” thus keeping atoms in a high-energy state, or excited, for about 10% longer than usual by delaying their normal return to the lowest-energy state. The technique might be used to improve quantum communication networks and atomic clocks.
Quantum systems such as atoms that are excited above their resting state naturally calm down, or decay, by releasing light in quantized portions called photons. This common process is evident in the glow of fireflies and emission from LEDs. The rate of decay can be engineered by modifying the environment or the internal properties of the atoms. Previous research has modified the electromagnetic environment; the new work focuses on the atoms.
The new JILA method relies on a rule of the quantum world known as the Pauli exclusion principle, which says identical fermions (a category of particles) can’t share the same quantum states at the same time. Therefore, if enough fermions are in a crowd—creating a Fermi sea—an excited fermion might not be able to fling out a photon as usual, because it would need to then recoil. That recoil could land it in the same quantum state of motion as one of its neighbors, which is forbidden due to a mechanism called Pauli blocking.
The single-cell transcriptional profile of a human embryo between 16 and 19 days after fertilization reveals parallels and differences in gastrulation in humans as compared with mouse and non-human primate models.
Distinct phases of synaptic plasticity contribute to memory formation at different times and in different brain regions.
Rutgers researchers and their collaborators have found that learning — a universal feature of intelligence in living beings — can be mimicked in synthetic matter, a discovery that in turn could inspire new algorithms for artificial intelligence (AI).
The study appears in the journal PNAS.
One of the fundamental characteristics of humans is the ability to continuously learn from and adapt to changing environments. But until recently, AI has been narrowly focused on emulating human logic. Now, researchers are looking to mimic human cognition in devices that can learn, remember and make decisions the way a human brain does.
Some Drosophila species have cryptic sex-ratio drive systems. Here, the authors show rapid expansion of a driver gene family, Distorter on the X, in three closely related Drosophila species on the X chromosome and suppressors on the autosomes.
Solutions to the problems of interstellar travel
Given the insane scale of interstellar distances, how might we extrapolate from the physics we do understand to envisioning possible ways that aliens (or us in the future) could cross the cosmic void? There are a few possible solutions to the problem of interstellar travel.
