Lifeboat Foundation

Theoretical physicists have a lot in common with lawyers. Both spend a lot of time looking for loopholes and inconsistencies in the rules that might be exploited somehow.

Valeri P. Frolov and Andrei Zelnikov from the University of Alberta in Canada and Pavel Krtouš from Charles University in Prague probably couldn’t get you out of a traffic fine, but they may have uncovered enough wiggle room in the laws of physics to send you back in time to make sure you didn’t speed through that school zone in the first place.

Shortcuts through spacetime known as wormholes aren’t recognized features of the cosmos. But for the better part of a century, scientists have wondered if the weft and warp instructed by relativity prescribe ways for quantum ripples – or even entire particles – to break free of their locality.

Summary: A new study reveals that individuals with stronger ‘mindreading’ abilities, or the capacity to understand others’ feelings and intentions, are more successful in cooperative tasks. This trait, also known as ‘theory of mind,’ is not directly tied to intelligence and can potentially be improved through training programs.

The research demonstrated that those with high theory of mind were more effective in cooperation, particularly when paired with individuals with similar abilities. The study underlines the potential to foster enhanced cooperation in various settings like schools, workplaces, or colleges by improving these abilities.

Ah, Doom. Who knows where we’d be today if it weren’t for the innovation that made you the granddaddy of first-person shooters? Probably one of the things that’s helping to keep id Software’s iconic game alive after all these years is the fact that it can be ported to just about anything. It’s even possible to play Doom inside Doom itself.

As you can imagine, many people have attempted to see what crazy methods they can to play this legendary FPS. Now, some scientists are doing something a little different. Namely, they want to see if it’s possible to grow their own neurons that can be taught to play games. And yes, they want to see if they will be able to control Doom.

A video from the YouTube channel The Thought Emporium goes into detail about the hypothesis. The basic idea is to be able to hook up some lab-grown rat neurons to a computer that will be able to play Doom, at least in a rudimentary fashion.

Prior to school getting under way is an ideal time to review your child’s needs for coping with allergies and asthma.

The quantum nature of interactions between elementary particles allows drawing non-trivial conclusions even from processes as simple as elastic scattering. The ATLAS experiment at the LHC accelerator reports the measurement of fundamental properties of strong interactions between protons at ultra-high energies.

The physics of billiard ball collisions is taught from early school years. In a good approximation, these collisions are elastic, where both momentum and energy are conserved. The scattering angle depends on how central the collision was (this is often quantified by the impact parameter value—the distance between the centers of the balls in a plane perpendicular to the motion). In the case of a small impact parameter, which corresponds to a highly central collision, the scattering angles are large. As the impact parameter increases, the scattering angle decreases.

In particle physics, we also deal with elastic collisions, when two particles collide, maintaining their identities, and scatter a certain angle to their original direction of motion. Here, we also have a relationship between the collision parameter and the scattering angle. By measuring the scattering angles, we gain information about the spatial structure of the colliding particles and the properties of their interactions.

We are pleased to announce Claude 2, our new model. Claude 2 has improved performance, longer responses, and can be accessed via API as well as a new public-facing beta website, claude.ai. We have heard from our users that Claude is easy to converse with, clearly explains its thinking, is less likely to produce harmful outputs, and has a longer memory. We have made improvements from our previous models on coding, math, and reasoning. For example, our latest model scored 76.5% on the multiple choice section of the Bar exam, up from 73.0% with Claude 1.3. When compared to college students applying to graduate school, Claude 2 scores above the 90th percentile on the GRE reading and writing exams, and similarly to the median applicant on quantitative reasoning.

Think of Claude as a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language to help you with many tasks. The Claude 2 API for businesses is being offered for the same price as Claude 1.3. Additionally, anyone in the US and UK can start using our beta chat experience today.

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A rare, half-billion-year-old fossil gives us a clue to how a bizarre marine invertebrate can possibly be related to humans. In a study published on July 6 in the journal Nature Communications, Harvard University researchers identified a prehistoric specimen in a collection at the Natural History Museum of Utah as a tunicate, or sea squirt. The preserved invertebrate, which was originally discovered in the rugged, desert-like landscape of the House Range in western Utah, can be used to understand evolution mysteries that go way back to the Cambrian explosion.

“There are essentially no tunicate fossils in the entire fossil record. They’ve got a 520-to 540-million year-long gap,” says Karma Nanglu, an invertebrate paleontologist at Harvard. “This fossil isthe first soft-tissue tunicate in, we would argue, the entire fossil record.”

Sea squirts can be seen swaying on the ocean floor with its potato-like body and two chimney-like parts called siphons that are used to feed and expel water. While there are at least 3,000 different species today, the crayon-point-size organisms are generally unknown to people—despite being our invertebrate cousins, says Nanglu. Like humans, they belong to the chordates, which share five essential physical features during development or when fully grown. Most tunicates hatch as swimming, tadpole-like creatures, but eventually attach to the ocean floor and lead a sessile lifestyle.

Stevens’ School of Systems and Enterprises (SSE) held a reception at Northrop Grumman’s Space Systems headquarters in Dulles, Va., to congratulate its 21 employees who received their Master of Engineering in Space Systems Engineering through the SSE Corporate Education program.

SSE’s Dr. Wiley Larson was able to congratulate the cohort of graduates, and Marcos Stephens, director, technical staff development for NGC Space Systems, served as the program emcee. Stephens and Carol Ruiz, director, online and corporate engagement for SSE, planned the event with the assistance of Julie Godby, executive assistant at NGC. The School of Systems and Enterprises has partnered with Northrup Grumman since 2006 and is excited to be engaged with their Space Systems segment.

Scientists discovered that a synthetic cell with a reduced genome could evolve as quickly as a normal cell. Despite losing 45% of its original genes, the cell adapted and demonstrated resilience in a laboratory experiment lasting 300 days, effectively showcasing that evolution occurs even under perceived limitations.

“Listen, if there’s one thing the history of evolution has taught us is that life will not be contained. Life breaks free. It expands to new territories, and it crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but… ife finds a way,” said Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic.

The Jurassic period is a geologic time period and system that spanned 56 million years from the end of the Triassic Period about 201.3 million years ago to the beginning of the Cretaceous Period 145 million years ago. It constitutes the middle period of the Mesozoic Era and is divided into three epochs: Early, Middle, and Late. The name “Jurassic” was given to the period by geologists in the early 19th century based on the rock formations found in the Jura Mountains, which were formed during the Jurassic period.