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Category: humor – Page 7

The Big Bang and the genetic code

Circa 2000

A 1940 paper by Gamow and Mario Schoenberg was the first in a subject we now call particle astrophysics. The two authors presciently speculated that neutrinos could play a role in the cooling of massive collapsing stars. They named the neutrino reaction the Urca process, after a well known Rio de Janeiro casino. This name might seem a strange choice, but not to Gamow, a legendary prankster who once submitted a paper to Nature in which he suggested that the Coriolis force might account for his observation that cows chewed clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the 1940s Gamow began to attack, with his colleague Ralph Alpher, the problem of the origin of the chemical elements. Their first paper on the subject appeared in a 1948 issue of the Physical Review. At the last minute Gamow, liking the sound of ‘alpha, beta, gamma’, added his old friend Hans Bethe as middle author in absentia (Bethe went along with the joke, but the editors did not). Gamow and Alpher, with Robert Herman, then pursued the idea of an extremely hot neutron-dominated environment. They envisioned the neutrons decaying into protons, electrons and anti-neutrinos and, when the universe had cooled sufficiently, the neutrons and protons assembling heavier nuclei. They even estimated the photon background that would be necessary to account for nuclear abundances, suggesting a residual five-degree background radiation.

We now realize that their scheme was incorrect. The Universe began with roughly equal numbers of protons and neutrons. Collisions with electrons, positrons, neutrinos and anti-neutrinos are more important than neutron decay, and the absence of stable nuclei with atomic numbers of five and eight creates a barrier to further fabrication in the early Universe. Nevertheless Alpher, Gamow and Herman’s work was the first serious attempt to discuss the observable consequences of a big bang and the basic framework was correct. Ironically, the term ‘Big Bang’ was coined by Fred Hoyle, an advocate of a steady-state model of the universe, to make fun of Gamow’s efforts.

DARPA helped make a sarcasm detector, because of course it did

Between the rolled eyes, shrugged shoulders, jazzed hands and warbling vocal inflection, it’s not hard to tell when someone’s being sarcastic as they’re giving you the business face to face. Online, however, you’re going to need that SpongeBob meme and a liberal application of the shift key to get your contradictory point across. Lucky for us netizens, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) has collaborated with researchers from the University of Central Florida to develop a deep learning AI capable of understanding written sarcasm with a startling degree of accuracy.

“With the high velocity and volume of social media data, companies rely on tools to analyze data and to provide customer service. These tools perform tasks such as content management, sentiment analysis, and extraction of relevant messages for the company’s customer service representatives to respond to,” UCF Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, Ivan Garibay, told Engadget via email. “However, these tools lack the sophistication to decipher more nuanced forms of language such as sarcasm or humor, in which the meaning of a message is not always obvious and explicit. This imposes an extra burden on the social media team, which is already inundated with customer messages to identify these messages and respond appropriately.”

As they explain in a study published in the journal, Entropy, Garibay and UCF PhD student Ramya Akula have built “an interpretable deep learning model using multi-head self-attention and gated recurrent units. The multi-head self-attention module aids in identifying crucial sarcastic cue-words from the input, and the recurrent units learn long-range dependencies between these cue-words to better classify the input text.”

Single dogecoin account holds $2 billion fortune

Dogecoin may have started as a joke, but one of its holders is sitting on some serious dough.

A single cryptocurrency account contains about $2 billion worth of the meme-inspired coin whose price has been pumped up by celebrities such as Elon Musk, Snoop Dogg and Gene Simmons.

The account holds about 36.8 billion dogecoins — a massive stash that accounts for more than 28 percent of all the coins currently in circulation, according to cryptocurrency data website Bitinfocharts.

In a first, astronomers watch a black hole’s corona disappear, then reappear

Could be used for quasar propulsion: 3.

It seems the universe has an odd sense of humor. While a crown-encrusted virus has run roughshod over the world, another entirely different corona about 100 million light years from Earth has mysteriously disappeared.

For the first time, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched as a supermassive black hole’s own corona, the ultrabright, billion-degree ring of high-energy particles that encircles a black hole’s event horizon, was abruptly destroyed.

The cause of this dramatic transformation is unclear, though the researchers guess that the source of the calamity may have been a star caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull. Like a pebble tossed into a gearbox, the star may have ricocheted through the black hole’s disk of swirling material, causing everything in the vicinity, including the corona’s high-energy particles, to suddenly plummet into the black hole.

Robot Deliveries Might End Up Being Common, Post-Coronavirus Pandemic

While the Wuhan district in China was under quarantine, news surfaced of robots delivering food and, later, medical supplies. Meanwhile, in the United States, the French company NAVYA configured its autonomous passenger shuttles in Florida to transport COVID-19 tests to the Mayo Clinic from off-site test locations. As the weeks of stay-at-home orders and recommendations slip into months, the delivery robots that were seen as a joke, fad, or nuisance have in some instances found a way into the public consciousness as important tools to combat the spread of coronavirus. The question is, will their usefulness extend post-lockdown?

Teleportation is Here, But It’s Not What We Expected

In 2005, the obituary of physicist Asher Peres in the magazine Physics Today told us that when a journalist asked him if quantum teleportation could transport a person’s soul as well as their body, the scientist replied: “No, not the body, just the soul.” More than just a simple joke, Peres’ response offers a perfect explanation, encoded in a metaphor, of the reality of a process that we have seen countless times in science fiction. In fact, teleportation does exist, although in the real world it is quite different from the famous “Beam me up, Scotty!” associated with the Star Trek series.

Teleportation in real science began to take shape in 1993 thanks to a theoretical study published by Peres and five other researchers in Physical Review Letters, which laid the foundation for quantum teleportation. Apparently, it was co-author Charles Bennett’s idea to associate the proposed phenomenon with the popular idea of teleportation, but there is an essential difference between fiction and reality: in the latter it’s not matter that travels, but rather information, which transfers properties from the original matter to that of the destination matter.

Quantum teleportation is based on a hypothesis described in 1935 by physicist Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, known as the EPR paradox. As a consequence of the laws of quantum physics, it was possible to obtain two particles and separate them in space so that they would continue to share their properties, as two halves of a whole. Thus, an action on one of them (on A, or Alice, according to the nomenclature used) would instantaneously have an effect on the other (on B, or Bob). This “spooky action at a distance”, in Einstein’s words, would seem capable of violating the limit of the speed of light.