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Mar 6, 2018

Physicists Find a Way to See the ‘Grin’ of Quantum Gravity

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, quantum physics

In 1935, when both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity were young, a little-known Soviet physicist named Matvei Bronstein, just 28 himself, made the first detailed study of the problem of reconciling the two in a quantum theory of gravity. This “possible theory of the world as a whole,” as Bronstein called it, would supplant Einstein’s classical description of gravity, which casts it as curves in the space-time continuum, and rewrite it in the same quantum language as the rest of physics.

Bronstein figured out how to describe gravity in terms of quantized particles, now called gravitons, but only when the force of gravity is weak — that is (in general relativity), when the space-time fabric is so weakly curved that it can be approximated as flat. When gravity is strong, “the situation is quite different,” he wrote. “Without a deep revision of classical notions, it seems hardly possible to extend the quantum theory of gravity also to this domain.”

His words were prophetic. Eighty-three years later, physicists are still trying to understand how space-time curvature emerges on macroscopic scales from a more fundamental, presumably quantum picture of gravity; it’s arguably the deepest question in physics. Perhaps, given the chance, the whip-smart Bronstein might have helped to speed things along. Aside from quantum gravity, he contributed to astrophysics and cosmology, semiconductor theory, and quantum electrodynamics, and he also wrote several science books for children, before being caught up in Stalin’s Great Purge and executed in 1938, at the age of 31.

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Mar 6, 2018

Have there been successful Transaction Malleability attacks?

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, finance, internet

First, let’s get some basics out of the way…

What is Transaction Malleability?

Here are 2 explanations of transaction malleability: [Coindesk] [TechTalk]

In a nutshell, Transaction Malleability is a weakness in the original Bitcoin implementation that enables a bad actor to change the unique ID of a bitcoin transaction before it is confirmed on the Blockchain. Such a change makes it possible for someone to pretend that a transaction didn’t happen, if all necessary conditions are in place.

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Mar 6, 2018

A “Living Dead” Star that Could Shed Light on the Early Universe

Posted by in category: cosmology

IT’S BREAKING ALL THE RULES. Ordinarily, a supernova marks the death of a mammoth star, which then briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading away. Not so for a baffling supernova that went off in a nearby galaxy in 2014. Instead of being the end of the story, the stellar explosion inexplicably began to brighten and has since dimmed, then brightened up again four more times.

If that weren’t odd enough, it turns out a supernova blew up in the same place in the sky more than 60 years ago. Somehow, a star that apparently died around the time Elvis Presley released his first record endured only to die again—truly a “living dead” star.

Astrophysicists suspect this apparent stellar zombie was a rare, colossal type of star with 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. The universe’s first stars were similarly huge, they think, though these distant objects lie beyond the reach of even our most powerful telescopes. The re-exploding star could, therefore, be a cosmic anachronism, offering scientists an unprecedented glimpse into the primeval universe.

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Mar 6, 2018

Google backs its Bristlecone chip to crack quantum computing

Posted by in categories: engineering, information science, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Like every other major tech company, Google has designs on being the first to achieve quantum supremacy — the point where a quantum computer could run particular algorithms faster than a classical computer. Today it’s announced that it believes its latest research, Bristlecone, is going to be the processor to help it achieve that. According to the Google Quantum AI Lab, it could provide “a compelling proof-of-principle for building larger scale quantum computers.”

One of the biggest obstacles to quantum supremacy is error rates and subsequent scalability. Qubits (the quantum version of traditional bits) are very unstable and can be adversely affected by noise, and most of these systems can only hold a state for less than 100 microseconds. Google believes that quantum supremacy can be “comfortably demonstrated” with 49 qubits and a two-qubit error below 0.5 percent. Previous quantum systems by Google have given two-qubit errors of 0.6 percent, which in theory sounds like a miniscule difference, but in the world of quantum computing remains significant.

However, each Bristlecone chip features 72 qubits, which may help mitigate some of this error, but as Google says, quantum computing isn’t just about qubits. “Operating a device such as Bristlecone at low system error requires harmony between a full stack of technology ranging from software and control electronics to the processor itself,” the team writes in a blog post. “Getting this right requires careful systems engineering over several iterations.”

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Mar 6, 2018

Bioquark Inc. — Mama Bear Cancer Coach Radio Show — Ira Pastor

Posted by in categories: aging, biological, business, DNA, futurism, genetics, health, life extension, neuroscience, transhumanism

https://www.spreaker.com/user/10066453/030518-mama-bear-cancer-coach-ira-pastor

Mar 6, 2018

Humans frozen

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, cryonics, life extension

Frozen corpses could be brought back to life and made to look YOUNGER than when they died using stem cell injections, claims expert…


EXCLUSIVE: Dennis Kowalski, President of the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute, has claimed scientists could revive a frozen human corpse by using stem cells to help repair damaged cells.

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Mar 6, 2018

The tyranny of algorithms is part of our lives: soon they could rate everything we do

Posted by in categories: finance, information science

Credit scores already control our finances. With personal data being increasingly trawled, our politics and our friendships will be next.

Contact author.

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Mar 6, 2018

Baidu’s creepy new AI can accurately mimic your voice

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Researchers from the Beijing-based technology firm trained its text-to-speech synthesis system on more than 800 hours of audio, taken from around 2,400 different speakers.

To work at its best, Deep Voice requires 100 five-second sections of sound but it can trick a voice recognition system 95 per cent of the time with just ten five-second samples.

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Mar 6, 2018

Undoing Aging With Michael Greve

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education, life extension

On the run up to Undoing Aging 2018, Nicola Bagalà from LEAF did an interview to learn a bit more about our foundation and the story of our involvement in life extension.


As our readers probably already know, from March 15 to March 17 this year, the Undoing Aging 2018 Conference will be held at the Umspannwerk Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany. The event is intended to bring together scientists working on repair-based therapies for aging as well as to give life sciences students—and anyone else who may be interested, really—an occasion to deepen their understanding of the current state of rejuvenation research.

Organised by the Forever Healthy Foundation and the SENS Research Foundation, the conference will feature eminent researchers among its many speakers, such as the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Anthony Atala; Dr. Kristen Fortney, who is an expert on computational drug discovery and aging biomarkers; Dr. Michael West, co-CEO of BioTime and founder of Geron Corporation; Dr. James Kirkland, a world-class expert on cellular senescence; and Dr. Vera Gorbunova, a pioneer of the comparative biology approach to the study of aging and co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center. In addition to its scientific, educational, and networking value, UA2018 will no doubt greatly contribute to the popularisation of this area of research and help spread awareness, both about the problem represented by age-related diseases and the great opportunity we have to finally bring aging under comprehensive medical control within a relatively short time frame.

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Mar 6, 2018

DARPA’s new program is looking for ways to ‘slow biological time’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, military

The Pentagon is hoping to tap into the incredible survival techniques of some of nature’s hardiest creatures to ‘slow biological time’ on the battlefield.

DARPA’s new program, dubbed Biostasis, aims to develop ways to buy extra time for wounded soldiers between the moment of injury and first medical treatment.

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