Thinks he now has the answer to time travel — but you thankfully won’t be needing a DeLorean like the hit 8’0s movie Back to the Future A scientist believes he has finally cracked the code to enable time travel after having a big ‘eureka’ moment as he lay in hospital.
A team of scientists, including physicist Eugene Demler from ETH Zurich, for the first time, closely observed how magnetic correlations play a role in mediating hole pairing.
Superconductivity only occurs in pairs. Therefore, in order for conductance without electrical resistance to take place in specific materials, the charge carriers must pair up. In traditional superconductors, the current is made up of electrons and pairing is facilitated by the collective movements of the crystal lattice, referred to as phonons. This mechanism is well understood. However, in recent decades, a growing number of materials have been found that don’t fit within this conventional theoretical framework.
The leading theories for unconventional superconductors suggest that magnetic fluctuations, not phonons, lead to pairing in these systems, — and surprisingly, magnetic interactions arise from the repulsive Coulomb interaction between electrons. However, verifying these models in experiments is extremely difficult.
An ongoing study led by Cedars-Sinai has demonstrated that certain gut bacteria may increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes while others may provide protection against it. These are early results from a prospective study.
According to the study, which was published in the journal Diabetes, higher levels of the bacterium Coprococcus are associated with improved insulin.
Insulin is a hormone that regulates the level of glucose (sugar) in the blood. It is produced by the pancreas and released into the bloodstream when the level of glucose in the blood rises, such as after a meal. Insulin helps to transport glucose from the bloodstream into the cells, where it can be used for energy or stored for later use. Insulin also helps to regulate the metabolism of fat and protein. In individuals with diabetes, their body doesn’t produce enough insulin or doesn’t respond properly to insulin, leading to high blood sugar levels, which can lead to serious health problems if left untreated.
Will a machine learning AI be the way we find out we are not alone in the Universe?
In a January 2023 published paper in Nature Astronomy, a collaboration by authors from universities in Toronto, Canada, Berkeley in California, Manchester in the United Kingdom, Malta, Queensland and Western Australia, and the SETI Institute, created a machine learning algorithm variational autoencoder, a type of neural network that learns through the unsupervised study of unlabelled data. They used it to try and find technosignatures contained within 150 Terabytes of radio traffic from 820 nearby stars. The data source came from the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the world’s largest steerable radio telescope. This data had previously been searched in 2017 using traditional techniques.
Radio signals are abundant throughout the Universe and they represent the most effective way for us to find out if we are a solo act or one of many technical civilizations. Our contribution to radio traffic has been going on for more than a century which means an alien civilization within a hundred light-years from us with technology similar to ours can now detect us.
Continue reading “Will AI Make First Contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence?” »
Over 1 million researchers have used the AI breakthrough that helps scientists better understand diseases. Here’s how AlphaFold came to be.
A geomagnetic storm caused by a series of recent explosive events on the sun has brought spectacular auroras to parts of Earth in recent days.
Astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) 250 miles above our planet have also been enjoying the amazing light show, with ISS inhabitant Josh Cassada sharing a stunning image that he captured just recently.
“Absolutely unreal,” Cassada tweeted alongside the image, which shows not only the gorgeous greens of the aurora, but also city lights on Earth, and part of the space station.
Is self-consciousness necessary for consciousness? The answer is yes. So there you have it—the answer is yes. This was my response to a question I was asked to address in a recent AEON piece (https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference). What follows is based upon the notes for that essay, with a special focus on self-organization, self-evidencing and self-modeling. I will try to substantiate my (polemic) answer from the perspective of a physicist. In brief, the argument goes as follows: if we want to talk about creatures, like ourselves, then we have to identify the characteristic behaviors they must exhibit. This is fairly easy to do by noting that living systems return to a set of attracting states time and time again. Mathematically, this implies the existence of a Lyapunov function that turns out to be model evidence (i.e., self-evidence) in Bayesian statistics or surprise (i.e., self-information) in information theory. This means that all biological processes can be construed as performing some form of inference, from evolution through to conscious processing. If this is the case, at what point do we invoke consciousness? The proposal on offer here is that the mind comes into being when self-evidencing has a temporal thickness or counterfactual depth, which grounds inferences about the consequences of my action. On this view, consciousness is nothing more than inference about my future; namely, the self-evidencing consequences of what I could do.
There are many phenomena in the natural sciences that are predicated on the notion of “self”; namely, self-information, self-organization, self-assembly, self-evidencing, self-modeling, self-consciousness and self-awareness. To what extent does one entail the others? This essay tries to unpack the relationship among these phenomena from first (variational) principles. Its conclusion can be summarized as follows: living implies the existence of “lived” states that are frequented in a characteristic way. This mandates the optimization of a mathematical function called “surprise” (or self-information) in information theory and “evidence” in statistics. This means that biological processes can be construed as an inference process; from evolution through to conscious processing. So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action.
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite is an all-sky survey mission that will discover thousands of exoplanets around nearby bright stars. TESS launched April 18, 2018 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
- and Yes TESS found a second exoplanet like Earth over 60 million light years away. A link about it is in this one.
Got a voucher? Enter your voucher code 
Sunday – Thursday 9pm AEDT or watch on-demandGet Flash
Skyrmions are extremely small with diameters in the nanoscale, and they behave as particles suited for information storage and logic technologies. In 1961, Tony Skyrme formulated a manifestation of the first topological defect to model a particle and coined it as skyrmions. Such particles with topologically stable configurations can launch a promising route toward establishing high-density magnetic and phononic (a discrete unit of quantum vibrational mechanical energy) information processing routes.
In a new report published in Science Advances, Liyun Cao and a team of researchers at the University of Lorraine CNRS, France, experimentally developed phononic skyrmions as new topological structures by using the three-dimensional (3D) hybrid spin of elastic waves. The researchers observed the frequency-independent spin configurations and their progression toward the formation of ultra-broadband phononic skyrmions that could be produced on any solid structure.
