Lifeboat Foundation

So why not break the AI apart?

In a new study published in PNAS, the team took a page from cognitive neuroscience and built a modular AI agent.

The idea is seemingly simple. Rather than a monolithic AI—a single network that encompasses the entire “self”—the team constructed a modular agent, each part with its own “motivation” and goals but commanding a single “body.” Like a democratic society, the AI system argues within itself to decide on the best response, where the action most likely to yield the largest winning outcome guides its next step.

The transition to chaos is ubiquitous in nonlinear systems. Continuous-wave-driven photonic-chip-based Kerr microresonators exhibit spatiotemporal chaos, also known as chaotic modulation instability.

For more than fifteen years such modulation instability states have been considered impractical for applications compared to their coherent-light-state counterparts, such as soliton states. The latter have been the centerpiece for numerous high-profile application demonstrations, from long-range optical communication to photonic computing.

Now, researchers from the group of Tobias Kippenberg at EPFL have found a new way to harness the unique features of chaotic frequency combs to implement unambiguous and interference-immune massively parallel laser ranging by utilizing the intrinsic random amplitude and phase modulation of the chaotic comb lines.

Images of thousands of Purkinje cells reveal that almost all human cells have multiple primary dendrites. These structures, when observed in mice, facilitate connections with multiple climbing fibers originating from the brain stem.

In 1906, the Spanish researcher Santiago Ramón y Cajal received the Nobel Prize for his trailblazing exploration of the microscopic structures of the brain. His renowned illustrations of Purkinje cells within the cerebellum depict a forest of neuron structures, with multiple large branches sprouting from the cell body and splitting into beautiful, leaf-like patterns.

Despite these early portrayals showing multiple dendrites branching out from the cell body, the enduring consensus among neuroscientists is that Purkinje cells possess only a single main dendrite that forms a connection with a lone climbing fiber originating from the brain stem. However, a recent study from the University of Chicago, recently published in the journal Science, reveals that Cajal’s sketches were indeed accurate — practically all Purkinje cells in the human cerebellum have multiple primary dendrites.

Mature fields of engineering use physics-based models to design systems that work reliably the first time. Here the authors show how a similar approach can be used to design and build a cellular-scale system, protein synthesis, from scratch.

For over a century, biologists have had to contend with a complicated picture of genetics, which they’ve only recently begun to understand.

The U.S. plans to slowly choke china’s access to leading-edge chips and semiconductor manufcturing equipment seems to be bearing fruits, as imports of both chips and fabrication tools fell by over 20%.

The early history of laser cooling is a tale of three Nobel prizes and plenty of hard work, as Chad Orzel reveals.

The island, which has set a goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, has made some progress deploying technologies like district cooling, floating solar and energy-efficient water desalination.

Two of humanity’s most ubiquitous historical materials, cement and carbon black (which resembles very fine charcoal), may form the basis for a novel, low-cost energy storage system, according to a new study. The technology could facilitate the use of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal power by allowing energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations in renewable energy supply.

The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor—an alternative to batteries—that could provide storage of electrical energy.

As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.