Lifeboat Foundation

First written: Dec 14, 2018, Last update: Jan 2, 2019.

How can we think about the relationship between the conscious and the physical? In this essay, I wish to propose a way of thinking about it that might be fruitful and surprisingly intuitive, namely to think of consciousness as waves.

The idea is quite simple: one kind of conscious experience corresponds to, or rather conforms to description in terms of, one kind of wave. And by combining different kinds of waves, we can obtain an experience with many different properties in one.

Are dark matter and dark energy stable and constant? Since we don’t understand their true physical nature, we can’t be sure. But astronomers can see if they vary depending on which direction in space they look. This is a test of whether the universe is lopsided or the same everywhere (the physics term for this is isotropic). It turns out that the amount of dark matter surrounding galaxies is the same in every direction, and the strength of dark energy is also the same in every direction.

To see whether the influence of dark matter and dark energy has changed over cosmic time, astronomers look deep into space. Distant light is old light, so telescopes act as time machines, probing billions of years into the past. By measuring the redshift and brightness of distant objects, astronomers map out the expansion history of the universe. Dark matter dominated for most of that history since the Big Bang. That’s because when the universe was smaller, the gravity exerted by dark matter was stronger, while the force exerted by dark energy has stayed the same. Now is the only time in the entire history of the universe when the two entities’ influences are about equal. In the future, the effects of dark energy will increasingly dominate, and the universe will accelerate forever.

Multi-stepions between a variety of topological spin textures have been unveiled in a centrosymmetric magnet, which may enable efficient multistate memory and logic devices.

If black holes are just regions of spacetime, where the slope of spacetime is infinite at it’s center, how can black holes even move? When matter moves through spacetime, it bends the spacetime around it, but if black holes are just regions of spacetime, how can a region in spacetime bend other regions of spacetime? And another question arises. If black holes are just regions in spacetime, how can it bend the spacetime around it, so it can remain a black hole, if there is no matter to continuously bend it?

Current AI training methods burn colossal amounts of energy to learn, but the human brain sips just 20 W. Swiss startup FinalSpark is now selling access to cyborg biocomputers, running up to four living human brain organoids wired into silicon chips.

The human brain communicates within itself and with the rest of the body mainly through electrical signals; sights, sounds and sensations are all converted into electrical pulses before our brains can perceive them. This makes brain tissue highly compatible with silicon chips, at least for as long as you can keep it alive.

Continue reading “Living brain-cell biocomputers are now training on dopamine” »

The origin of life on Earth has long been a mystery that has eluded scientists. A key question is how much of the history of life on Earth is lost to time. It is quite common for a single species to “phase out” using a biochemical reaction, and if this happens across enough species, such reactions could effectively be “forgotten” by life on Earth.

Transistors are the basis for microchips and the whole electronic industry. The invention of transistors, by Bardeen and Brattain in 1947, awarded with a Nobel prize, is regarded as one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century.

Scientists have just identified the formation processes of some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies in the turbulent era of the Cosmic Dawn.

JWST observations of the early Universe around 13.3 to 13.4 billion years ago – just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang – have revealed telltale signs of gas reservoirs being actively slurped into three newly forming and growing galaxies.

“You could say that these are the first ‘direct’ images of galaxy formation that we’ve ever seen,” says astrophysicist Kasper Elm Heintz from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, who led the research.

Despite their performance, current AI models have major weaknesses: they require enormous resources and are indecipherable. Help may be on the way.

By Manon Bischoff

ChatGPT has triggered an onslaught of artificial intelligence hype. The arrival of OpenAI’s large-language-model-powered (LLM-powered) chatbot forced leading tech companies to follow suit with similar applications as quickly as possible. The race is continuing to develop a powerful AI model. Meta came out with an LLM called Llama at the beginning of 2023, and Google presented its Bard model (now called Gemini) last year as well. Other providers, such as Anthropic, have also delivered impressive AI applications.