On October 16, 2017, an international group of astronomers and physicists excitedly reported the first simultaneous detection of light and gravitational waves from the same source—a merger of two neutron stars. Now, a team that includes several University of Maryland astronomers has identified a direct relative of that historic event.
“This may be the best example of an animal masquerading as a plant that we have,” biologist Nicholas Paul, an expert on seaweed and algae at Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast, said in an email. He wasn’t involved with the new study.
The new species exclusively feed on the seaweed genus Caulerpa and are found throughout the Pacific, including Malaysia, Australia, Guam, and the Philippines. Humans consider the algae’s caviar-like bulbs, called sea grapes, a delicacy—but few sea creatures dare eat the stuff, making them highly invasive. Thanks to the global aquarium trade, the algae has invaded waters from the Mediterranean to Japan.
MIT has launched the Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, a $1 billion center dedicated to “reshaping its academic program” around AI. The idea, said MIT president L. Rafael Reif, is to use AI, machine learning and data science with other academic disciplines to “educate the bilinguals of the future,” defining bilingual as those working in biology, chemistry, politics, history and linguistics with computing skills that can be used in their field.
Is working to pioneer the full scope of everything that exists a duty? I have been contemplating aspects of that question for some years now. Here I move in the direction of articulating its nature and making the case by drawing out correlations with life extension and Immanuel Kant’s thoughts in The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics.
“IV. What are the Ends which are also Duties? They are: A. Our own perfection, B. Happiness of others.”
His notion of “categorical imperative” is that of a universally applicable, non-contradictory, absolute necessity which everyone can use pure practical reason to understand without it needing to be experienced or taught to them.
He says that “ethics may also be defined as the system of the ends of the pure practical reason.”
Scientists at TU Wien, the University of Innsbruck and the ÖAW have for the first time demonstrated a wave effect that can lead to measurement errors in the optical position estimation of objects. The work now published in Nature Physics could have consequences for optical microscopy and optical astronomy, but could also play a role in position measurements using sound, radar, or gravitational waves.
With modern optical imaging techniques, the position of objects can be measured with a precision that reaches a few nanometers. These techniques are used in the laboratory, for example, to determine the position of atoms in quantum experiments.
“We want to know the position of our quantum bits very precisely so that we can manipulate and measure them with laser beams,” explains Gabriel Araneda from the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck.
Levitation is often thought of as the realm of magicians or The Jetsons, but it is technically possible. That said, the tech seems to be moving pretty slowly. Now, researchers at the University of Sussex have developed SoundBender, a technology that bends sound waves around obstacles to acoustically levitate objects above them.
Some of Allen’s philanthropy has taken a scientific bent: Allen founded the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003, pouring $500 million into the non-profit that aims to give scientists the tools and data they need to probe how brain works. One recent project, the Allen Brain Observatory, provides an open-access “catalogue of activity in the mouse’s brain,” Saskia de Vries, senior scientist on the project, said in a video. That kind of data is key to piecing together how the brain processes information.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died today from complications with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 65. Allen said earlier this month that he was being treated for the disease.
Allen was a childhood friend of Bill Gates, and together, the two started Microsoft in 1975. He left the company in 1983 while being treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma and remained a board member with the company through 2000. He was first treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009, before seeing it go into remission.
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