Lifeboat Foundation

The universe is kind of an impossible object. It has an inside but no outside; it’s a one-sided coin. This Möbius architecture presents a unique challenge for cosmologists, who find themselves in the awkward position of being stuck inside the very system they’re trying to comprehend.

It’s a situation that Lee Smolin has been thinking about for most of his career. A physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin works at the knotty intersection of quantum mechanics, relativity and cosmology. Don’t let his soft voice and quiet demeanor fool you — he’s known as a rebellious thinker and has always followed his own path. In the 1960s Smolin dropped out of high school, played in a rock band called Ideoplastos, and published an underground newspaper. Wanting to build geodesic domes like R. Buckminster Fuller, Smolin taught himself advanced mathematics — the same kind of math, it turned out, that you need to play with Einstein’s equations of general relativity. The moment he realized this was the moment he became a physicist. He studied at Harvard University and took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, eventually becoming a founding faculty member at the Perimeter Institute.

Continue reading “We’re Stuck Inside the Universe. Lee Smolin Has an Idea for How to Study It Anyway” »

The quantum computer Sycamore reportedly performed a calculation that even the most powerful supercomputers available can’t reproduce.

Dr Neal also said there were safety risks with people buying the equipment from online sites and doing the procedures from home.

The Scottish government told BBC Scotland’s The Nine it intended to regulate procedures carried out by non-healthcare professionals and it was consulting on how this could be done.

Meet the people seeking to improve their bodies by implanting technology such as microchips.

A new microfluidic device for long-term tissue culture.

New book by Caltech astrophysicist Sean Carroll explores the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics and its bizarre implications.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.

Related: from big bang to present: snapshots of our universe through time.

It’s a “precise new approach” to targeting and replacing mutated genes, scientists say.

Intel has unveiled two new processors as part of its Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP) lineup with an aim to accelerate training and inferences drawn from artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Dubbed Spring Crest and Spring Hill, the company showcased the AI-focused chips for the first time on Tuesday at the Hot Chips Conference in Palo Alto, California, an annual tech symposium held every August.

Intel RealSense technologies offer a variety of vision‑based solutions to give your products the ability to understand and perceive the world in 3D. When combined with the Intel Neural Compute Stick 2, which re‑defined the AI at the edge development kit, you get low power, high performance intelligent computer vision at low cost for your prototype.

Depth sensing meets plug-and-play AI at the edge inferencing with Intel® RealSense™ stereo depth cameras bundled with the Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2.