Lifeboat Foundation

“The problems arising when interpreting the data from WASP-39b are well known from many other exoplanets — regardless whether they are observed with Kepler, TESS, James Webb, or the future PLATO spacecraft,” said Dr. Nadiia Kostogryz.

While there is currently a myriad of techniques used to both discover exoplanets and calculate their physical characteristics, could other methods be developed to overcome specific data errors? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how a star’s magnetic field can be used to ascertain additional data for an exoplanet, which is traditionally done using conventional exoplanet detection methods, specifically the transit detection method. This study holds the potential to help astronomers establish new methods for discovering and characterizing exoplanets throughout the cosmos.

For the transit method, an exoplanet passes in front of its parent star, causing its starlight to slightly decrease and has been instrumental in discovering and characterizing thousands of exoplanets. However, astronomers have also discovered that a star’s limb darkening, which is the observed edge of the star, causes errors in transit light curves for exoplanets, despite using state-of-the-art atmospheric models to predict observations.

Continue reading “A New Approach to Analyze Exoplanetary Light Curves” »

Joscha Bach principles of synthetic intelligence.

Shared with Dropbox.

Picture this disaster scenario in the making: At an industrial plant, a pipe cracks, spraying a cloud of tiny droplets into the air. Workers, however, are in luck. Within minutes, a laser-based device the size of a small suitcase spots the cloud and tells safety crews what’s in it so they know how to respond.

That’s the vision behind a new project from a team of engineers and chemists at the University of Colorado Boulder, California Institute of Technology, University of California Santa Barbara, and three companies. It’s funded by a new contract from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), part of the federal Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The effort borrows its name, the Standoff Aerosol measUrement Remote Optical Network (SAURON), from the villain in “The Lord of the Rings” book series—a presence who often takes the form of a flaming eye and whose “gaze pierces cloud, shadow, earth.”

An international team of researchers has stumbled upon a remarkable discovery — the first regular molecular fractal in nature.

This fascinating finding, led by groups from the Max Planck Institute and the Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, has unveiled a microbial enzyme that spontaneously assembles into a pattern known as the Sierpinski triangle.

The enzyme, identified as citrate synthase from a cyanobacterium, was discovered by chance. “We stumbled on this structure completely by accident and almost couldn’t believe what we saw when we first took images of it using an electron microscope,” says Franziska Sendker, the study’s first author.

From Words to Numbers.

Your large language model is secretly a capable regressor when given in-context examples.

We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear #regression when given…

Continue reading “Paper page — From Words to Numbers: Your Large Language Model Is Secretly A Capable Regressor When Given In-Context Examples” »

Microsoft presents Rho-1

Not All Tokens Are What You Need https://huggingface.co/papers/2404.

Previous language model pre-training methods have uniformly applied a next-token #prediction #LOSS to all training #tokens.

Continue reading “Rho-1: Not All Tokens Are What You Need” »

Want to experience totality again? Here are the next seven total solar eclipses across the world, from Alaska to Australia.

In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

An enzyme in a cyanobacterium can take the unusual form a triangle containing ever-smaller triangular gaps, making a fractal pattern.

By Alex Wilkins