Lifeboat Foundation

When ultrafast electrons are deflected, they emit light—synchrotron radiation. This is used in so-called storage rings in which magnets force the particles onto a closed path. This light is longitudinally incoherent and consists of a broad spectrum of wavelengths.

Its high brilliance makes it an excellent tool for materials research. Monochromators can be used to pick out individual wavelengths from the spectrum, but this reduces the radiant power by many orders of magnitude to values of a few watts only.

But what if a storage ring were instead to deliver monochromatic, coherent light with outputs of several kilowatts, analogous to a high-power laser? Physicist Alexander Chao and his doctoral student Daniel Ratner found an answer to this challenge in 2010: if the electron bunches orbiting in a storage ring become shorter than the wavelength of the light they emit, the emitted radiation becomes coherent and therefore millions of times more powerful.

“Automated logistics roads are designed to get the most out of road space by utilizing hard shoulders, median strips, and tunnels beneath the roadway,” Muramatsu explained.

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The project involves installing automated conveyor belts in tunnels beneath major highways, on above-ground tracks in the middle of roads, and along hard shoulders. This innovative approach aims to optimize existing road space and enhance freight movement efficiency.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams blasted off on June 5 — the start of a test flight that was expected to last just a week or so.

An international team of astronomers has performed follow-up observations of a nearby alien world known as TOI-1685 b. Results of the observations, published May 21 on the pre-print server arXiv, indicate that TOI-1685 b is a hot and rocky alien world with an Earth-like density.

The so-called “super-Earths” are planets more massive than Earth but not exceeding the mass of Neptune. Although the term “super-Earth” refers only to the mass of the planet, it is also used by astronomers to describe planets bigger than Earth but smaller than the so-called “mini-Neptunes” (with a radius between two to four Earth radii).

Discovered in 2021, TOI-1685 b is an ultra-short-period (USP) super-Earth orbiting an M-dwarf star about half the size and mass of the sun. The system is located some 122.5 light years away.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station were instructed to shelter inside their respective spacecraft after reports indicated pieces of a broken-up satellite were headed their way.

Specifically, the remains of a derelict spacecraft called Resurs-P 1, a Russian commercial Earth observation satellite that launched in June 2013, were spotted by space junk monitor LeoLabs.

“Early indications are that a non-operational Russian spacecraft, Resurs P1 (SATNO 39186), released a number of fragments between 13:05 UTC 26 June and 00:51 UTC 27 June,” Leolabs tweeted late Wednesday evening.

“Supergranules are a significant component of the heat transport mechanisms of the sun, but they present a serious challenge for scientists to understand,” said Dr. Shravan Hanasoge.

How does the Sun’s interior function and produce the energy needed to allow life to exist on the Earth? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as a team of international researchers led by New York University Abu Dhabi (NYU Abu Dhabi) investigated how the Sun delivers heat from its interior to the surface, also known as convection, through its supergranules, whose individual structures have diameters three times greater than the Earth. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the Sun’s convection processes while also challenging previous hypotheses about the Sun’s convection, as well.

For the study, the researchers conducted one of the most in-depth analyses of the Sun’s supergranuales using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which is in geosynchronous orbit around the Earth, to examine approximately 23,000 supergranules across the Sun’s surface. The team used sound waves to examine the supergranules’ interiors, which previous studies have also done, as well. Through this, the team was able to measure upflows and downflows with incredible precision compared to past studies.

Continue reading “Revealing the Interior Structure of the Sun’s Supergranules” »

In one of the final chapters of his book: Reality+: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy, David Chalmers asks, have we fallen from the Garden of Eden? “Eden” in this case is a metaphor for living in a world where everything is as it seems, matching our pre-theoretical view of reality.

In Eden, everything exists in a three dimensional Euclidean space. And time flows from one moment to the next with an absolute now across all of space. In Eden, color is an intrinsic property of objects, so the apple really is red. And objects like rocks are truly solid. In Eden, we have free will in the classic contra-causal sense of that term.

Once we lived in Eden. But then there was a fall. We ate of the Tree of Science and were cast out.

Imagine waking up one day to the realization that everything you’ve ever known—the universe, the stars, your own thoughts—could be nothing more than an elaborate computer simulation crafted by an advanced civilization. This is the audacious, mind-bending premise explored by philosopher Nick Bostrom in “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Through rigorous reasoning and a blend of cutting-edge technology and philosophical inquiry, Bostrom challenges our understanding of reality itself, posing that the odds we are living in a simulated world may be profoundly higher than we ever considered. As you delve into this thought-provoking investigation, you might just find that questioning the nature of your own existence becomes more thrilling—and unsettling—than any work of science fiction.

Recent advances in deep learning have allowed artificial intelligence (AI) to reach near human-level performance in many sensory, perceptual, linguistic, and cognitive tasks. There is a growing need, however, for novel, brain-inspired cognitive architectures. The Global Workspace Theory (GWT) refers to a large-scale system integrating and distributing information among networks of specialized modules to create higher-level forms of cognition and awareness. We argue that the time is ripe to consider explicit implementations of this theory using deep-learning techniques. We propose a roadmap based on unsupervised neural translation between multiple latent spaces (neural networks trained for distinct tasks, on distinct sensory inputs and/or modalities) to create a unique, amodal Global Latent Workspace (GLW). Potential functional advantages of GLW are reviewed, along with neuroscientific implications.

Keywords: attention; broadcast; consciousness; grounding; latent space; multimodal translation.

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