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Category: education – Page 161

The multiplication of integers is a problem that has kept mathematicians busy since Antiquity. The “Babylonian” method we learn at school requires us to multiply each digit of the first number by each digit of the second one. But when both numbers have a billion digits each, that means a billion times a billion or 1018 operations.

At a rate of a billion operations per second, it would take a computer a little over 30 years to finish the job. In 1971, the mathematicians Schönhage and Strassen discovered a quicker way, cutting calculation time down to about 30 seconds on a modern laptop. In their article, they also predicted that another algorithm—yet to be found—could do an even faster job. Joris van der Hoeven, a CNRS researcher from the École Polytechnique Computer Science Laboratory LIX, and David Harvey from the University of New South Wales (Australia) have found that algorithm.

They present their work in a new article that is available to the through the online HAL archive. But one problem raised by Schönhage et Strassen remains to be solved: proving that no quicker method exists. This poses a new challenge for theoretical science.

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AI Overlords

Musk has repeatedly warned of evil AI overlords in the past, saying that AI could become “an immortal dictator from which we could never escape” in a 2018 documentary called “Do You Trust This Computer?”

Most of what Neuralink is working on, including any plans for a brain computer interface, are still tightly under wraps. In one tantalizing clue, Bloomberg recently reported on a still unpublished academic paper by five authors who have been employed by or associated with Neuralink — though it’s unclear whether Musk’s tweet referred to their work.

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In a proof-of-principle study in mice, scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report the creation of a specialized gel that acts like a lymph node to successfully activate and multiply cancer-fighting immune system T-cells. The work puts scientists a step closer, they say, to injecting such artificial lymph nodes into people and sparking T-cells to fight disease.

In the past few years, a wave of discoveries has advanced new techniques to use T-cells – a type of white blood cell – in cancer treatment. To be successful, the cells must be primed, or taught, to spot and react to molecular flags that dot the surfaces of cancer cells. The job of educating T-cells this way typically happens in lymph nodes, small, bean-shaped glands found all over the body that house T-cells. But in patients with cancer and immune system disorders, that learning process is faulty, or doesn’t happen.

To address such defects, current T-cell booster therapy requires physicians to remove T-cells from the blood of a patient with cancer and inject the cells back into the patient after either genetically engineering or activating the cells in a laboratory so they recognize cancer-linked molecular flags.

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Ryan Weed updates the work at Positron Dynamics at Space Access 2019. Positron Dynamics has completed the NASA NIAC study. They are applying for some Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

Positron Dynamics will use Krypton isotopes to generate positrons. They would breed more Krypton isotopes. They sidestep the issue of antimatter storage. It would take 10 school buses of volume at the Brillouin limit to trap 1 microgram.

They are slowing the positrons that are generated. Krypton 79 isotope to generate hot positrons. Use their system to moderate the positrons so they can be used.

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In the desert hills of China’s Gansu province, a company called C-Space has just opened “Mars Base 1,” a simulated Martian base of operations for future astronauts. Plans for the base, currently an educational facility, include expansion—becoming more of a tourist destination soon, adding a space-themed hotel and restaurant. Photographers were on hand as some of the first student groups arrived to tour this vision of Mars in the China’s Gobi desert.

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Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed.

Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, an international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects brain cells to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.

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  • Researchers figure out a new way to pair perovskites with silicon for a solar boost.
  • Hawaiian Electric sets new goals for solar and storage.
  • Chicago officially commits to its 100% renewable energy goal for 2035.
  • Anaheim builds nine new solar projects at public schools.
  • Amazon employees want the company to take action on climate change, stop supporting fossil fuels.

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The Internet comprises a decentralized global system that serves humanity’s collective effort to generate, process, and store data, most of which is handled by the rapidly expanding cloud. A stable, secure, real-time system may allow for interfacing the cloud with the human brain. One promising strategy for enabling such a system, denoted here as a “human brain/cloud interface” (“B/CI”), would be based on technologies referred to here as “neuralnanorobotics.” Future neuralnanorobotics technologies are anticipated to facilitate accurate diagnoses and eventual cures for the ∼400 conditions that affect the human brain. Neuralnanorobotics may also enable a B/CI with controlled connectivity between neural activity and external data storage and processing, via the direct monitoring of the brain’s ∼86 × 10 neurons and ∼2 × 1014 synapses. Subsequent to navigating the human vasculature, three species of neuralnanorobots (endoneurobots, gliabots, and synaptobots) could traverse the blood–brain barrier (BBB), enter the brain parenchyma, ingress into individual human brain cells, and autoposition themselves at the axon initial segments of neurons (endoneurobots), within glial cells (gliabots), and in intimate proximity to synapses (synaptobots). They would then wirelessly transmit up to ∼6 × 1016 bits per second of synaptically processed and encoded human–brain electrical information via auxiliary nanorobotic fiber optics (30 cm) with the capacity to handle up to 1018 bits/sec and provide rapid data transfer to a cloud based supercomputer for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction. A neuralnanorobotically enabled human B/CI might serve as a personalized conduit, allowing persons to obtain direct, instantaneous access to virtually any facet of cumulative human knowledge. Other anticipated applications include myriad opportunities to improve education, intelligence, entertainment, traveling, and other interactive experiences. A specialized application might be the capacity to engage in fully immersive experiential/sensory experiences, including what is referred to here as “transparent shadowing” (TS). Through TS, individuals might experience episodic segments of the lives of other willing participants (locally or remote) to, hopefully, encourage and inspire improved understanding and tolerance among all members of the human family.

“We’ll have nanobots that… connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud… Our thinking will be a… biological and non-biological hybrid.”

— Ray Kurzweil, TED 2014

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