The late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, “Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems become more and more advanced, can the same statement apply to computers?
According to many technology moguls and policymakers, the answer is this: We’re not quite there yet.
“That in general is good advice for people creating companies,” Musk said to students. “Start with the minimally useful system.”
Posted in physics
Scientists Have Confirmed the Existence of Gravitational Waves.
We just found gravitational waves!! Scientists at LIGO have confirmed!
“The finding: There’s little correlation between a group’s collective intelligence and the IQs of its individual members. But if a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises.”
Interesting. What do you think of this?
A mammal brain has been defrosted from cryogenic storage in an almost perfect state for the first time. This breakthrough, accomplished using a rabbit brain, brings us one – albeit tiny – step closer to the prospect of reanimating a human brain that has been cryogenically preserved.
After death, organs begin to decay, but we can delay this by cooling these tissues, just like freezing food. But in the same way that a frozen strawberry becomes soggy when defrosted, it is difficult to perfectly preserve mammals at cold temperatures. We, and strawberries, contain large amounts of water, which freezes into ice crystals that damage cells.
Cryoprotectants can prevent this ice damage, working like medical-grade antifreezes and preventing organs from freezing. This works in small worms and rabbit kidneys, but it needs to be administered quickly, which usually causes brains to dehydrate and shrink.
A team of researchers has achieved the fastest ever transmission rate for digital information between a single transmitter and receiver, sending data optically at a frankly ridiculous 1.125 terabits per second.
The result, achieved by scientists at University College London, uses a series of signal processing techniques to achieve the speed. But first, the lead researcher, Dr Robert Maher, puts the rate into context in a press release:
For comparison this is almost 50,000 times greater than the average speed of a UK broadband connection of 24 megabits per second… To give an example, the data rate we have achieved would allow the entire HD Game of Thrones series to be downloaded within one second.
An international group of scientists, with the help of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), have found proof of something physicists have spent decades expecting for, subatomic particles acting in a way that challenges the Standard Model. By using the LHC, scientists observed conditions that violate the standard rules of particle physics. The group of physicists looked at data gathered from the LHC’s first run from year 2011–2012, a run made famed for the discovery of the Higgs boson, and found the proof they were looking for: Leptons disobeying the Standard Model. Leptons are a group of subatomic particles consist of of three different variations: the tau, the electron, and the muon. Electrons are very stable, however both the tau and muon decay very fast.
Image credit: Michael Taylor/Shutterstock.
A study of cadavers reveals a dramatic decrease of vitamin B12 in the brain across the ages but also among young people with autism and schizophrenia.
