Lifeboat Foundation

Study explores an ancient lineage of marine invertebrates, including soft corals, pushes back the previous oldest dated example of trait by nearly 300 million years.

According to a new study by scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, bioluminescence originated in animals at least 540 million years ago among a group of marine invertebrates known as octocorals.

The results, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the previous record for the luminous trait’s oldest dated emergence in animals by nearly 300 million years, and could one day help scientists decode why the ability to produce light evolved in the first place.

THE END OF ACADEMIA?

The pandemic and industrial action has caused massive upheaval in the education system in recent years, and many students feel short-changed.

Have you ever looked back on a moment and wondered if you made the right choice? Professor Robert Sapolsky has, but he believes that there was no actual choice at that moment. Professor Sapolsky has staked out an extreme stance in the field: we are nothing more than the sum of our biology, over which we had no control, and its interactions with the environment, over which we also had no control. Explore what it looks like to reject the notion of free will and how doing so can be liberating rather than paralyzing and despairing.

About the Speaker.
Professor Robert Sapolsky is the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor and a professor of biology, of neurology, and of neurosurgery. Over the past thirty years, he has divided his time between the lab, where he studies how stress hormones can damage the brain, and in East Africa, where he studies the impact of chronic stress on the health of baboons.

Continue reading “Determined: Life without Free Will with Robert Sapolsky” »

Humanity will change. Or be replaced. Or go extinct. An exploration of the many potential posthuman offspring of humankind, from the biological to the artificial.
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C. M. Kosemen YouTube: / cmkosemen.
C. M. Kosemen Patreon: / cmkosemen.
C. M. Kosemen Website: http://www.cmkosemen.com/

What do you imagine when I say the future of human evolution?

Continue reading “The Future of Human Evolution?” »

The OpenAI Startup Fund, a venture fund related to — but technically separate from — OpenAI that invests in early-stage, typically AI-related companies across education, law and the sciences, has quietly closed a $15 million tranche.

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, two unnamed investors contributed the $15 million in new cash on or around April 19. The paperwork was submitted on April 25, and mentions Ian Hathaway, the OpenAI Startup Fund’s manager and sole partner.

The capital was transferred to a legal entity called a special purpose vehicle, or SPV, associated with the OpenAI Startup Fund: OpenAI Startup Fund SPV II, L.P.

Among the myriad of projects that challenge traditional norms and offer innovative approaches to gaming and game development, hand gesture-based systems undeniably stand in a league of their own, a fact that’s recently been reaffirmed by Programmer and ML enthusiast Ayaan Khan.

Over on LinkedIn, Ayaan presented an impressive setup he devised during his high school years that enables one to play racing games by simply waving fingers in the air and making different hand gestures in front of a webcam. Inspired by the idea of combining technology with gaming, the system allows users to steer virtual cars by detecting which fingers are displayed to the camera, offering a truly unique gaming experience.

In the demo shared by Ayaan, he showed how the system can be utilized to play EA’s 2017 racing game, Need for Speed Payback. While the developer refrained from revealing the inner workings of his system, he hinted that it relies primarily on Python, OpenCV, and MediaPipe, providing a clue for aspiring developers interested in replicating the setup. You can check out Ayaan’s original post by clicking this link.

Revision bots, design-your-own-course companions, even mock interview coaches: Experts say that edtech is facing disproportionate disruption from generative AI, and interestingly, from older, non-tech learners in India.

Humanoid robots are robots that resemble and act like humans. Typically engineered to imitate authentic human expressions, interactions and movements, these robots are often outfitted with an array of cameras, sensors and, more recently, AI and machine learning technologies.

While more humanoid robots are being introduced into the world and making a positive impact in industries like logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and hospitality, their use is still limited, and development costs are high.

Continue reading “Top 22 Humanoid Robots in Use Right Now” »

Quantum chaos focuses on the quantum manifestations of classical chaos. A characteristic of classical chaos is the exponential sensitivity of the dynamics with respect to infinitesimal changes in the initial conditions. Thus, to classify classical dynamics it is sufficient to follow phase space trajectories starting infinitesimally close to each other and to determine the evolution of their distances with respect to each other with time. Because of the uncertainty relation, this is no longer possible in the corresponding quantum system. One important aspect of quantum chaos is the understanding of features of the classical dynamics in terms of the fluctuation properties in the energy spectra of closed quantum systems or of the fluctuations exhibited by the scattering matrix elements describing open ones. The fluctuation properties are predicted to be universal, that is, to be the same for systems belonging to the same universality class and exhibiting the same chaotic behavior in the corresponding classical dynamics and to be describable by random matrix theory. Furthermore, random-matrix models that had been developed for the scattering matrix associated with compound-nuclear reactions have been shown to be applicable to quantum-chaotic scattering processes. A second important aspect within the field of quantum chaos concerns the semiclassical approach. In this context, one of the most important achievements was the periodic orbit theory pioneered by Gutzwiller, which led to understanding the impact of the classical dynamics on the properties of the quantum system in terms of purely classical quantities. The focus of research within the field of quantum chaos has been extended to relativistic quantum systems and to many-body quantum systems with focus on random matrix theory and the semiclassical approach. In distinction to single-particle systems, many-body systems like atomic nuclei do not have a classical analogue. In recent years different measures of chaos and models have been developed. Here, a prominent model is the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model which serves as a paradigm for the study of quantum chaos in strongly interacting many-body systems. The school is aimed at PhD students, post-docs and outstanding master students and the first part will provide a survey of single-and many-body quantum chaos and applications based on random-matrix theory and the semiclassical approach. The second part of the school will focus on current aspects of research in the context of many-body quantum chaos. There is no registration fee and limited funds are available for travel and local expenses. Organizers: Hilda Cerdeira (IFT-UNESP, Brazil) Barbara Dietz-Pilatus (Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Republic of Korea)