Lifeboat Foundation

Rural communities are often built on agriculture and livestock. That means they’re also dependent upon a strong irrigation system – a potential weakness as the global water crisis grows. To more efficiently manage and coordinate the use of a scarce water supply in agricultural communities, a team from the Polytechnic University of Madrid proposed a blockchain-based automatic water control system.

“We investigated how blockchain technologies can be used to solve the problem of user competition for scarce resources in communities,” said Borja Bordel, the project’s lead investigator. “We particularize the problem to the irrigation communities, where independent users must trust a system that automates a fair and trustworthy distribution of the available water resources, according to an individual quota set by the community and the consumption forecasts of its users.”

Rules are paramount for the proposed system and must be established upfront by the community of users. In a prosumer environment, users establish regulations for their individual and community water quotas. Those regulations are then taken by a transformation engine and are built, compiled, and deployed. A simple infrastructure of common valves and pumps are complemented by interactive electronic devices and allow a SmartContract to oversee decision-making and control algorithms, as well as the state of the water sources.

Wave function represents the quantum state of an atom, including the position and movement states of the nucleus and electrons. For decades researchers have struggled to determine the exact wave function when analyzing a normal chemical molecule system, which has its nuclear position fixed and electrons spinning. Fixing wave function has proven problematic even with help from the Schrödinger equation.

Previous research in this field used a Slater-Jastrow Ansatz application of quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods, which takes a linear combination of Slater determinants and adds the Jastrow multiplicative term to capture the close-range correlations.

Now, a group of DeepMind researchers have brought QMC to a higher level with the Fermionic Neural Network — or Fermi Net — a neural network with more flexibility and higher accuracy. Fermi Net takes the electron information of the molecules or chemical systems as inputs and outputs their estimated wave functions, which can then be used to determine the energy states of the input chemical systems.

To evaluate the performance of robotics algorithms and controllers, researchers typically use software simulations or real physical robots. While these may appear as two distinct evaluation strategies, there is a whole other range of possibilities that combine elements of both.

In a recent study, researchers at Texas A&M University and the University of South Carolina have set out to examine evaluation and execution scenarios that lie at an intersection between simulations and real implementations. Their investigation, outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv, specifically focuses on instances in which real robots perceive the world via their sensors, where the environment they sense could be seen as a mere illusion.

“We consider problems in which robots conspire to present a view of the world that differs from reality,” Dylan Shell and Jason O’Kane, the researchers who carried out the study, wrote in their paper. “The inquiry is motivated by the problem of validating robot behavior physically despite there being a discrepancy between the robots we have at hand and those we wish to study, or the environment for testing that is available versus that which is desired, or other potential mismatches in this vein.”

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are often at odds, but there’s at least one place where those two space-industry rivals are on the same page: the newly unveiled Space Talent job database.

The search engine for careers in the space industry is a project of Space Angels, a nationwide network designed to link angel investors with space entrepreneurs.

“If you’ve ever considered working in space, this jobs board has 3,000 reasons to make the leap,” Space Angels CEO Chad Anderson said in a tweet.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme longevity and aging ambassador and Founder of Bioquark, interviews Robin Farmanfarmaian, medical futurist, bestselling author, professional speaker, and CEO and Co-Founder of ArO.

Ira Pastor Comments:

Continue reading “Robin Farmanfarmaian’s Mission: To Empower The Healthcare Consumer” »

The code used below is on GitHub.

In this project, we’ll be solving a problem familiar to any physics undergrad — using the Schrödinger equation to find the quantum ground state of a particle in a 1-dimensional box with a potential. However, we’re going to tackle this old standby with a new method: deep learning. Specifically, we’ll use the TensorFlow package to set up a neural network and then train it on random potential functions and their numerically calculated solutions.

Why reinvent the wheel (ground state)? Sure, it’s fun to see a new tool added to the physics problem-solving toolkit, and I needed the practice with TensorFlow. But there’s a far more compelling answer. We know basically everything there is to know about this topic already. The neural network, however, doesn’t know any physics. Crudely speaking, it just finds patterns. Suppose we examine the relative strength of connections between input neurons and output. The structure therein could give us some insight into how the universe “thinks” about this problem. Later, we can apply deep learning to a physics problem where the underlying theory is unknown. By looking at the innards of that neural network, we might learn something new about fundamental physical principles that would otherwise remain obscured from our view. Therein lies the true power of this approach: peering into the mind of the universe itself.

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Classical computers struggle to crack modern encryption. But quantum computers using Shor’s Algorithm make short work of RSA cryptography. Find out how.

Much like US corporations do now.

Debates about rights are frequently framed around the concept of legal personhood. Personhood is granted not just to human beings but also to some non-human entities, such as corporations or governments. Legal entities, aka legal persons, are granted certain privileges and responsibilities by the jurisdictions in which they are recognized, and many such rights are not available to non-person agents. Attempting to secure legal personhood is often seen as a potential pathway to get certain rights and protections for animals¹, fetuses², trees and rivers ³, and artificially intelligent (AI) agents⁴.

It is commonly believed that a new law or judicial ruling is necessary to grant personhood to a new type of entity. But recent legal literature ^5–8 suggests that loopholes in the current law may permit legal personhood to be granted to AI/software without the need to change the law or persuade a court.

Continue reading “Your Software Could Have More Rights Than You” »

Evidence that quantum searches are an ordinary feature of electron behavior may explain the genetic code, one of the greatest puzzles in biology.