The first full-color images from the James Webb Telescope are gorgeous, but they’re also full of substantial science.
Images of galaxy clusters, deep fields, dying stars, birthing stars, and exoplanet spectra electrified the astronomy community Tuesday.
An international team consisting of Russian and German scientists has made a breakthrough in the creation of seemingly impossible materials. They have managed to create the world‘s first quantum metamaterial which can be used as a control element in superconducting electrical circuits.
Metamaterials.
Metamaterials are engineered materials that have properties not usually found in nature.
Recently, NIRISS, one of NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.” Its core values are “safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion.”
Many students who enroll in a science course at university do not complete it.
Instead, because science courses are difficult, the majority of them drop out in their second year.
Solving the 3D structure at near atomic level resolution, one of the world’s hardest, giant jigsaw puzzles—the nuclear pore complex—the largest molecular machine in human cells, with structure-based AI prediction @ScienceMagazine
Amazon and Max Planck Society announced the formation of a Science Hub—a collaboration that marks the first Amazon Science Hub to exist outside the United State… See more.
Amazon and Max Planck Society (also known as Max-Planck-Gesellschaft or MPG) today announced the formation of a Science Hub. The collaboration marks the first Amazon Science Hub to exist outside the United States and will focus on advancing artificial intelligence research and development throughout Germany.
The hub’s goal is to advance the frontiers of AI, computer vision, and machine learning research to ensure that research is creating solutions whose benefits are shared broadly across all sectors of society. To achieve that end, the collaboration will include sponsored research; open research; industrial fellowships co-supervised by Max Planck and Amazon; and community events funding to enrich the MPG and Amazon research communities.
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Stuart Firestein Science is a fundamentally optimistic enterprise. More than a cheery disposition, it is the source of a philosophical outlook that we might call ‘optimistical’. It reliably produces fundamental and actionable knowledge about the world. We are able to take for granted, in a way even our recent ancestors never imagined, the idea of progress. The engines behind science, surprisingly, are ignorance, the unknown, failure, and, perhaps most vexingly, uncertainty. In recent decades, science has undergone a change in perspective and practice — from viewing the universe like a clockwork regimented by laws and formulas to recognizing it as irreducibly complex and uncertain. Perhaps counter intuitively this has freed science to exploit previously unimaginable possibilities and opportunities. It has led to a deeper understanding of the nature of things and to the production of technologies such as lasers, microchips, the internet, genetics, and many more. And yet socially and societally we remain mired in a 19th century view of deterministic science. We might instead learn to revel in the adventure of navigable uncertainty and take advantage of the creative opportunities of a world where we can confidently say ‘it could be otherwise’. Possibility of this sort is the rarest and purest form of optimism. Stuart Firestein is a neuroscientist and the former Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, where he researches the vertebrate olfactory system. He is also a member of SFI’s Fractal Faculty.
This paper provides evidence that a theoretical computer science (TCS) perspective can add to our understanding of consciousness by providing a simple framework for employing tools from computational complexity theory and machine learning. Just as the Turing machine is a simple model to define and explore computation, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) is a simple model to define and explore consciousness (and related concepts). The CTM is not a model of the brain or cognition, nor is it intended to be, but a simple substrate-independent computational model of (the admittedly complex concept of) consciousness. This paper is intended to introduce this approach, show its possibilities, and stimulate research in consciousness from a TCS perspective.
