Month: October 2016

Private exoplanet hunting

Unlike the Kepler Space Telescope—which monitored 100k stars and looked for slight dimming to determine when planets passed in front of their parent stars—Project Blue will use high-contrast imaging. Technical studies have shown that, with an advanced coronagraph to block light from the stars and data processing techniques, such a telescope could reject light from the 2 stars at a rate of 10B to 1. This is sufficient to allow direct imaging of a planet with observations made over the course of several years. Put another way, such an observation system is akin to detecting a firefly next to a lighthouse 16km away.

The proposed telescope should be able to resolve a world that is 0.5 to 1.5 times of the size of Earth and orbiting within the host star’s “habitable zone,” where water theoretically could exist on the surface. Based on Kepler’s data, with 2 Sun-like stars to search around, the odds of at least 1 terrestrial planet in the habitable zone is 80%.

RIP Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 ma old.

For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 2200km long, with 2900 individual reefs and 1050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1625 species of fish, 3000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

2022-08-21: Various coral startups are tackling this problem. I haven’t been able to find a number in centimeters / year for this claim to make it comparable.

Unlike traditional projects, Coral Vita grows their corals on land, and they do this for a few key reasons. Land-based coral farming basically allows us to grow more diverse and resilient corals more affordably and at scale. So corals have a natural ability to adapt to changing conditions, but things are deteriorating in the ocean so quickly— largely due to climate change— that they can’t keep up. So what we’re doing is acclimating the corals. By raising and lowering the temperature of the water, the corals undergo stress. We basically take them to the gym. And in turn harden, which boosts their ability to survive the planet’s warming oceans. Corals also have an ability to make babies, it’s known as coral spawning. So when it comes time for coral spawning, we can then put those already more resilient corals together so that their babies are also gonna be more resilient. This process is called ‘assisted evolution.’ They can also dramatically speed up a coral’s growth rate. The method we rely on to accelerate coral growth rates is known as ‘microfragmenting,’ which is an open-source method that basically allows us to grow corals 50x faster.

2022-10-07: Another huge claim on coral growth. Has anyone combined these techniques?

In nature, coral grows 0.5cm per year through the accretion of minerals dissolved in seawater, which form a thick layer of substrate. But on electrically charged reefs, the electric current takes on some of the heavy lifting needed to deposit essential calcium carbonate on the reef. The coating could thicken at a rate of 5cm per year — 10x faster than coral grows naturally — for as long as a current was flowing through it.

2023-04-07: There’s also Stony coral tissue loss disease to deal with

A bacterial probiotic treatment effectively stopped or slowed SCTLD in 66% of tested infected coral fragments. It also prevented the infection from spreading in all transmission experiments.

Miscelánea

When you walk down East 4th Street, it is easy to pass by Miscelánea, but that would be a mistake. This unassuming Mexican general store is home to one of the tastiest tortas in the city, plus it’s stocked with south-of-the-border goods such as chile chocolates, salsa verdes and tortilla presses.

Obama interview

OBAMA: We know the guys who are funding them, and if you talk to Larry Page or others, their general attitude, understandably, is, “The last thing we want is a bunch of bureaucrats slowing us down as we chase the unicorn out there.”

Part of the problem that we’ve seen is that our general commitment as a society to basic research has diminished. Our confidence in collective action has been chipped away, partly because of ideology and rhetoric.

The analogy that we still use when it comes to a great technology achievement, even 50 years later, is a moonshot. And somebody reminded me that the space program was 0.5% of GDP. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but in today’s $ that would be $80B that we would be spending annually … on AI. Right now we’re spending probably less than $1B. That undoubtedly will accelerate, but part of what we’re gonna have to understand is that if we want the values of a diverse community represented in these breakthrough technologies, then government funding has to be a part of it. And if government is not part of financing it, then all these issues that Joi has raised about the values embedded in these technologies end up being potentially lost or at least not properly debated.

2060 Energy Scenarios

The World Energy Scenarios comprise 3 scenarios for the energy sector up to 2060 referred to as Unfinished Symphony, Modern Jazz and Hard Rock. Solar and wind energy account for only 4% of power generation in 2014, but by 2060 it will account for 20% to 39% of power generation. In Unfinished Symphony, strong policy supported by hydro and nuclear capacity additions will allow intermittent renewables to reach 39% of electricity generation by 2060. Large-scale pumped hydro and compressed air storage, battery innovation, and grid integration provide dependable capacity to balance intermittency. Modern Jazz sees intermittent renewables reach 30% of generation enabled by distributed systems, digital technologies, and battery innovation. For both resources (solar and wind), the largest additions will be seen in China, India, Europe, and North America. With less capacity for infrastructure build-out, Hard Rock sees the lowest penetration, with solar and wind generation reaching 20% by 2060.

Guadalupe Inn

If you’re a fan of Cosme or Empellón Cocina, you’ll want to check out Guadalupe Inn, which the team behind Williamsburg Mexican restaurants Mesa Coyoacan and Zona Rosa just opened in Bushwick. Mexico City–born chef-owner Ivan Garcia’s menu is quite ambitious: To start, there’s beer-battered squash blossom, corn-masa tamales with bone marrow, and fish tacos cooked in the style of Michoacán.

But things only get more interesting!

Quantum Supremacy

Quantum supremacy can be achieved in the near-term with 50 superconducting qubits. We introduce cross entropy as a useful benchmark of quantum circuits which approximates the circuit fidelity. We show that the cross entropy can be efficiently measured when circuit simulations are available. Beyond the classically tractable regime, the cross entropy can be extrapolated and compared with theoretical estimates of circuit fidelity to define a practical quantum supremacy test.

As of 2018, Google and NASA are testing it:

Google and NASA have an agreement to compare Google 72-qubit quantum Bristlecone chip and possibly near-term follow-up quantum chips against regular supercomputers.

And John Preskill writes about how he coined the term:

In 2012, I proposed the term “quantum supremacy” to describe the point where quantum computers can do things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful. Where do we go from here? Naturally, Google and other hardware builders hope to find practical applications for their quantum devices. A much larger quantum computer might help researchers design new materials and chemical compounds or build better tools for machine learning, but a noisy quantum computer with a few 100 qubits might not be capable of anything useful. Still, we have ideas about how to use NISQ computers that we’re eager to try, which might yield better methods for optimization or more accurate physical simulations, but we’re not sure if any of these will pan out. It will be fun to play with NISQ technology to learn more about what it can do. I expect that quantum computers will have a transformative effect on society, but this may still be decades away.