A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born. Our own Universe may be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe.
2019-01-02:
If complexity does underlie spatial volume in black holes, Susskind envisions consequences for our understanding of cosmology in general. “It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time. I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I don’t know the answer.”
amazing reconstructions. No idea how credible those are but they are striking. 2019-02-27: 2 different projects to make emperor sculptures:
Césares de Roma is a project to make hyperrealist sculptures of Roman emperors using existing portraits and sculptures as references. The latest creation is a silicone bust of Nerón Claudio César Augusto Germanicus, aka Nero, who wreaked havoc from 54 to 68 AD.
Working from remains discovered during archaeological excavations, sculptor and archaeologist Oscar Nilsson combines his 2 disciplines to reconstruct the faces of people who lived 100s, 1000s, and even 10Ks of years ago. This Neanderthal woman lived 50 ka ago:
Researchers have reconstructed the torso of a woman of the Únětice culture whose remains were unearthed in a Bronze Age cemetery in eastern Bohemia. She had been buried sometime between 3880 and 3750 BP with 5 bronze bracelets, 2 gold earrings, a 3-strand necklace made of beads of amber imported from the Baltic, and 3 bronze sewing needles.
one line of evidence is that a purely classical analysis of the energy required to hold DNA together does not add up. It is possible that DNA is indeed quantum-efficient.
if Grover-algorithmic processing is some sort of fundamental property of nature, then you might expect the genetic material to be synthesized most efficiently when the machinery has a choice of 4 different nucleotides. And when translating these into proteins, a triplet code (which requires 3 processing steps) would function most efficiently when working with a palette of 20 amino acids. I will admit to being unusually susceptible to ideas like this, but that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
This will be fun to watch. And to witness the drama and handwringing of the dilettante press.
For the last 3 years, IBM scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
In a canned demo, Kelly chose a sample debate topic: “The sale of violent video games to minors should be banned.” The Debater was tasked with presenting pros and cons for a debate on this question. Speaking in nearly perfect English, Watson/The Debater replied: Scanned 4 million Wikipedia articles, returning 10 most relevant articles. Scanned all 3000 sentences in top 10 articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech with top claim predictions. Ready to deliver. It then presented 3 relevant pros and cons.
2014-10-07: If the process of science itself can be changed from the current miasma of writing 19th century style papers, lack of negative results etc towards a process of discovery where all knowledge is like wikipedia, and AI infers new things, that’d be quite something.
Scientists demonstrated a possible new path for generating scientific questions that may be helpful in the long term development of new, effective treatments for disease. In a matter of weeks, biologists and data scientists using the Baylor Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT), based on Watson technology, accurately identified proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many cancers, which can eventually lead to better efficacy of drugs and other treatments. A feat that would have taken researchers years to accomplish without Watson’s cognitive capabilities, Watson analyzed 70k scientific articles on p53 to predict proteins that turn on or off p53’s activity. This automated analysis led the Baylor cancer researchers to identify 6 potential proteins to target for new research. These results are notable, considering that over the last 30 years, scientists averaged 1 similar target protein discovery per year.
Enter blueberries as the essential ingredient, click dessert and Watson recommends similar ingredients based on food pairing chemistry. After you’ve narrowed preferences down, Watson recommends brand-new cooking ideas, based on recipes Watson has studied. And users can go more deeply into the app too, modifying Watson’s modifications. Its website calls the human-computer partnership a tool to “amplify human creativity.”
The isotopic composition of strontium, oxygen and lead in Ötzi’s teeth show that his likely birthplace was near the modern town of Brixen, Italy – but that his adult life was spent in the neighboring Vinschgau or Schnals valleys.
he long struggle to turn medicine from art to science: checklists increase ICU survival rates by 50%. algorithms save lives.
The checklists provided 2 main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes. Pronovost was surprised to discover how often even experienced personnel failed to grasp the importance of certain precautions. In a survey of I.C.U. staff taken before introducing the ventilator checklists, he found that 50% hadn’t realized that there was evidence strongly supporting giving ventilated patients antacid medication. Checklists established a higher standard of baseline performance.
For average lightning parameters the correct induced electric fields appear more than an order of magnitude smaller. For typical ranges of stronger than average lightning currents, electric fields above the threshold for cortical phosphene stimulation can be induced only for short distances (order of meters), or in medium distances (order of 50 m) only for pulses shorter than established axon excitation periods. Stimulation of retinal phosphene perception has much lower threshold and appears most probable for lightning electromagnetic fields.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 