Black holes are getting weirder by the day. When scientists first confirmed the behemoths existed back in the 1970s, we thought they were pretty simple, inert corpses. Then, famed physicist Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t exactly black and they actually emit heat. And now, a pair of physicists has realized that the sort-of-dark objects also exert a pressure on their surroundings.
The finding that such simple, non-rotating “black holes have a pressure as well as a temperature is even more exciting given that it was a total surprise,” co-author Xavier Calmet, a professor of physics at the University of Sussex in England, said in a statement.
A new paper takes a deep dive into primordial black holes that were formed as a part of the early universe when there were still no stars or galaxies. Such black holes could account for strange cosmic possibilities, including baby universes and major features of the current state of the cosmos like dark matter.
To study the exotic primordial black holes (PBHs), physicists employed the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) of the huge 8.2m Subaru Telescope operating near the 4,200 meter summit of Mt. Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This enormous digital camera can produce images of the entire Andromeda galaxy every few minutes, helping scientists observe one hundred million stars in one go.
A team of physicists at CU Boulder has solved the mystery behind a perplexing phenomenon in the nano realm: why some ultra-small heat sources cool down faster if you pack them closer together. The findings, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), could one day help the tech industry design faster electronic devices that overheat less.
“Often, heat is a challenging consideration in designing electronics. You build a device then discover that it’s heating up faster than desired,” said study co-author Joshua Knobloch, postdoctoral research associate at JILA, a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “Our goal is to understand the fundamental physics involved so we can engineer future devices to efficiently manage the flow of heat.”
The research began with an unexplained observation: In 2,015 researchers led by physicists Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn at JILA were experimenting with bars of metal that were many times thinner than the width of a human hair on a silicon base. When they heated those bars up with a laser, something strange occurred.
In recently published research using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers announced that they had found the first clear detection of a circumplanetary, moon-forming disk surrounding the exoplanet PDS 70c — a first in astrophysics.
The circumplanetary disk, or CPD, has been seen in past research from other groups. However, due to the inability to tell the disk apart from its surrounding environment, the presence of the disk around PDS 70c could not be confirmed.
In this podcast, I have invited Daniel Jue, one of the youngest Entrepreneurs of the field of AGI. Daniel is an Independent Artificial General Intelligence researcher at Cognami in the US. He has worked supporting the US Department of Defense, including Data Fusion and analytic development for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is to prevent technological surprise by potential adversaries. In addition he worked with scientists and engineers at IronNet CyberSecurity, a startup with DARPA and NSA heritage who have recently gone public. In March of 2,021 Daniel took on full time AGI research, drawing upon the fields of Computer Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Psychology. Some of his major influences have been Jacques Pitrat’s CAIA (An Artificial AI Scientist) project, Jean Piaget’s childhood development theories and Spiking Neural Networks. He sees a generalizable substrate at the basis for AGI, where engineers design the “physics” in which intelligent behavior could emerge.
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0:24 Introduction of Daniel Jue. 2:07 Alignment Problem. 6:33 Will AGI be our Last Invention? 14:37 Distributional Shift in Narrow AI 19:46 How can one build an AGI? 25:08 Humans vs AI. Who is more dangerous for our existence? 28:58 Will AGI eliminate us? 36:50 Thousand Brains theory. 42:05 Cognitive Architectures. 44:43 Stephen Hawking’s AI theory. 48:21 Problems that AGI will solve in the future. 51:21 Biological Humans will be indistinguishable from AGI 55:37 Free Will, Determinism and the role of Philosophy in building the AGI 58:39 Adding consciousness to AI 1:01:39 Meaning of Life.
In a tentative eureka moment, physicists from Cambride may have detected dark energy for the first time. This could be the biggest physics discovery ever!
Analysis of unique fingerprints in light emitted from material surrounding young stars has revealed “significant reservoirs” of large organic molecules necessary to form the basis of life, say researchers.
Dr. John Ilee, Research Fellow at the University of Leeds who led the study, says the findings suggest that the basic chemical conditions that resulted in life on Earth could exist more widely across the Galaxy.
The large organic molecules were identified in protoplanetary disks circling newly formed stars. A similar disk would have once surrounded the young Sun, forming the planets that now make up our Solar System. The presence of the molecules is significant because they are “stepping-stones” between simpler carbon-based molecules such as carbon monoxide, found in abundance in space, and more complex molecules that are required to create and sustain life.
The study, published in Physical Review Letters, used historic records between 1962–64 from a research station in Scotland. Scientists compared days with high and low radioactively-generated charge, finding that clouds were visibly thicker, and there was 24% more rain on average on the days with more radioactivity.
Professor Giles Harrison, lead author and Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Reading, said: By studying the radioactivity released from Cold War weapons tests, scientists at the time learnt about atmospheric circulation patterns. We have now reused this data to examine the effect on rainfall.
The politically charged atmosphere of the Cold War led to a nuclear arms race and worldwide anxiety. Decades later, that global cloud has yielded a silver lining, in giving us a unique way to study how electric charge affects rain.
