The Sky This Week from September 4 to 11 – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on by

Saturday, September 5The gas giant Jupiter is known for its otherworldly weather. And right now, its putting on a show. Every few years, Jupiter experiences outbreaks of brilliant white storms in its Northern Temperate Belt, or NTB. Although the next outbreak wasnt expected until 2021, its happening early storms burst onto the scene August 18 and were first detected separately by two frequent Astronomy contributors: Damian Peach and Martin Ratcliffe. It was reported shortly after by Japanese amateur astronomer Isao Miyazaki.

Since then, a second outbreak has occurred, starting early September 2, and more may follow. To catch sight of the storms, youll need a telescope with an aperture of 8 inches or larger and a dark, steady sky. Jupiter rotates in just under 10 hours, meaning its features change relatively quickly, even over the course of a single night. Currently, the magnitude 2.5 gas giant is visible in the evenings, already above the southern horizon at sunset and setting around 2 A.M. local time. If youre an experienced imager, the British Astronomical Association is requesting images of the storms.

Even if you dont have a large scope or imaging capabilities, Jupiter and nearby Saturn, about 8.3 to its east are great targets within the constellation Sagittarius. The two planets and several of their moons are visible in small scopes and even binoculars, so dont feel youre missing out on a great sight without a larger instrument.

Sunrise: 6:32 A.M.Sunset: 7:24 P.M.Moonrise: 9:23 P.M.Moonset: 9:37 A.M.Moon Phase: Waning gibbous (89%)

Sunday, September 6The Moon passes 0.03 north of Mars at 1 A.M. EDT. Theyre close enough to appear in the same field of view of binoculars and small scopes. Youll find them together in the southeastern corner of Pisces the Fish. The bright Moon, less than a week past Full, will likely wash out the dim stars of the constellation, but magnitude 1.9 Mars will still be easy to pick out.

For observers in central South America, North Africa, and southern Europe, the Moon and Mars will do more than make a close approach. Youll see the Moon completely occult, or pass in front of, Mars. Check the International Occultation Timing Associations page on the event for occultation times (given in Universal Time, or UT) from the location nearest you. In some places, the occultation will begin and end late on the 5th.

The Moon reaches apogee, the farthest point in its orbit from Earth, at 2:29 A.M. EDT. At that time, our satellite will be 252,032 miles (405,606 kilometers) from Earth.

Sunrise: 6:33 A.M.Sunset: 7:23 P.M.Moonrise: 9:48 P.M.Moonset: 10:35 A.M.Moon Phase: Waning gibbous (82%)

Monday, September 7The Moon passes 3 south of Uranus at midnight EDT this morning. Youll find the pair about 15 above the eastern horizon in Aries the Ram. Uranus is roughly halfway between Aries bright star Hamal and Menkar in Cetus. The waning Moon may make it hard to spot the ice giants magnitude 5.7 glow, but spend some time in the region with binoculars or your scope, and you may spot the flat-looking grayish disk.

Saturns two-faced moon Iapetus reaches superior conjunction today. Youll find the planet and its system of moons the largest in the solar system in Sagittarius. Jupiter lies nearby, to Saturns west. Theyre visible for a few hours after midnight, and again after sunset.

Once youve focused in on the planet, look for Iapetus 63" due north of Saturn. The small moon shines at magnitude 11. Because its two hemispheres have vastly different albedos one is dark, reflecting little light, while the other is brighter and reflects more light the moon swings between magnitudes 10.5 and 11.7, depending on which hemisphere (or combination of the two) is facing Earth. At superior conjunction, 50 percent of each side is pointed toward us, leaving it roughly in the middle of the two extremes.

With a telescope capable of reaching magnitude 11, youll also see several of Saturns other moons: Rhea, Tethys, and Dione (all 10th magnitude), as well as magnitude 8 Titan. Once youve spotted these small points of light, take some time to admire Saturns rings, which extend about 40" from end to end. You may even spot the shadow of the planet falling on the rings eastern side.

Sunrise: 6:34 A.M.Sunset: 7:21 P.M.Moonrise: 10:14 P.M.Moonset: 11:34 A.M.Moon Phase: Waning gibbous (75%)

Read the rest here:

The Sky This Week from September 4 to 11 - Astronomy Magazine

A nearby supernova could have caused the Devonian mass extinction – Astronomy Magazine

Posted on by

Most scientists think the dinosaurs along with countless other creatures were wiped out some 66 million years ago when a space rock slammed into Earth. But a cosmic impact isnt the only disaster that could have rapidly extinguished a huge percentage of life on Earth; nearby supernovae can pose a similar risk.

If a supernova erupted near Earth, harmful cosmic rays, which are charged particles that act like tiny space bullets, and ultraviolet radiation would pummel Earths ozone layer, eventually tearing a hole through its protective bubble. This scenario has long been considered, but a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that at least one of Earths past mass extinctions might have been the result of a nearby supernova.

By examining the boundary between the Devonian period and the next (Carboniferous Period) in Earths soil, the scientists behind this latest study found plant spores that were burned by ultraviolet light, which suggests they were around when the ozone was depleted. And while numerous calamities can take chunks out of Earths ozone, the researchers argue that in this case, a supernova is the most likely culprit.

Earth-based catastrophes such as large-scale volcanism and global warming can destroy the ozone layer, too, lead author Brian Fields said in a statement. But the evidence for those scenarios just isnt there. Instead, we propose that one or more supernova explosions, about 65 light-years away from Earth, could have been responsible for the protracted loss of ozone.

A supernova could indeed deliver just the right attack to devastate life on Earth. Such an explosion would bathe Earth in harmful ultraviolet light, but the damage wouldnt end there: For up to 100,000 years, supernova debris would continue to rain down on our planet, creating radioactive isotopes in Earths atmosphere.

But to complicate matters further, fossil evidence indicates that biodiversity fell for a total of 300,000 years before the final Devonian mass extinction occurred. This suggests that there might have even been more than one supernova that thrashed Earth. This is entirely possible, said study co-author Jesse Miller. Massive stars usually occur in clusters with other massive stars, and other supernovae are likely to occur soon after the first explosion.

Although the team is still missing conclusive evidence to confirm their theory, they have already outlined what they need to look for. The radioactive isotopes created by supernova debris interacting with Earths atmosphere would have decayed long ago. So if researchers can find evidence of these isotopes in rocks from the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary, it would directly suggest that at least one nearby star exploded around that time.

Read the rest here:

A nearby supernova could have caused the Devonian mass extinction - Astronomy Magazine

Great Basin National Park astronomy festival to be held mostly virtually this month – FOX5 Las Vegas

Posted on by

'); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append(""+val.title+""); // if (window.location.hostname == "www.kmov.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.kctv5.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.azfamily.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.kptv.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.fox5vegas.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.wfsb.com") { if (val.poly != "" && val.polyimg != "") { $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append('"+val.ihtml+""); $("#expandable-weather-block .weather-index-alerts").show(); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body h2").css({"font-family":"'Fira Sans', sans-serif", "font-weight":"500", "padding-bottom":"10px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body p").css({"font-size":"14px", "line-height":"24px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body span.wxalertnum").css({"float":"left", "width":"40px", "height":"40px", "color":"#ffffff", "line-height":"40px", "background-color":"#888888", "border-radius":"40px", "text-align":"center", "margin-right":"12px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body b").css("font-size", "18px"); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body li").css({"font-size":"14px", "line-height":"18px", "margin-bottom":"10px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body ul").css({"margin-bottom":"24px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body pre").css({"margin-bottom":"24px"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body img").css({"width":"100%", "margin-bottom":"20px", "borderWidth":"1px", "border-style":"solid", "border-color":"#aaaaaa"}); $("#expandable-weather-block .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).css({"borderWidth":"0", "border-bottom-width":"1px", "border-style":"dashed", "border-color":"#aaaaaa", "padding-bottom":"10px", "margin-bottom":"40px"}); }); } function parseAlertJSON(json) { console.log(json); alertCount = 0; if (Object.keys(json.alerts).length > 0) { $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body ").empty(); } $.each(json.alerts, function(key, val) { alertCount++; $("#mrd-wx-alerts .alert_count").text(alertCount); $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body ").append(''); $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append(""+val.title+""); // if (window.location.hostname == "www.kmov.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.kctv5.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.azfamily.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.kptv.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.fox5vegas.com" || window.location.hostname == "www.wfsb.com") { if (val.poly != "" && val.polyimg != "") { $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append(''); } else if (val.fips != "" && val.fipsimg != "") { // $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append(''); } // } //val.instr = val.instr.replace(/[W_]+/g," "); $("#mrd-wx-alerts .modal-body #mrd-alert"+ alertCount).append(val.dhtml+"

Instruction

Read more here:

Great Basin National Park astronomy festival to be held mostly virtually this month - FOX5 Las Vegas

Indian astronomers discover one of the farthest galaxies in the universe – Moneycontrol

Posted on by

Indias AstroSat/UVIT was able to detect one of the farthest star galaxies in the universe because the background noise in it is much lesser than on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)s Hubble Space Telescope.

Indian astronomers have discovered one of the farthest galaxies in the universe, which is estimated to be 9.3 billion light-years away from the earth. A team of astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune discovered the galaxy.

The galaxy, christened AUDFs01, was detected by Indias first Multi-Wavelength Space Observatory called AstroSat. To put it more precisely, the observatory had detected extreme UV light from the newly discovered galaxy located billions of light-years away.

Announcing the discovery, the Department of Space, said: As a landmark achievement in Space missions, Indian astronomers have discovered one of the farthest star galaxies in the universe.

The information was also shared by Union Minister of State (Independent Charge), Dr Jitendra Singh. He said: The galaxy called AUDFs01 was discovered by a team of Astronomers led by Dr Kanak Saha from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) Pune.

Indias AstroSat/UVIT was able to detect one of the farthest star galaxies in the universe because the background noise in it is much lesser than on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)s Hubble Space Telescope.

Congratulating the Indian space scientists, Felicia Chou, Public Affairs Officer, NASA, said: NASA congratulates the researchers on their exciting discovery.

Dr Somak Ray Chaudhury, Director, IUCAA, also hailed the discovery. Explaining its importance, he said: This discovery is a very important clue to how the dark ages of the Universe ended and there was light in the Universe. We need to know when this started, but it has been very hard to find the earliest sources of light.

First Published on Sep 3, 2020 04:38 pm

See the article here:

Indian astronomers discover one of the farthest galaxies in the universe - Moneycontrol

Breaking down the astronomical number of mail-in ballot requests in NC – CBS17.com

Posted on by

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) More than one out of every six requests for a mail-in ballot in North Carolina has come from Wake County.

State Board of Elections data show the total number of vote-by-mail requests has nearly doubled in the past two weeks, with 618,842 applications received Thursday, one day before the state will begin mailing those ballots to those who have asked for them.

State records show 313,224 requests were received on Aug. 19, and the current total is nearly 17 times the amount of requests in the last presidential election in 2016 when 37,576 people had requested mail-in ballots at this time that year.

The trend has certainly been astronomical, said political science professor Michael Bitzer of Catawba College. The numbers just continue to grow at exponential rates.

Of the current total, 108,046 or 17 percent are from Wake County, the only county in the state with more than 100,000 requests.

Durham County has the third-highest total of requests with 34,220 and 62 percent of those requests are from registered Democrats with Mecklenburg County (87,749) ranking second.

The current total represents roughly 9 percent of the total of 7 million registered voters in the state and state election officials expect that to rise to as much as 30 percent.

But theyre confident they can handle so many ballots.

This isnt the first time weve done absentee by-mail, said Karen Brinson Bell, the state board of elections chair. Its just the first time weve done it at this volume.

The data show 53 percent of requests come from registered Democrats with 31 percent coming from unaffiliated voters and only 16 percent from registered Republicans.

There were more Democrats than Republicans seeking mail-in ballots in every county but three Avery, Mitchell and Yadkin.

State election data show the percentages are a bit more even when it comes to the total number of registered voters in the state, with 35 percent Democrats, 33 percent unaffiliated, and 30 percent Republicans.

The percentages of total mail-in voters rises as the age brackets increase, with 43 percent of requests coming from voters older than 65 and another 36 percent from those between the ages of 41 and 65. At the other end, just 6 percent are between 18 and 25 while 14 percent are between 26 and 40.

Among age, it is skewing older, and thats to be expected, Bitzer said. It tends to draw the oldest voters to that method.

What surprised him is the rising number of Black voters looking to vote by mail.

While nearly 69 percent of requests came from white voters, almost 19 percent are Black.

Typically, we tend to see a much more white voter bloc utilizing this, Bitzer said. Right now, we are almost at parity in terms of the absentee by-mail ballots and the overall racial composition of eligible voters. African-American voters have skyrocketed in terms of their percentage of requests for absentee by-mail ballots. So its a real interesting dynamic thats playing out that is kind of reflective of the 7 million registered voters.

More coverage from Your Local Election Headquarters:

Go here to read the rest:

Breaking down the astronomical number of mail-in ballot requests in NC - CBS17.com

Meet The Woman Behind Ninjas Astronomical Success: Jessica Blevins – Forbes

Posted on by

The saying, Behind every successful man, there is a strong woman, rings incredibly true for Jessica Blevins. Wife and manager to Tyler Ninja Blevins, the most famous streamer with 40 million fans worldwide and featured in many accolade lists includingForbes 30 under 30,Jessica is an influencer in her own right with 1.2 million Instagram followers and 466,000 Twitch followers.

I sat down with Jessica and Tyler to learn about their daily lives streaming to their fans and how they are taking the entertainment and gaming industry by storm.

Jessica Blevins and her furry friends

Kate Talbot: You manage your husband, Tyler Ninja Blevins. What does that look like on a day-to-day basis for you?

Jessica Blevins: Every day is different. Right now, during COVID, it's more steady because we haven't been traveling. I start my day pretty early, much earlier than Tyler, because he's normally up very late. When Tyler wakes up, he usually likes to get on stream right away.

I always ask for 10 minutes to get answers and input from my morning calls talking to publicists, lawyers, or any new opportunities. While he streams, I do the exact same thing.

We try to have him get off-stream around 6 pm and spend time together as a couple watching Netflix or eating dinner. As of late, there has been a lot of contracts and deals going on. Our personal life sometimes takes a backseat, but we always try to make sure we make up for those busy days with what we call date days where we take the entire day off, both of us.

Talbot: What have you learned managing Tyler?

Blevins: What I've learned is truly endless. I'm super proud to have learned to negotiate not only contracts but multimillion-dollar ones. I'm a small-town girl. If somebody would've told me this would be my life when I was young, I would've laughed. I'm very proud and happy to have learned that skill.

I've also learned to communicate with pretty much anyone and everyone from producers, actors, musicians, tech companies that set up Ninja events, sponsors, agencies, lawyers, the list goes on and on. Because my college degree was in communications and it's one of my passions, I love that I've grown with who and how I communicate.

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Jessica Blevins on the red carpet for the National Football League Honors

Talbot: Tyler, what do you admire most about Jessica's ability to step into the role of your manager?

Tyler Ninja Blevins:What I admire most about Jessicas ability to step into the role of my manager is how flawlessly she did it. She immediately played hard ball with the big boys and acted 10x more professional than I ever could at the time. She was so eager to learn about the space and always was asking for advice from more experienced people and still does. She wants to be the best at what she does and continues to work toward it.

Talbot: Back to you Jessica, gaming is a very male-dominated industry. What advice do you have for a woman wanting to enter into that world?

Blevins: Dont let the thought of being a minority keep you from doing what you're passionate about. You will be stereotyped. You will be torn down. But if you can block out the negativity, there's a whole lot of positivity floating around the world of gaming as well.

This world is also overdue for even more awesome, female gamers who compete alongside the best of the best. I know they're out there. I know more are coming. And I cannot wait for that. The world of streaming has seen many females come in and start dominating. That's evened out the playing field a bit more, even though it's so male-dominated. With Esports and competition specifically, I want to see even more amazing female competitors come into that scene.

Talbot: You're also an influencer with like 1.2 million Instagram followers and 466,000 Twitch followers. Whats your favorite part of having that reach?

Blevins: I love just getting to show people the real me especially now that Tyler is as big as he is. There are still so many people that have a stereotype about me, and all somebody would need to do is pop into one of my streams or start following my Instagram to understand who I am and see the real me.

Tyler "Ninja" Blevins and Jessica Blevins

I love that I have these platforms hold me accountable and keep me down to earth. I'm not going to start posting Gucci bags, and 'hey, we're here at this huge Hollywood event." That's a fun, exciting thing that we get to do. However, I don't want that to completely take over who I am at heart, which small-town girl from Wisconsin. I love that I can use my platforms to give back to animals and the environment. I love being able to share exciting, incredible, authentic things with my community.

Talbot: Tell me more about your passion for philanthropy.

Blevins: My main goal when I got into philanthropy was to help out the average person with unexpected expensive vet bills. What I started doing was vetting people on Twitter asking, "What's going on right now? Who has an animal that's sick? Tell me your story."

For the environment, I am pretty close to an organization called 4ocean. They sell bracelets, and for each sold, they pull one pound of trash out of the ocean. They then make different colored bracelets from the recycled garbage materials that they find in the ocean.

Talbot: Lastly, Tyler, what do you think the next five years will look like for you two?

Tyler Ninja Blevins:I think the next five years for Jessica and I will look like a lot of gaming, flying, a bunch of more firsts as a married couple, and maybe an extra puppy or two!

Follow this link:

Meet The Woman Behind Ninjas Astronomical Success: Jessica Blevins - Forbes

Tesla To Cash in on Astronomical Stock Price With $5 Billion Capital Raise – The Drive

Posted on by

Every company in America wants a little bit of that Tesla money, even Tesla itself. After seeing its shares skyrocket nearly ten-fold in the past year, the all-electric automaker, whose CEO once said that the stock price was too high, plans to sell off some of its stock in an attempt to raise up to $5 billion in additional capital.

In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Tesla said it will begin selling its shares to investors in the open market. The news comes immediately following Tesla's 5 to 1 stock split which provided existing shareholders with five shares for every one it held. This split, while not directly creating value, does help to make Tesla's stock significantly more affordable for new investors while also providing increased liquidity. As a result, Tesla may find it easier to raise capital through a stock sale with a reduced barrier of entry.

The actual number of shares Tesla plans to offload wholly depends on the market price of the share when it sellsthe only limit is the aggregate offering price of $5 billion.

Behind the scenes, Tesla is working to rapidly expand its manufacturing footprint. The automaker began delivering vehicles produced at its brand new Gigfactory in Shanghai less than nine months ago, and has since broken ground at two new sites in Germany and Texas where it will construct additional manufacturing facilities to expand its product line. At Gigafactory Texas, for example, Tesla plans to build its hotly anticipated Cybertruck and its first commercial vehicle.

It goes without saying that both auto manufacturingand expanding said manufacturingis expensive, especially in an industry where business models for EVs haven't caught up to those of tried-and-true fossil fuels. Even Tesla's hefty wallet of cash and cash equivalents (which was valued at $8.6 billion at the close of its second quarter) can't eat the entire cost of its expansion projects without negatively affecting its balance sheet. $5 billion in capital will surely help, and any excess is planned to be used as an investment into "highly liquid cash equivalents or United States government securities."

Historically, Tesla's shares have been quite volatile. The rapidly fluctuating stock prices, which have long been attributed to short-sellers, have helped slingshot Tesla's market capital well past that of Toyota and Volkswagen, eventually earning Tesla the title of world's most valuable automaker.

Despite selling only a fraction of the number of cars versus its closest-ranking fiscal competitors, Tesla's value is largely based on its perceived position as a leader in both the emerging electric and autonomous vehicle segmentshow that translates to a long-term valuation is still to be seen.

Got a tip? Send us a note: tips@thedrive.com

Read the rest here:

Tesla To Cash in on Astronomical Stock Price With $5 Billion Capital Raise - The Drive

A supernova that left chaos in its wake – SYFY WIRE

Posted on by

There are few events in the Universe more violent than a supernova.

When a star explodes, the energy released is almost unimaginable. In seconds, billons of times the energy of the entire Sun is released; a wave of destruction moves through the doomed star from the inside out, blasting away an octillion tons of gas, sending it raging into space at a significant fraction of the speed of light.

The initial explosion eventually fades, but that gas still moves outward. What does this do over time? What does thatlook like after a few thousand years?

Chaos.

That is the Vela supernova remnant, the aftermath of a massive star reaching its end and exploding. The unnamed star's life ended about 11,000 years ago, but the gas it flung into space is still there, moving away from the blast site at high speed. In this image, you can see it as the thin, filamentary structure in the center, shining on both red and blue, indicating the presence of hydrogen and oxygen; the former the star was born with, the latter created in the nuclear forge in its heart.

From our distance of 800 light years, the supernova still appears huge, spanning 8 from side to side, over 15 times the width of the full Moon on the sky.

And yet, this image is much larger than that, covering twice that angle on the sky. It's a mosaic of 200 individual images taken as part of the Digitized Sky Survey and supplemented using a small telescope in Australia; the image was processed and assembled by Robert Gendler.

So if the supernova remnant is only in the center, what is the rest of all that material you can see.

This part of the sky in the constellation Vela, which itself lies in the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. When we look toward it, we are seeing into our galaxy, towards regions where gas and dust litter space.

Most of the red glow you see there is from gas well behind the supernova remnant from our point of view, thousands of light years away. Wherever you see red is where stars are being born, their glow lighting up the gas, exciting it, causing it to glow literally like a neon sign. For example, directly above the supernova and a bit to the left is a small circle of pink glowing brighter than the rest; that is the nebula Gum 15, lit by the fierce light of single star called HD 74804, a massive blue star that emits thousands of times as much light as the Sun.

The others all have similar tales to tell. An annotated version of this image will give you plenty to scour the internet for; this image is literally filled with amazing objects.

But harking back to the supernova, what of the star itself? Did it leave anything behind besides ever expanding besides wisps of gas?

Yes. When the core collapsed, creating the explosion that would tear its outer layers away, it compressed into a ball of neutrons, an object with the mass of a star like the Sun but all contained in a sphere just a few kilometers across. This neutron star is so dense that a cubic centimeter of it would weigh one hundred million tons, and is still fiercely hot from the fires of its creation.

It also spins rapidly and possesses a powerful magnetic field. These combine to power rotating twin beams of radiation, like a lighthouse, sweeping over the sky 12 times per second. This makes it a pulsar, because we see those moving beams as blips in our telescopes, dimmed by the 800 light years of space between us and it.

That pulsar can still be seen in the remnant, a dim star otherwise indistinguishable than thousands of others there.

Astronomy asks a lot of us. We see nearly ungraspable violence, but it's reduced to a spark due to the nearly ungraspable distance. One of these huge factors is difficult enough to internalize, but both? And the forces involved, the energies, the interactions, are mostly alien to what we experience in our daily lives, engaging a third way to remove our ability to truly appreciate what we're seeing.

But it also makes up for that in sheer beauty. And, for the scientist, the added pleasure of understanding the mechanisms and engines behind all this.

It may look like chaos, but this is the Universe expressing itself through physics. And even it must obey those rules.

See the article here:

A supernova that left chaos in its wake - SYFY WIRE

The ghost of an angry black hole still haunts this galaxy – SYFY WIRE

Posted on by

Some galaxies we see are what we call active: They blast out huge amounts of radiation from their centers, sometimes enough energy to outshine the rest of the galaxy combined. We know this is due to a supermassive black hole in their cores gobbling down matter. The matter forms a disk around it, gets very very hot, and shines exceedingly brightly.

Sometimes, the rotation of that disk (plus, it's now thought, the rotation of the black hole itself) can wind up the magnetic fields in the disk, causing them to form twin vortices, like tornadoes pointing up and down, away from the disk. Matter then gets brutally accelerated along those directions, screaming away in twin beams at very nearly the speed of light. We call those features jets.

That matter decelerates as it plows through the thin material in between galaxies, eventually slowing suddenly and puffing out, forming huge lobes that look like Q-tips cotton swabs hundreds of thousands of light years across, that is. The jets can extend for millions of light years!

But they don't always do this. Low-resolution images made by radio telescopes of the galaxy PGC 064440 showed it to have a weird X-shaped structure, like it had four jets, not two. Different ideas were proposed to explain this, but a new image from the South African MeerKAT radio observatory has finally cleared up this mystery:

Whoa. When I first saw this I was baffled; I've never seen structure like that before. The long arms of the X are clearly jets, but what are those shorter arms off at an angle? Reading the journal paper, however, made it all clear: This isn't an active galaxy; it used to be an active galaxy!

Those jets were probably launched tens of millions of years ago. But then, for some reason, the black hole in the center of the galaxy shut off (probably when the material in the disk finally ran out). Once that happened the matter stopped flowing out. If it ever had giant lobes they've since dissipated, and the material in the jets started falling back toward the galaxy.

But it couldn't just all flow back in. When it got near the galaxy the ambient gas there caused the infalling jet gas to pile up and deflect to the sides. That's what the short arms of the X are! That's the gas that fell in, got pushed to the side, and is flowing away from the galaxy like backwash (the two inner bright dots may be the jets restarting; perhaps material started falling into the black hole again and the process is cycling up once more).

The galaxy itself isn't visible in this radio image, but observations in visible light show it to be pretty big, bigger than our Milky Way, a disk galaxy something like 150,000 light years across or more. But it's dwarfed by those arms; the long ones stretch 5 million light years end-to-end! For comparison, the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years from the Milky Way, and on this image above that would be from the center to the end of one of the long arms.

This structure is vast.

And it's so cool! I've never seen anything quite like this. Most active galaxies with jets are still active, with matter still blasting away from the galactic center. This one shut down millions of years ago, so we're seeing the ghosts of jets past, their decaying emission still tenuously echoing their past life.

This sort of thing (called hydrodynamical backflow if you want to drop that into a casual conversation) was predicted to exist years ago, so it's also pretty nice to see that realized.

It always amazes me that there is so much variety to objects in the sky. Galaxies with jets can look radically different depending on circumstances, but it never occurred to me to wonder what they might look like after the black hole was done eating. Well, now we know. You could look all over the sky for something like this and never find one, but in hindsight it should've been easy.

After all, how often does X really mark the spot?

More:

The ghost of an angry black hole still haunts this galaxy - SYFY WIRE

Before or After the Singularity – PRESSENZA International News Agency

Posted on by

Scientific theories developed by independent and non-networked groups came to the following conclusion: Something will happen around the world that will change human history in a special way. While the predictions may not match exact dates, they all have one thing in common it will happen this century and within a few decades.

The event or the sum of the events per se was named SINGULARITY and has unique characteristics: The development of the events does not generally accelerate within the scope of their properties, but changes abruptly or collapses and starts again.

These predictions could be made on the basis of curves that encompass the development of natural ecosystems as well as the various significant milestones in the universal history of mankind from the beginning of time.

Researchers like Alexander Panov, Ray Kurzweil and many others were able to bring those considerations together by bringing together fundamentally different variables such as energy sources, automation, artificial intelligence, mode of production and consumption, etc., etc., etc.

However, the majority of theories portray science and technology as the creator of this future and not as a by-product of the evolution of our species.

We are of the opinion that the change takes place out of ones own awareness of humanity in its human and spiritual dimension, and that as a consequence of this change external changes also occur which technology, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering do not exclude, but them instead puts it in the foreground and makes it the vehicle and support for this change.

In summary, the SINGULARITY is a wonderful tool for theoretical analysis for us to imagine a world to which we are striving and also to prevent the dangers that such a change could bring.

In what other way could we seriously speak of this chaotic future? Its like were on a ship and were drawn to the enormous gravity of a black hole, a zone where time and space warp. Would we be able to know at what point in time or what distance we would reach the central vortex of the black hole? Were not trying to do futurology even less under these conditions.

But analyzing things from this point of view, with a warning in mind, is an excellent way of imagining the world that we may expect in the future.

Our area of interest focuses on human existence and this is the basis of our analysis, which of course does not claim to be scientific accuracy. We may also later be able to question current science with its alleged thoroughness and infallibility.

We strive for the evolution of mankind, we want a revolution in their consciousness and values. We reject the reification of the human being and the apocalyptic view of the future. We do not deny that machines are useful if they help to relieve people of work. We speak out against any kind of concentration of power and demand the expansion of human freedom, which can neither be restricted nor replaced by soulless algorithms.

As you can see, the future can hold many nuances Our goal is to exchange ideas with those who are interested in these topics.

What is your vision of the future?

Translation from German by Lulith V. by the Pressenza volunteer translation team. We are looking for volunteers!

Carlos Santos is a teacher and has been active in a humanist movement all his life. For the last decade he has devoted himself to audiovisual implementations as a director, producer and screenwriter of documentaries and feature films within his production company Esencia Humana Films. Email: escenariosfuturos21@gmail.com; Blog: escenariosfuturos.org

Read the original post:

Before or After the Singularity - PRESSENZA International News Agency

Neuralink’s Wildly Anticipated New Brain Implant: the Hype vs. the Science – Singularity Hub

Posted on by

Neuralinks wildly anticipated demo last Friday left me with more questions than answers. With a presentation teeming with promises and vision but scant on data, the event nevertheless lived up to its main goal as a memorable recruitment session to further the growth of the mysterious brain implant company.

Launched four years ago with the backing of Elon Musk, Neuralink has been working on futuristic neural interfaces that seamlessly listen in on the brains electrical signals, and at the same time, write into the brain with electrical pulses. Yet even by Silicon Valley standards, the company has kept a tight seal on its progress, conducting all manufacturing, research, and animal trials in-house.

A vision of marrying biological brains to artificial ones is hardly unique to Neuralink. The past decade has seen an explosion in brain-machine interfacessome implanted into the brain, some into peripheral nerves, or some that sit outside the skull like a helmet. The main idea behind all these contraptions is simple: the brain mostly operates on electrical signals. If we can tap into these enigmatic neural codesthe brains internal languagewe could potentially become the architects of our own minds.

Let people with paralysis walk again? Check and done. Control robotic limbs with their minds? Yup. Rewriting neural signals to battle depression? In humans right now. Recording the electrical activity behind simple memories and playing it back? Human trials ongoing. Linking up human minds into a BrainNet to collaborate on a Tetris-like game through the internet? Possible.

Given this backdrop, perhaps the most impressive part of the demonstration isnt lofty predictions of what brain-machine interfaces could potentially do one day. In some sense, were already there. Rather, what stood out was the redesigned Link device itself.

In Neuralinks coming out party last year, the company envisioned a wireless neural implant with a sleek ivory processing unit worn at the back of the ear. The electrodes of the implant itself are sewn into the brain with automated robotic surgery, relying on brain imaging techniques to avoid blood vessels and reduce brain bleeding.

The problem with that design, Musk said, is that it had multiple pieces and was complex. You still wouldnt look totally normal because theres a thing coming out of your ear.

The prototype at last weeks event came in a vastly different physical shell. About the size of a large coin, the device replaces a small chunk of your skull and sits flush with the surrounding skull matter. The electrodes, implanted inside the brain, connect with this topical device. When covered by hair, the implant is invisible.

Musk envisions an outpatient therapy where a robot can simultaneously remove a piece of the skull, sew the electrodes in, and replace the missing skull piece with the device. According to the team, the Link has similar physical properties and thickness as the skull, making the replacement a sort of copy-and-paste. Once inserted, the Link is then sealed to the skull with superglue.

I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldnt know it, quipped Musk.

For a device that small, the team packed an admirable array of features into it. The Link device has over 1,000 channels, which can be individually activated. This is on par with Neuropixel, the crme de la crme of neural probes with 960 recording channels thats currently used widely in research, including by the Allen Institute for Brain Science.

Compared to the Utah Array, a legendary implant system used for brain stimulation in humans with only 256 electrodes, the Link has an obvious edge up in terms of pure electrode density.

Whats perhaps most impressive, however, is its onboard processing for neural spikesthe electrical pattern generated by neurons when they fire. Electrical signals are fairly chaotic in the brain, and filtering spikes from noise, as well as separating trains of electrical activity into spikes, normally requires quite a bit of processing power. This is why in the lab, neural spikes are usually recorded offline and processed using computers, rather than with on-board electronics.

The problem gets even more complicated when considering wireless data transfer from the implanted device to an external smartphone. Without accurate and efficient compression of those neural data, the transfer could tremendously lag, drain battery life, or heat up the device itselfsomething you dont want happening to a device stuck inside your skull.

To get around these problems, the team has been working on algorithms that use characteristic shapes of electrical patterns that look like spikes to efficiently identify individual neural firings. The data is processed on the chip inside the skull device. Recordings from each channel are filtered to root out obvious noise, and the spikes are then detected in real time. Because different types of neurons have their characteristic ways of spikingthat is, the shape of their spikes are diversethe chip can also be configured to detect the particular spikes youre looking for. This means that in theory the chip could be programmed to only capture the type of neuron activity youre interested infor example, to look at inhibitory neurons in the cortex and how they control neural information processing.

These processed spike data are then sent out to smartphones or other external devices through Bluetooth to enable wireless monitoring. Being able to do this efficiently has been a stumbling block in wireless brain implantsraw neural recordings are too massive for efficient transfer, and automated spike detection and compression of that data is difficult, but a necessary step to allow neural interfaces to finally cut the wire.

Link has other impressive features. For one, the battery life lasts all day, and the device can be charged at night using inductive charging. From my subsequent conversations with the team, it seems like there will be alignment lights to help track when the charger is aligned with the device. Whats more, the Link itself also has an internal temperature sensor to monitor for over-heating, and will automatically disconnect if the temperature rises above a certain thresholda very necessary safety measure so it doesnt overheat the surrounding skull tissue.

From the get-go of the demonstration, there was an undercurrent of tension between whats possible in neuroengineering versus whats needed to understand the brain.

Since its founding, Neuralink has always been fascinated with electrode numbers: boosting channel numbers on its devices and increasing the number of neurons that can be recorded at the same time.

At the event, Musk said that his goal is to increase the number of recorded neurons by a factor of 100, then 1,000, then 10,000.

But heres the thing: as neuroscience is increasingly understanding the neural code behind our thought processes, its clear that more electrodes or more stimulated neurons isnt always better. Most neural circuits employ whats called sparse coding, in that only a handful of neurons, when stimulated in a way that mimics natural firing, can artificially trigger visual or olfactory sensations. With optogeneticsthe technique of stimulating neurons with lightscientists now know that its possible to incept memories by targeting just a few key neurons in a circuit. Sticking a ton of wires into the brain, which inevitably causes scarring, and zapping hundreds of thousands of neurons isnt necessarily going to help.

Unlike engineering, the solution to the brain isnt more channels or more implants. Rather, its deciphering the neural codeknowing what to stimulate, in what order, to produce what behavior. Its perhaps telling that despite claims of neural stimulation, the only data shown at the event were neurons firing from a section of a mouse brainusing two-photon microscopy to image neural activationafter zapping brain tissue with an electrode. What information, if any, is really being written into the brain? Without an idea of how neural circuits work and in what sequences, zapping the brain with electricityno matter how cool the device itself isis akin to banging on all the keys of a piano at once, rather than composing a beautiful melody.

Of course, the problem is far larger than Neuralink itself. Its perhaps the next frontier in solving the brains mysteries. To their credit, the Neuralink team has looked at potential damage to the brain from electrode insertion. A main problem with current electrodes is that the brain will eventually activate non-neuronal cells to form an insulating sheath around the electrode, sealing it off from the neurons it needs to record from. According to some employees I talked to, so far, for at least two months, the scarring around electrodes is minimal, although in the long run there may be scar tissue buildup at the scalp. This may make electrode threads difficult to removesomething that still needs to be optimized.

However, two months is only a fraction of what Musk is proposing: a decade-long implant, with hardware that can be updated.

The team may also have an answer there. Rather than removing the entire implant, it could potentially be useful to leave the threads inside the brain and only remove the top capthe Link device that contains the processing chip. The team is now trying the idea out, while exploring the possibility of a full-on removal and re-implant.

As a demonstration of feasibility, the team trotted out three adorable pigs: one without an implant, one with a Link, and one with the Link implanted and then removed. Gertrude, the pig currently with an implant in areas related to her snout, had her inner neural firings broadcasted as a series of electrical crackles as she roamed around her pen, sticking her snout into a variety of food and hay and bumping at her handler.

Pigs came as a surprise. Most reporters, myself included, were expecting non-human primates. However, pigs seem like a good choice. For one, their skulls have a similar density and thickness to human ones. For another, theyre smart cookies, meaning they can be trained to walk on a treadmill while the implant records from their motor cortex to predict the movement of each joint. Its feasible that the pigs could be trained on more complicated tests and behaviors to show that the implant is affecting their movements, preferences, or judgment.

For now, the team doesnt yet have publicly available data showing that targeted stimulation of the pigs cortexsay, motor cortexcan drive their muscles into action. (Part of this, I heard, is because of the higher stimulation intensity required, which is still being fine-tuned.)

Although pitched as a prototype, its clear that the Link remains experimental. The team is working closely with the FDA and was granted a breakthrough device designation in July, which could pave the way for a human trial for treating people with paraplegia and tetraplegia. Whether the trials will come by end of 2020, as Musk promised last year, however, remains to be seen.

Rather than other brain-machine interface companies, which generally focus on brain disorders, its clear that Musk envisions Link as something that can augment perfectly healthy humans. Given the need for surgical removal of part of your skull, its hard to say if its a convincing sell for the average person, even with Musks star power and his vision of augmenting natural sight, memory playback, or a third artificial layer of the brain that joins us with AI. And because the team only showed a highly condensed view of the pigs neural firingsrather than actual spike tracesits difficult to accurately gauge how sensitive the electrodes actually are.

Finally, for now the electrodes can only record from the cortexthe outermost layer of the brain. This leaves deeper brain circuits and their functions, including memory, addiction, emotion, and many types of mental illnesses off the table. While the team is confident that the electrodes can be extended in length to reach those deeper brain regions, its work for the future.

Neuralink has a long way to go. All that said, having someone with Musks impact championing a rapidly-evolving neurotechnology that could help people is priceless. One of the lasting conversations I had after the broadcast was someone asking me what its like to drill through skulls and see a living brain during surgery. I shrugged and said its just bone and tissue. He replied wistfully it would still be so cool to be able to see it though.

Its easy to forget the wonder that neuroscience brings to people when youve been in it for years or decades. Its easy to roll my eyes at Neuralinks data and think well neuroscientists have been listening in on live neurons firing inside animals and even humans for over a decade. As much as Im still skeptical about how Link compares to state-of-the-art neural probes developed in academia, Im impressed by how much a relatively small leadership team has accomplished in just the past year. Neuralink is only getting started, and aiming high. To quote Musk: Theres a tremendous amount of work to be done to go from here to a device that is widely available and affordable and reliable.

Image Credit: Neuralink

View original post here:

Neuralink's Wildly Anticipated New Brain Implant: the Hype vs. the Science - Singularity Hub

New Zealand Is About to Test Long-Range Wireless Power Transmission – Singularity Hub

Posted on by

A famous image of inventor Nikola Tesla shows him casually sitting on a chair, legs crossed, taking notesoblivious to the profusion of artificial lightning rending the air meters away. By then, Tesla and raw electricity were like an old married couple.

The experiments, conducted in Colorado, led to one of Teslas most audacious proposals: To power the world without wires. He made headlines with plans for a world wireless system, and won funding from JP Morgan to build the first of several huge transmission towers.

But Teslas wireless energy dream died soon after. JP Morgan canceled additional funding. The tower was demolished. Later scientists were skeptical Teslas plans (which were a bit vague) would have worked.

Meanwhile, Teslas peer Guglielmo Marconi pursued a parallel dream with far greater success: The wireless transmission of information on radio waves. Todays world is, of course, awash in wireless information.

Now, if New Zealand startup Emrod has its way, Tesla and Marconis dreams may merge. The company is building a system to wirelessly beam power over long distances. Earlier this month, Emrod received funding from Powerco, New Zealands second biggest utility, to conduct a test of its system at a grid-connected commercial power station.

The company hopes to bring energy to communities far from the grid or transmit power from remote renewable sources, like offshore wind farms.

The system consists of four components: A power source, a transmitting antenna, several (or more) transmitting relays, and a rectenna.

First, the transmitting antenna transforms electricity into microwave energyan electromagnetic wave just like Marconis radio waves, only a bit more energeticand focuses it into a cylindrical beam. The microwave beam is sent through a series of relays until it hits the rectenna, which converts it back into electricity.

With safety in mind, Emrod is using energy in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band, and keeping the power density low. Its not just how much power you deliver, its how much power you deliver per square meter, Emrod founder, Greg Kushnir, told New Atlas. The levels of density were using are relatively low. At the moment, its about the equivalent of standing outside at noon in the sun, about 1 kW per square meter.

But if it works as intended, the beam wont ever contact anything but empty air. The system uses a net of lasers surrounding the beam to detect obstructions, like a bird or person, and it automatically shuts off transmission until the obstruction has moved on.

The technologypower transmission via microwave energyhas been around for decades. But to make it commercially viable, you have to minimize energy losses. Kushnir said metamaterials developed in recent years are the difference-maker.

The company uses metamaterials to more efficiently convert the microwave beam back into electricity. The relays, which are like lenses extending the beam beyond line-of-sight by refocusing it, are nearly lossless. According to Kushnir, most of losses happen at the other end, where electricity is converted into microwave energy. Overall, he said the systems efficiency is around 70%, which is short of copper wires but economically viable in some areas. And its those areas the companys aiming for.

we dont foresee in the near future a situation where we could say all copper wire can be replaced by wireless, Kushnir said. Inherently, itll have lower efficiency levels. Its not about replacing the whole infrastructure but augmenting it in places where it makes sense.

The companys prototype can currently send a few watts of energy over a distance of about 130 feet. For the Powerco project, theyre working on a larger version capable of beaming a few kilowatts. The plan is to deliver the new system to Powerco in October, test it in the lab for a few months, and then, if all goes to plan, try it out in the field. The tests will aim to validate how much power the system can transmit over what distance.

Though the current model is modest, Kushnir says it should scale.

We can use the exact same technology to transmit 100 times more power over much longer distances, he said in a press release. Wireless systems using Emrod technology can transmit any amount of power current wired solutions transmit.

Ray Simpkin, Emrods chief scientific officer, told IEEE Spectrum that the company is also looking into whether they could beam power across 30 kilometers of water from the New Zealand mainland to Stewart Island. He said the system could cost as little as 60 percent of an undersea cable.

Ultimately, the technology may help power rural areas or transmit energy from offshore wind farms, both cases where its expensive to build physical infrastructure to tap or feed the grid. In other cases, say in national parks, a mode of wireless transmission could have less impact on the environment and require less maintenance. Or it might be used to provide power after natural disasters in which physical infrastructure has been damaged.

Its not Teslas world wireless system, but it just might make long-distance wireless power a commercial reality in the not-too-distant future.

Image source:Killian Eon /Pexels

Continue reading here:

New Zealand Is About to Test Long-Range Wireless Power Transmission - Singularity Hub

Baby Boomers 7 Possible Legacies, Guided by W.B. Yeats, Joan Didion and the Book of Revelations – Forbes

Posted on by

The center wasnt holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public auction announcements and common-place reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled the four-letter words they scrawled.

-Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion (1964)

Cycles of History: Post World War I, the 1960s and now

Joan Didion, wrote her essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem in 1964 from Haight-Ashbury, ground zero for the cultural shockwave unleashed when the oldest Baby Boomers became eligible for the draft, found their parents lifestyle stifling and discovered the pleasuresand painsof drugs, sex and rock and roll.

Writer Joan Didion and novelist John Gregory Dunne sitting in the library of their Malibu, ... [+] California, home. (Photo by Henry Clarke/Conde Nast via Getty Images)

Her reference to the center wasnt holding directly connects the 1960s in America to the instability after the end of World War I in 1918, which inspired W. B. Yeats to write his famous poem, The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the wideninggyre.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Widening gyre refers to his theory of history as a series of cycles of order and disorder from the birth of Christ to his Second Coming.If Irish mysticism isnt your thing, think of Mark Twains (maybe) words, History doesnt repeat itself, it rhymes. Or,Kondratievs long wave theory of cycles of 40-60 years.

The idea of history as a "gyre" is drawn from Irish mysticism and Hinduism.

In 1918, the war to end all wars led instead to a period of extended political and economic instability that laid the foundation for Yeats torment. And the violent Easter Rising of 1916, leading to the independence of the Irish Republic in 1919,brought it home. The Pandemic of 1918 infected 500 million people and killed 50 million, and brought Yeats young wife near death.

We Baby Boomers Pass Through Yeats Widening Gyre

From Joan Didions hippies to our ongoing pandemic, it feels like we Baby Boomers are moving through Yeatswidening gyre.Perhaps it is as simple as when many of our parents were born (mine 1911, 1914); when we were becoming adults in the 1960s and 1970s; and now we see the Great White Light in the lessening distance about 50 years later.

Or maybe we Baby Boomers are finally coming to terms with our lost innocence. Watch the movie documentary, Woodstock. What you will see and hear...almost smell, touch and taste...is beautiful, dirty, dizzy late adolescents who are smiling, high, frothy with the ooze of young sensuality, misinterpreted as some kind of new utopian societal order. We believed we were going to bring peace and love to the world. Great rock and roll though.

At our confident midlife, we thought the world was yielding to our generational intelligence, insight and will. Our working life witnessed an unprecedented period of economic expansion, riding the powers of globalization and innovation in technology and health care. If the alchemy of technical smarts and money could achieve something, mostly we have.

Then, what initially seemed like an era of the spreading of our values of democracy and human rights shifted towards autocracy, the increasing economic hegemony of China and America shifting towards President Trumps populism and America First. We can take claim, though, for major progress in womens and gay rights.

Assessing Our 7 Legacies Past, Present, Future

We Baby Boomers are beginning to reflect about our legacies might be. Its too early to know, of course. But its not too early to speculate, to outline the first draft of possibilities. We will take our guidance from Yeats and Didion whenever we can.

War: The Vietnam war wasnt our idea. We can take claim to ending it and the military draft. America didnt initiate significant aggressive military action for 25 years after.But, after Al Qaedas attacks on U.S. soil on 9/11/2001, we decided not only to retaliate against Afghanistan but to forget the sins of colonialism and imperialism and engage in nation-building in the graveyard of empires.Our unilateral attack against Iraq only proved that we had forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. Maybe if we had a military draft in 2003, we might have hesitated long enough to realize that we were invigorating a new power with WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iran by destroying its worst enemy.

JFK and Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink outfit prepared for motorcade into city from airport, Nov. 22. After ... [+] a few speaking stops, the President was assassinated in the same car.

Violence:The assassinations of John F. Kennedy (November 22, 1963), Malcolm X (February21, 1965), Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968), Robert F. Kennedy(June 6, 1968) left us stunned and wounded and with a leadership vacuum we can sense even today.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned

The violence of the 1960s also deepened a deep cultural rift between those Americans favoring various forms of gun control and those who hold that the Second Amendment provides expansive rights for individual citizens to own and carry guns. The National Rifle Associations turn to lobbying for gun rights in the late 1970s has thwarted many Congressional attempts for stronger gun control. Despite the Second Amendments ambiguity in wording and intent- A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.in 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed an individuals right to guns.

Today, we remain the most heavily armed citizenry in the world, by a huge margin. We account for 393 million (about 46 percent) of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms, on average over 1 gun per person, about 10 times most other countries.

Racism: We Baby-Boomers inherited a long, mean history of racism, often enabled by violence,which has been part of America from our very beginning. Born in Revolution, we expanded with genocidal fervor against Native Americans who occupied land we coveted, and built the economy of our largely agricultural South with African slaves.

Even after we fought the Civil War, certainly because of slavery whatever other causes one might posit,racial segregation continued, most prominently due to Jim Crow laws. Until 1965, Jim Crow laws notoriously constrained any political and economic gainsby black people, enabled bythe Supreme-Court-mandated separate but equal doctrine in 1896.

We Baby Boomers were born and growing up just as the Civil Rights Movement emerged in the late 1950s, enabled by multiple rulings by the Warren Court finding segregation unconstitutional. Some of may remember dramatic events ranging from Emmett Tills murder and Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid 1950s to the Freedom Riders, voter registration drives and the March on Washington in the first half of the 1960s.

The Civil Rights Act became law in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965. But the progress made was not enough to stop the Long, Hot Summer of race riots in over 100 cities throughout our country in 1967. The federally sponsored Kerner Commission later determined the causes of the riots included police brutality, white racism, and socioeconomic discrimination in multiple forms.

But as our gyre winds around again, the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down an essential clause of the Voting Rights Act because it bears no logical relationship to the present day.And we live today in the sad wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the killings of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin and so many other Black men.

Participants in the March on Washington conclude their march from the Lincoln Memorial to the Martin ... [+] Luther King Jr. Memorial August 28, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Will Black Lives Matter be our platform to end our countries 400 year history racism against Blacks?

Wealth:Despite great prosperity, we Baby Boomers have presided over dramatic growth in the socioeconomic gap that is now threatening our American social contract. Our wealthiest 0.1% take in almost 200 times the income of the bottom 90%, reflecting levels unseen since the Gilded Age before World War I.S&P 500 firm CEOs were paid 287 times as much as average U.S. workers in 2018, compared to 42 times as much as the average U.S. worker in 1980.

Through our new monetary policy of flooding the world with cash at zero interest rates and a fiscal policy spending unprecedented numbers of trillions of dollars, we are now spending our childrens and grandchildrens money. But its okay because, after all, The Giving Pledge still lets billionaires leave their kids 50%!

Drugs: We Baby Boomers have had a drug to enhance every period of our lives. Sex? Birth control pills approved by the FDA in 1960.When we grew anxious and depressed with our adult responsibilities, we had Prozac and its progeny, anti-depressants too numerous to list. Our sex life dragging in midlife?ED drugs, starting with Viagra in 1998.

To get high? Pot and LSD for our college years; cocaine when we had money and gotbusy in our 20s and 30s.Remember how fun college was? Lets legalize pot as medicine as we age.

And, as our forebears in the gyre, from the Roaring Twenties and the Lost Generation after World War (read Hemingways Moveable Feastits life as punctuated by alcohol), we loved to party and alcohol for most is remains our chosen drug.

Tragically,many of our poor, some returning soldiers and now even members of our working class have sought heroin in the 1960s and later, crack cocaine in the 1970s and 1980s, and now pain-killing legal opioids leading back to illegal heroin, fentanyl.We passed Just Say No years ago.

Climate Change:

Like Scrooge in Dickens The Christmas Carol, we have been given a view of our future. In our case, its looking warm. We know, and have known for a long time, that a global temperature change of more than 1.5C would be catastrophic for human civilization. Its effects will range from the destabilization of agricultural systems to drastic sea-level rise, to tragic losses in biodiversity. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that limiting global warming to 1.5C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050. Statements like these are fairly banal to read these days, but even so, it has become abundantly clear that a world without emissions is beyond the reach of the Boomer imagination.

A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery illuminates the sky on August 21, 2019 in ... [+] Norco, Louisiana. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial intelligence is, in simplest terms, computer technology that emulates human intelligence. What we have now is called specialized artificial intelligence or machine learning.We have not yet achieved the much more human-like AI that would be needed to achieve the Singularity, defined as when technology develops beyond human control; or, when human and machine are fully integrated; or, when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.

We need to return now to Joan Didionsessay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem,whose title leads us to the second stanza of Yeats Second Coming, which we will need to help us decide about where we stand onAI and the Singularity.

Surely somerevelationis at hand;

Surely theSecond Comingis at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out ofSpiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape withlion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towardsBethlehemto be born?

The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats, (1919)

Yeats rough beast refers to the Anti-Christ in the last book of the New Testament, Revelations, who isset for the final showdown andthe Second Coming of Christ. You can think of the rough beast as Evil or your worst nightmare come to life right before your eyes.

Is the Singularity the work of the Anti-Christ?

Ray Kurzweil speaks onstage at 'Ray and Amy Kurzweil on Collaboration and the Future ' during 2017 ... [+] SXSW Conference and Festivals (Photo by Katrina Barber/Getty Images for SXSW)

Ray Kurzweil, one of the Singularitys leading theorists, tells us we shouldnt fear its arrival around 2045. The late Steven Hawkings thought AI posed a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.Elon Musk worries that AI might overtake human intelligence by 2025.

Who do you think is the Anti-Christ?

The Antichrist, miniature from the Latin manuscript III 177 folio 44, 12th Century. (Photo by ... [+] DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Wall Street? Well, its our gyres Whore of Babylon (Revelation: 17:1-8), whose infinite appetite for cashits profits have risen from 10% to close to half in the United States while we Boomers watchedwill certainly seek it to charge tolls on the road to the Singularity.

Biomedicine? A Chinese scientist cloned a human embryo in recent years Wont the Singularity need a post-modern Dr. Frankenstein to plant the circuit in our brains?

Perhaps, the FAANGsFacebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet, i.e., well-positioned with technology, expertise, cash, self-interest and brands, although their Chinese competitors are strong and determined to win.The social media segment gives loud voice to the worst of us but seems quite blind to that bare truth. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg views concerns about AI as irresponsible. People who dont trust Facebook, he says, dont understand it.

In the moments just before the Singularity, a Wall Street mergers bankercant miss the biggest deal ever! - approaches you with a digital device and asks, Please press the Accept button. You are only agreeing to give us your mind. You get to keep your soul.

Press Disagree Boomers. If we save humanity twice,We will be the Greatest Generation!

Read the rest here:

Baby Boomers 7 Possible Legacies, Guided by W.B. Yeats, Joan Didion and the Book of Revelations - Forbes

Could Quantum Computing Progress Be Halted by Background Radiation? – Singularity Hub

Posted on by

Doing calculations with a quantum computer is a race against time, thanks to the fragility of the quantum states at their heart. And new research suggests we may soon hit a wall in how long we can hold them together thanks to interference from natural background radiation.

While quantum computing could one day enable us to carry out calculations beyond even the most powerful supercomputer imaginable, were still a long way from that point. And a big reason for that is a phenomenon known as decoherence.

The superpowers of quantum computers rely on holding the qubitsquantum bitsthat make them up in exotic quantum states like superposition and entanglement. Decoherence is the process by which interference from the environment causes them to gradually lose their quantum behavior and any information that was encoded in them.

It can be caused by heat, vibrations, magnetic fluctuations, or any host of environmental factors that are hard to control. Currently we can keep superconducting qubits (the technology favored by the fields leaders like Google and IBM) stable for up to 200 microseconds in the best devices, which is still far too short to do any truly meaningful computations.

But new research from scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), published last week in Nature, suggests we may struggle to get much further. They found that background radiation from cosmic rays and more prosaic sources like trace elements in concrete walls is enough to put a hard four-millisecond limit on the coherence time of superconducting qubits.

These decoherence mechanisms are like an onion, and weve been peeling back the layers for the past 20 years, but theres another layer that left unabated is going to limit us in a couple years, which is environmental radiation, William Oliver from MIT said in a press release. This is an exciting result, because it motivates us to think of other ways to design qubits to get around this problem.

Superconducting qubits rely on pairs of electrons flowing through a resistance-free circuit. But radiation can knock these pairs out of alignment, causing them to split apart, which is what eventually results in the qubit decohering.

To determine how significant of an impact background levels of radiation could have on qubits, the researchers first tried to work out the relationship between coherence times and radiation levels. They exposed qubits to irradiated copper whose emissions dropped over time in a predictable way, which showed them that coherence times rose as radiation levels fell up to a maximum of four milliseconds, after which background effects kicked in.

To check if this coherence time was really caused by the natural radiation, they built a giant shield out of lead brick that could block background radiation to see what happened when the qubits were isolated. The experiments clearly showed that blocking the background emissions could boost coherence times further.

At the minute, a host of other problems like material impurities and electronic disturbances cause qubits to decohere before these effects kick in, but given the rate at which the technology has been improving, we may hit this new wall in just a few years.

Without mitigation, radiation will limit the coherence time of superconducting qubits to a few milliseconds, which is insufficient for practical quantum computing, Brent VanDevender from PNNL said in a press release.

Potential solutions to the problem include building radiation shielding around quantum computers or locating them underground, where cosmic rays arent able to penetrate so easily. But if you need a few tons of lead or a large cavern in order to install a quantum computer, thats going to make it considerably harder to roll them out widely.

Its important to remember, though, that this problem has only been observed in superconducting qubits so far. In July, researchers showed they could get a spin-orbit qubit implemented in silicon to last for about 10 milliseconds, while trapped ion qubits can stay stable for as long as 10 minutes. And MITs Oliver says theres still plenty of room for building more robust superconducting qubits.

We can think about designing qubits in a way that makes them rad-hard, he said. So its definitely not game-over, its just the next layer of the onion we need to address.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Read more:

Could Quantum Computing Progress Be Halted by Background Radiation? - Singularity Hub

If you flew your spaceship through a wormhole, could you make it out alive? Maybe… – SYFY WIRE

Posted on by

Can you already hear Morgan Freemans sonorous voice as if this was another episode of Through the Wormhole?

Astrophysicists have figured out a way to traverse a (hypothetical) wormhole that defies the usual thinking that wormholes (if they exist) would either take longer to get through than the rest of space or be microscopic. These wormholes just have to warp the rules of physics which is totally fine since they would exist in the realm of quantum physics. Freaky things could happen when you go quantum. If wormholes do exist, some of them might be large enough for a spacecraft to not only fit through, but get from this part of the universe to wherever else in the universe in one piece.

"Larger wormholes are possible with aspecial type of dark sector,a type of matter that interactsonly gravitationally with our own matter. The usual dark matter is an example.However, the one we assumed involves a dark sector that consists of an extradimensional geometry,"Princeton astrophysicist Juan Maldacena and grad student Alexey Milekhin told SYFY WIRE.Theyrecently performed a new study that reads like a scientific dissection of what exactly happened to John Crichtons spaceship when it zoomed through a wormhole in Farscape.

"This type of larger wormhole isbased on therealization that a five-dimensional spacetime could be describing physics at lowerenergies than the ones we usually explore, but that it would have escaped detection because it couples with our matter only through gravity," Maldacena and Milekhinsaid."In fact, its physics issimilar to adding many strongly interacting massless fields to the known physics,and for this reason it can give rise to the required negative energy."

While the existence of wormholes has never been proven, you could defend theories that they could exist deep in the quantum realm. The problem is, even if they do exist, they are thought to be infinitesimal. Hypothetical wormholes would also take so long to get across that youd basically be a space fossil by the time you got to the other end. Maldacena and Milekhin have found a theoretical way for a wormhole thatcould get you across the universe in seconds and manage not to crush your spacecraft. At least it would seem like seconds to you. To everyone else on Earth, it could be ten thousand years. Scary thought.

"Usually whenpeople discuss wormholes, they have in mind 'short'wormholes: the ones forwhich the travel time would be almost instantaneous even for a distant observer.We think that such wormholes are inconsistent with the basic principles of relativity," the scientists said. "The ones we considered are 'long': for a distant observed the path alongnormal space-time is shorter than through the wormhole.There is a time-dilation factor because the extreme gravity makes travel time very short for the traveller. For an outsider, the time it takes is much longer, so we have consistency with the principles of relativity, which forbid travel faster than the speed of light."

Fortraversable wormholesto exist, but the vacuum of space would have to be cold and flat to actually allow for what they theorize. Space is already cold. Just pretend that its flat for the sake of imagining Maldacena and Milekhin's brainchild of a wormhole.

"These wormholes are big, the gravitational forces will be rather small. So, if they were in empty flat space,they would not be hazardous. We chose their size to be big enough so that theywould be safe from large gravitational forces," they said.

Negative energy would also have to exist in a traversable wormhole. Physics forbids such a thing from being a reality. In quantum physics, the concept of this exotic energy is explained by Stephen Hawking as the absence of energy from two pieces of matter being closer together as opposed to being far apart, because energy needs to be burned so they can be separated despite gravitational force struggling to pull them back together. Fermions, which include subatomic particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons (with the exception that they would need to be massless), would enter one end and travel in circles. They would come out exactly where they went in, which suggests that the modification of energy in the vacuum can make it negative.

"Early theorized wormholes were not traversable; an observer going through a wormhole encounters a singularity before reaching the toher side, which is related ot the fact that positive energy tends to attract matter and light," the scientists said."This is whyspacetime shrinks at the singularity of a black hole. Negative energy prevents this. The main problem is that the particular type of negative energy that is needed is not possible in classical physics, and in quantum physics it is only possible in some limited amounts and for special circumstances.

Say you make it to a gaping wormhole ready to take you...nobody knows where. What would it feel like to travel through it? Probably not unlike Space Mountain, if you ask Maldacena and Milekhin. In their study, they described these wormholes as "the ultimate roller coaster."

The only thing a spaceship pilot would need to do, unlike Farscapes Crichton, who totally lost control, is get the ship in sync with the tidal forces of the wormhole so they could be in the right position to take off. These are the forces that will push and pull an object away from another object depending on the difference in the objects strength of gravity, and that gravity would power the spaceship through.This is whyit would basically end upflying itself. But there are still obstacles.

"The problem is that every object which enters the wormhole will be acceleratedto very high energies," the scientists said."It means that a wormhole must be kept extremely cleanto be safe for human travel. In particular, even the pervasive cosmic microwaveradiation, which has very low energy, would be boosted to high energies andbecome dangerous for the wormhole traveler."

So maybe this will never happen. Wormholes may never actually be proven to exist. Even if they dont, it's wild to think about the way quantum physics could even allow for a wormhole that you could coast right through.

Visit link:

If you flew your spaceship through a wormhole, could you make it out alive? Maybe... - SYFY WIRE

Diversity As A CEO Priority During This Singular Time In Our History – Forbes

Posted on by

As I speak with CEOs every day, so many are truly pained and deeply want racial harmony. In considering the state of diversity today, I thought it would make sense to talk with one leader who has a history of building true movements: Edie Fraser, CEO, Women Business Collaborative. Edie has already built Million Women Mentors (MWM) with 2.5 million commitments.

Robert Reiss: Talk about diversity today.

Edie Fraser: Robert, Diversity is a number one issue for the private sector, right up there with return on investments and CEO Leadership. This moment is singular and provides an opportunity to create sustainable change. The time is NOW! Platitudes are no longer acceptable.Talent is key and so, too, are investments in diverse suppliers and our communities. I was engaged in the civil rights movement early and have spent my career working to accelerate the position of women and minorities in business. It has been nearly only 17 months since we founded Women Business Collaborative (WBC) together as a non-profit, focusing on increasing parity and power and with it 25% advancement of diversity changes in every action initiative taken. The private sectors awareness of the disparities in corporate America have only heightened in 2020. It is business that is showing courage to take action, and the private sector must ACT NOW!

WBC Edie Fraser team

Focus on the importance of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) on our economy and our national wellbeing. COVID-19 and the recession combined with tensions over the continued racism in America have created an unprecedented economic and human crises and highlighted inequities further fueling unrest.In corporate America, our CEOs and Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) and CHROs are crucial to successfully navigating the current social challenges along with the others in the Executive Suite. Bottom up and top down, all must work together to change what has been the status quo. We want results.

Reiss: You mentioned the singularity of this moment in time. What strikes you as different from preceding periods of political and social unrest?

Fraser: 2020 is different because we are moving beyond statements of support into real actions, investments, and accountability. Platitudes are no longer acceptable. This moment is for change. Consumers and employees are demanding companies look beyond shareholder interests and prioritize people. Financial results will be better because they do. The Pandemic, recession and racism aren't just impacting a small number of people; impacts are widespread and leaders great leaders see that real investments in change are the next essential step.

This summer Blackrock CEO Larry Fink committed to insisting on Board diversity and senior talent and investments; Oprah replaced her likeness on the Cover of Oprah Magazine for the first time.Different examples in different industries with various needs and approaches but all are examples of real actionable leadership that aligns with their brand.

As business leaders, we know that if something is critical to our success, we measure it.DE&I is no different. Consumers have shown they are looking for real action such as more diversified hiring and promotion practices, diversifying suppliers, and insisting on internal reviews of cultures holding back people of color. The companies that prioritize all aspects of diversity will come out ahead. McKinsey & Company's 2019 Diversity Matters: How Inclusion Wins Report found that gender diverse teams are 25 percent more likely to financially outperform their competitors and ethnically diverse teams were 36 percent more likely.

Reiss: What does CEO activism look like?

Fraser:As protests erupted, most CEOs took that time to listen and reflect.The heard about long-term racism.To repeat: it is imperative we move from statements of support and listening to action.CEO activism includes some key tenants to start a clear connection between the statement, the brand, and actions.Activism includes transparency and accountability. CEOs and their teams set bold goals and lead by example.

Reiss: Which CEOs do you see as leaders for DE&I efforts right now?

Fraser:Many are committing action. Satya Nadella at Microsoft continually comes out on top of DE&I rankings. As one of the fastest-growing sectors, technology companies are under pressure to create a more substantial presence of women and people of color. Since 2014, Microsoft is in the 3 percent of Fortune 500 companies to report full workforce demographic data and supplier data. CEOs who are making commitments then hold themselves accountable by reporting the metrics. Robert, WBC with you and Becky Shambaugh, just interviewed Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams and he shared, Diversity is holistic in talent and community, and now Kaiser has made a commitment of $1.7 billion to Black and Hispanic suppliers.

Diversity is a most pressing issue right now. Companies tracking and reportingemployee satisfaction. DiversityInc. released its annual Top 50 Companies for Diversity list in May. At the top was Marriott International and CEO Arne Sorenson, a leader for diversity in the hospitality industry. Eli Lilly and Company was number three on the list with CEO Dave Ricks leading the way for inclusion in healthcare. Mastercard's Ajay Banga made the number six spot leading the financial service industry. (5/8/2020) Goldman Sachs' David Solomon, another leader in the financial service industry, recently released a list of aspirational goals emphasizing women and Black professionals in V.P. roles (8/6/2020).

The latest appointment of Linda Rendle as CEO at Clorox takes the number of women leading Fortune 500 companies to 38 and growing. Yet we lack women of color both at the CEO Level and in boardrooms. The momentum for DE&I across the board makes us focused. CEOs and CDOs need to work together with their teams to keep bring people to the table, move pipeline talent upward and insist that thosewho historically have not had the opportunity to be there get the new seats. Candidates have the skills.

Reiss: You mentioned the growing number of women leading Fortune 500 firms. As you are so dedicated to accelerating the position of women in business how do you believe we continue that progress?

Fraser: We cannot let the conversation off the table. We created WBC because there were manywomen business organizations working in silos. To change the numbers, we needed collaboration. In many instances, organizations were competing. WBC is thrilled to have 41+ women business organizations today aligned to drive change on more women and women of color as CEO, boards and capital firms and more entrepreneurs successful and with capital support.

We are seeing progress, in the past months, more women were appointed to corporate boards, 130 Black women are running for office, we had a record number of women leading Fortune 500 firms, and still there is so much work to be done. The Boardlist recently announced that it is extending its services to men of color.(8/11/20) That type of expansion is so imperative. We must see the progress, celebrate it, and then ask ourselves how we can take what we know works and use it to help more people.

This slow pace of change has been prompted calls to action. The current social unrest in our country calls for proactive, vigilant leadership working toward achieving results. It is THE TIME for accountability and impact. Together we will work tirelessly to inspire companies to share clear results. We must succeed.

To listen to CEO Interviews go to The CEO Forum Group

See the original post here:

Diversity As A CEO Priority During This Singular Time In Our History - Forbes

Managing Complexity in the New Era of HPC – insideHPC

Posted on by

By Bill Wagner, CEO Bright Computing

Until recently, High Performance Computing (HPC) was a fairly mature and predictable area of information technology. It was characterized by a narrow category of applications used by a largely fixed set of industries running on predominantly Intel-based on-premise systems. But over the last few years, all of that has begun to change. New technologies, cloud, edge, and a broadening set of commercial use cases in the areas of data analytics and machine learning have set in motion a tsunami of change for HPC. This is no longer a tool for rocket scientists and the research elite. HPC is quickly becoming a strategic necessity for all industries that want to gain a competitive advantage in their markets, or at least keep pace with their industry peers in order to survive.

While HPC has given commercial users a powerful set of new tools that drive innovation, it has also introduced a variety of challenges to those organizations, including increased infrastructure costs, complexities associated with new technologies, and a lack of HPC know-how to take advantage of it. The challenges introduced by this new era of HPC have given rise to new implications for how companies execute their HPC strategies, with most embarking on a steep and risky learning curve to the detriment of their IT staff and budget.

On the technology side, options have never been more prevalent. With a wide range of choices in hardware, software, and even consumption models, organizations are now faced with an array of choices. New processing elements (Intel, AMD, ARM, GPUs, FPGAs, IPUs), containers (Kubernetes, Docker, and Singularity), and cloud options (hybrid and multi-cloud) have disrupted the HPC industry, challenging organizations to pick infrastructure solutions (both hardware and software) that will be able to tackle their diversifying workloads, while seamlessly working together.

In the past, HPC clusters were built with a fairly static mindset. The notion of combining X86 and ARM architectures in the same cluster was not even a consideration. Furthermore, extending your HPC cluster to the public cloud for additional capacity was something you planned to do down the road. Hosting containerized machine learning applications and data analytics applications on your HPC cluster harmoniously alongside traditional MPI-based modeling and simulation applications was on the wishlist. Offering end users bare metal, VMs, and containers on the same cluster was unheard of, and deploying edge compute as an integral part of your core HPC infrastructure fell under the category of maybe someday. However, in todays new world of HPC, IT managers and infrastructure architects are feeling the pressure to make all these things happen right now. The availability of new, highly specialized hardware and software is both enticing and intimidating. If organizations dont take advantage of all that HPC offers, someone else will, and losing the race for competitive advantage can deal a devastating blow to businesses vying for market share.

In the days of traditional HPC, you built a static cluster and focused your energy on keeping it up and running for its lifespan. As such, research institutions and commercial HPC practitioners alike were able to get by with building custom scripts to integrate a collection of different open-source tools to manage their clusters. But integrating tools for server provisioning, monitoring, alerts, and change management is difficult, labor-intensive, and an ongoing maintenance burden, but possible nonetheless for organizations with the human resources and skill to do so. In the emerging new era of HPC, clusters are far from static and far more complex as a result. The need to leverage new types of processors and accelerators, servers from different manufacturers, to integrate with the cloud, to extend to the edge, to host machine learning and data analytics applications and offer end-users VMs and containers alongside bare metal servers raises the bar exponentially for organizations that contemplate a do-it-yourself approach to building a cluster management solution.

Now more than ever before, there is an increasing need for a professional, supported cluster management tool that spans hardware, software, and consumption models for the new era in HPC. Bright Cluster Manager is a perfect example of a commercial tool with the features and built-in know-how to build and manage heterogenous high-performance Linux clusters for HPC, machine learning, and analytics with ease. Bright Cluster Manager automatically builds your cluster from bare metal setting up networking, user directories, security, DNS, and more and sits across an organizations HPC resourceswhether on-premise, in the cloud, or at the edgeand manages them across workloads. Bright can also react to increasing demand for different types of applications and instantly reassign resources within the cluster to service high-priority workloads based on the policies you set. Intersect360 states, Fundamentally, Bright Computing helps address the big question in HPC: how to match diverse resources to diverse workloads in a way that is both efficient today and future-proof for tomorrow. [1]

Bright Computing highlights the transition that one organization made from their home-grown approach to Bright Cluster Manager. The Louisiana Optical Network Infrastructurea premier HPC and high-capacity middle-mile fiber-optic network provider for education and research entities in Louisianamade the switch from their do-it-yourself HPC management setup to Bright Cluster Manager software to provide consistency, ease-of-use, and the ability to easily extend resources to the cloud.

LONI had previously used a homegrown cluster management system that presented a myriad of challenges including lack of a graphical user interface (GUI), daunting complexity for new employees, and proneness to out-of-sync changes and configurations, said LONI Executive Director, Lonnie Leger. Likewise, the do-it-yourself infrastructure we had placed constraints on end-users due to a lack of knowledge continuity concerning cluster health, performance, and capability. By leveraging a commercial solution such as Bright Cluster Manager, we now have an enterprise-grade cluster management solution that embodies the required skills and expertise needed to effectively manage our HPC environment.

This decision to move from in-house, piecemeal open source to a fully supported commercial cluster management solution was born out of necessity for LONI. With a desire to diversify their services, they had quickly outgrown their DIY setup and HPC expertise. While expansion wasnt impossible, it became a daunting task as internal personnel and HPC expertise were limited. This example is but one of many in the new world of HPC. As more organizations try to navigate the challenge of managing the interdependency between hardware and software, dealing with hardware problems, isolating performance degradations, and keeping up with a constant demand for changes, the need for commercially supported cluster management solutions has become more important than ever before.

All of the change taking place in HPC that breaks and broadens how we think about it makes it necessary to remind ourselves what HPC really is. Intersect360 Research defines HPC as the use of servers, clusters, and supercomputersplus associated software tools, components, storage, and servicesfor scientific, engineering, or analytical tasks that are particularly intensive in computation, memory usage, or data management. [2] This definition is important because it recognizes that HPC can be much broader than what it has been traditionally, and with that broadening comes a whole new level of complexity. The harsh reality is that as organizations embrace a broader definition of HPC to propel their business, they must come to terms with the complexity that needs to be overcome in order to manifest it.

With Bright Cluster Manager software, complexity is automated away and replaced with flexibility. Bright builds and pre-tests a turn-key high-performance cluster from a wizard based on your specifications and instruments the cluster with health checks and monitoring, provides detailed insight on resource utilization, dynamically assigns resources to service end-user workloads based on demand, extends your cluster to the public cloud for additional resources if desired, extends to the edge for centralized management of remote resources, supports mixed hardware environments, offers bare metal, VMs or containers from the same cluster and provides command line, GUI and API based access to all functionality.

As stated by Intersec360 Research, Data science and machine learning? Intel or AMD? GPUs or FPGAs? Docker or Kubernetes? Cloud, on-premise, or edge? AWS or Azure? Bright Cluster Manager lets users decide individually how to incorporate all of these transitionssome or all, mix and match, now or laterin a single HPC cluster environment. With so many independent trends continuing to push HPC forward, Bright Computing is aiming to be the company that helps users pull them all together. [3]

Bright Computing helps address the big question in HPC: how to match diverse resources to diverse workloads in a way that is both efficient today and future-proof for tomorrow.

For more information about Bright Computing solutions for HPC, visit http://www.brightcomputing.com or email us at info@brightcomputing.com

[1] Intersect360 Research Paper: Bright Computing: Managing Multiple Paths to Innovation

[2] Intersect360 Research Paper: Bright Computing: Managing Multiple Paths to Innovation

[3] Intersect360 Research Paper: Bright Computing: Managing Multiple Paths to Innovation

Bright Computing is the leading provider of platform-independent commercial cluster management software. Bright Cluster Manager, Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science, and Bright OpenStack automate the process of installing, provisioning, configuring, managing, and monitoring clusters for HPC, data analytics, machine learning, and OpenStack environments.

See the article here:

Managing Complexity in the New Era of HPC - insideHPC

Caribbean islands respond to record COVID deaths – NYCaribNews

Posted on by

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) The Guyana government has reinstated a 12-hour curfew as Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries continue to implement measures aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) that has infected thousands of their nationals and killed more than 300 others.

Georgetown said that the 6:00 pm to 6:00 am (local time) curfew goes into effect as of Tuesday, making exceptions only for detailed essential workers including parliamentarians, healthcare officials, the disciplined forces and the Guyana Revenue Authority, among others.

In addition, the Cheddi Jagan International and Eugene F Correia Airports will remain closed to all incoming international flights, with some special exceptions, and the government warned that as part of measures to ensure strict adherence to COVID-19 protocols, charges will be imposed on individuals who fail to wear face masks in public spaces

It said that the measures are to remain in full effect until September 30. Health authorities said that as of Monday, the country had recorded 1,306 positive cases, including 41 deaths.

In Suriname, the Dutch-speaking Caricom country has, for the second time in four days, registered four COVID-19 deaths over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 71.

Health officials said that 25 new cases were recorded, bringing the total to 4,034 with 823 being active cases.

The authorities said 145 people are being cared for in various hospitals and that the number of patients in the different intensive care units is 18, while over the past 24 hours, 67 people have recovered, bringing the total to 3,140.

The number of positive people in isolation is 684, while there are now 92 people in quarantine, who are not positive.

The Ministry of Health in The Bahamas has confirmed that there have been 50 additional cases, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 2,217.

New providence continues to lead the islands in the archipelago in the number of cases, recording 1,378, followed by 552 in Grand Bahama, 67 in Abaco and 53 in Bimini.

The Ministry of Health also confirmed the unfortunate death of a 77- year-old male of New Providence on Monday, bringing the death toll to 44.

Original post:

Caribbean islands respond to record COVID deaths - NYCaribNews

Disturbance in Caribbean Sea expected to strengthen into tropical depression – Tampa Bay Times

Posted on by

A tropical wave moving west through the eastern Caribbean Sea is expected to strengthen into a tropical depression in the coming days, the National Hurricane Center announced in a special advisory Sunday.

The wave is one of a quartet of storms that are brewing in the Atlantic, but, because of its location and organization, it poses the greatest imminent threat to land in North and Central America. Currently named Disturbance 1, it was given a 80 percent chance of developing into a named storm in the next five days by the Hurricane Center.

Showers and thunderstorms associated with a tropical wave over the eastern Caribbean Sea are beginning to show signs of organization, the center wrote at 12:10 p.m. Sunday. Recent satellite-derived surface winds also indicated that a broad low-pressure system has formed in association with the wave.

Disturbance 1 was carrying a disorganized cluster of showers and thunderstorms on Sunday afternoon while it moved west at 15 to 20 mph, according to the Hurricane Center.

There is another disturbance with a high chance of formation as of Sunday afternoon a low-pressure area off the eastern seaboard, near northeast Florida. The Hurricane Center gave the disturbance a 70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone by the end of next week.

The system isnt expected to pose a threat to Florida, however, according to the Hurricane Center. It most likely will move parallel with the eastern United States while developing, then veer into the open Atlantic Ocean next week.

The Hurricane Center said Sunday that it is also monitoring two other tropical waves Disturbance 2 and Disturbance 4 that have a low chance of formation in the next five days. Both are slow-moving systems in the eastern Atlantic, near the coast of Africa and the Cabo Verde Islands. Their chance of development over the next five days is less than 30 percent.

If all four storms are to grow strong enough to be declared tropical storms or hurricanes, they would be named Nana, Omar, Paulette and Rene.

Together with researchers at Colorado State University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an extremely active hurricane season in the Atlantic this year that would see 11 named storms between June 1 and Nov. 30. This season has already had 13 named storms and is threatening more all before Sept. 10, which is recognized by scientists as being the climatological peak of the storm season.

2020 Tampa Bay Times Hurricane Guide

HURRICANE SEASON IS HERE: Get ready and stay informed at tampabay.com/hurricane

PREPARE FOR COVID-19 AND THE STORM: The CDCs tips for this pandemic-hurricane season

PREPARE YOUR STUFF: Get your documents and your data ready for a storm

BUILD YOUR KIT: The stuff youll need to stay safe and comfortable for the storm

PROTECT YOUR PETS: Your pets cant get ready for a storm. Thats your job

NEED TO KNOW: Click here to find your evacuation zone and shelter

Lessons from Hurricane Michael

What the Panhandles top emergency officials learned from Michael

Were not going to give up. What a school superintendent learned from Michael

What Tampa Bay school leaders fear most from a storm

Tampa Bays top cops fear for those who stay behind

Continue reading here:

Disturbance in Caribbean Sea expected to strengthen into tropical depression - Tampa Bay Times

Pirates of the Caribbean: Original Flying Dutchman Ship Explained – Screen Rant

Posted on by

In Pirates of the Caribbean, Davy Jones wreaked havoc on the high seas, but the legends surrounding the real ship Flying Dutchman are very different.

What's the true story behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise's most mysterious ship, The Flying Dutchman? Fans of the franchise are familiar with the onscreen story of The Flying Dutchman, but the legends surrounding the real Dutchman are even more intriguing. The Flying Dutchman makes its first appearance during Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The ship's captain is Davy Jones, the octopus-faced spurned lover of the sea goddess Calypso. Like The Dutchman, the lore of Davy Jones struck fear into the heart of many sailors for centuries, and some believed Jones to be the Devil himself.

The Pirates of the Caribbean films take place as the Golden Age of Piracy is drawing to a close. The first three films, The Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, and At World's End, borrow from nautical legends surrounding Davy Jones, his infamous Locker, and The Flying Dutchman. The movies chronicle the adventures of Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and Elizabeth Swann as they face threats from the cutthroat Captain Barbossa, the ever-looming presence of the East India Trading Company, and the impending extinction of pirates. The movies are reminiscent of the swashbuckling adventure films of Errol Flynn, complete with elaborate swordplay. They also rely on the supernatural superstitions embraced by sailors for hundreds of years. The fourth film On Stranger Tides focuses on JackSparrow's search for the Fountain of Youth, and the fifth film, Dead Men Tell No Tales,features Jack partnering with Will and Elizabeth's son to find the Trident of Poseidon.

RELATED: Pirates of the Caribbean: Why Disney Originally Hated Depp's Jack Sparrow

According to nautical legend, the real Flying Dutchmancarried spices and silk between the Netherlands and the East Indies during the 17th century. Its captain was Hendrick Van der Decken. While en route to Amsterdam, Van der Decken took a shortcut around the Cape of Good Hope, and The Dutchman sailed into a storm. By some accounts, Van der Decken was a victim of bad luck who realized his mistake too late. Others painted him as a drunken or insane tyrant who tempted fate and challenged an angel.In another version, Satan offered Van der Decken a chance at salvation if he could secure the love of a woman. The captain could make landfall every seven years until he achieved this task. The fate ofThe Flying Dutchmanremained the same: the ship was lost at sea and superstitious sailors claimed the ghost ship could be seen hovering above the waves or emerging from underneath, and it was a harbinger of bad luck.

In the Pirates franchise, The Flying Dutchman's original purpose was to ferry those who died at sea to the afterlife. Calypso entrusted Jones -- once a great sailor -- to serve as captain of the ship, promising that after a decade at sea, Jones could make port and reunite with Calypso. After his first 10 years of service, Jones returned to land, but Calypso wasn't thereso the abandoned captain abandoned his duties and roamed the seas, searching for souls to harvest, preying on dying sailors. He promised them that 100 years of servitude on the ship was preferable to the possibility of eternal damnation. Jones goes so far as to call on the sea monster the Kraken to destroy ships to recruit crew members. Unlike the real legends, The Flying Dutchman's fate is essentially the result of a bad breakup.

The Pirates of the Caribbean movies use the folklore surrounding Davy Jones and The Flying Dutchman but creates its own canon. One story shares a few similarities to the tale of The Flying Dutchmantold in the second and third movies of the franchise with Jones as the captain instead of Van der Decken. The Jones known to sailors was determined to make it round the Cape even if it meant that he and the crew would die trying. As a result, the Devil took the helm, and the ship was doomed to sail the seas for eternity. Jones' decision to tempt fate and invoke the name of Satan led to The Dutchman's curse. In the films, Jones' choice to shirk his responsibilities and defy Calypso caused him and his crew's transformations into half-men, half-sea-life.

MORE: Pirates of the Caribbean 6: Why Disney Is Rebooting The Franchise

All New Curious George Animated Movie Added To Peacock In September

Jennifer has been working as a freelance writer for eight years, contributing to BuddyTV, TVRage, Hidden Remote, Gossip On This, and PopMatters. She prefers binge-watching old episodes of The Office (British and American versions) to long walks on the beach. She's still holding out hope that Happy Endings will get a revival.

The rest is here:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Original Flying Dutchman Ship Explained - Screen Rant