Monthly Archives: January 2020

Among the many things weve become addicted to on our smartphones is checking the weather. If youre anything like me, you open a weather app at least twice a day: in the morning to know what to expect for the day ahead, maybe before your commute home so you can prepare for possible rain or snow, and sometimes before bed to get an idea of what to wear or what activities to plan for the next day. Depending where you live, how much time you spend outside, and how prone your area is to rapid weather changes, maybe you check the forecast even more frequently than that.

The fact that our phones now contain hour-by-hour breakdowns of temperature and likelihood of precipitation means we can be well-informed and well-prepared. But these forecasts are coming at a greater cost than we know, and theyre not always right.

On Monday, a post on Googles AI blog shared a machine learning method the company is developing for weather prediction. Google calls the technique nowcasting because its set up to predict weather zero to six hours ahead of time, and is focused around weather events like thunderstorms that can quickly morph from clear skies to heavy rains to gusting wind and back again.

By simplifying its methodology and actually using less data than existing forecasting techniques, the company believes it can give us accurate, timely weather predictions, especially ones relating to precipitation.

One of the biggest problems with existing forecasting is the amount of data it incorporates, and the amount of computing power needed to process and make sense of all that data. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) alone collects 100 terabytes of data per day. Its input to forecasting models that simulate everything from atmospheric dynamics and thermal radiation to lake and ocean effects.

The forecasting engines run on supercomputers, but theyre limited by their heavy need for computing power. According to Googles blog post, computational demands limit weather prediction to a spatial resolution of about 5 kilometers (3.1 miles), and the simulations take several hours to run. If, for example, it takes six hours to compute a forecast, that allows only three to four runs per day and results in forecasts based on data thats six hours old or more.

Google presents its method as being far simpler, describing it as highly localized, data-driven, physics-free, and low-latency. Essentially, the method turns weather forecasting into a computer vision problem; based on progressive images of the formation and movement of clouds over a short time period, a machine learning algorithm predicts how the pattern will evolve over the subsequent few hours.

Specifically, Google uses a convolutional neural network (CNN), a type of deep learning algorithm whose architecture is particularly conducive to image analysis. The physics-free descriptor means the neural network learns only from its training data and doesnt incorporate knowledge of how the atmosphere works; all it has to go off of are patterns it identifies in the images its fed.

Google points out that from a computing power perspective, this method is much more economical than existing forecast techniques, especially once the model is already trained. The company claims its algorithm can generate forecasts that have a one-kilometer resolution with a latency of five to ten minutes.

When compared to three common forecasting modelsthe NOAAs high resolution rapid refresh numerical forecast, an optical flow algorithm, and a persistence modelGoogle claims the precision of its method outperformed all of these for prediction timespans of less than five to six hours, emphasizing that low latency makes its predictions effectively instantaneous.

So instead of checking the weather on our phones a couple times a day or every few hours, it may not be long before we can access accurate forecasts every minute.

We could also just look out the windowor put our phones down and go for a walk outside.

Image Credit: Image by _Alicja_ from Pixabay

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How Google's New Weather AI Will Make Sure You Never Get Caught in the Rain - Singularity Hub

Scientific progress is not usually straightforward. Researchers pursue and abandon lines of inquiry. Results languish. Theories take decades to cohere.

But sometimes the accumulation of scientific knowledge proceeds more directly, with one discovery triggering the next like a cascade of dominoes.

Thats been the case recently with the mathematical study of fluid mechanics. A startling experimental discovery in 2013 set in motion a series of mathematical proofs that have unsettled centuries of thinking.

Its been a very dynamic and exciting story, said Alexander Kiselev, a mathematician at Duke University and a coauthor of one of the proofs.

The discoveries center on the Euler equations, posed by Leonhard Euler in 1757. Mathematicians and physicists have used them to model how fluids evolve over time. If you toss a rock into a still pond, how will the water be moving five seconds later? The Euler equations can tell you.

Though, not literally. The Euler equations describe an idealized world in which fluids have a number of properties not found in reality. The equations assume, for example, that fluids have no viscosity (internal currents dont create friction as they move past one another) and that theyre incompressible (you cant squeeze a fluid into a smaller space than it already occupies).

Within this idealized world, the equations use Newtons laws of motion to predict the future states of a fluid. Ultimately, mathematicians who study the Euler equations want to know whether the equations always work. Are there scenarios that effectively cause the equations to crash and prevent them from describing a fluid any further into the future?

In 2013, a pair of mathematicians seemed to find such a scenario. Thomas Hou of the California Institute of Technology and Guo Luo, now of the City University of Hong Kong, were running numerical simulations on a computer. They provided a numerical description of the initial state of a fluid and let the computer apply the Euler equations to determine the fluids motion in the future.

Hou and Luo focused on a particular scenario that you could nearly simulate at home. But first, to help think about the surprisingly complicated ways in which fluids can flow, lets consider a scenario you really can try at home.

Imagine a flat-bottomed, cylindrical cup full of tea, with some tea leaves that have settled at the bottom. Now stir the tea clockwise. At first the whole fluid rotates almost as a single body, sweeping the leaves along for the ride.

As the stirring proceeds, though, the centrifugal force of the rotating liquid interacts with the side of the cup to create what physicists call a secondary flow a more complicated motion that arises in response to the initial motion of the stirring. These secondary flows, which go down at the sides of the cylinder and up at the center, are evident in the motion of the tea leaves: They collect in the center at the bottom of the cup and then remain practically stationary even as the tea around them continues to swirl.

The phenomenon, observed for centuries, is called the tea leaf paradox. In 1926 Albert Einstein provided the first mathematical explanation for this behavior.

The scenario that Hou and Luo considered is slightly more complicated. Again, imagine a fluid in a cylinder. This time, the fluid in the top half of the cylinder is rotating clockwise, as in the tea cup, but in the bottom half its rotating counterclockwise. The motions produce several secondary flows. Eddies develop, in the form of swirls running up and down the sides of the cylinder.

From the top the fluid is spiraling down, and from the bottom it is swirling up in the opposite direction, Hou said.

As Hou and Luo ran their numerical simulation, they observed something surprising happening halfway down the cup, right where the conflicting flows came together. The Euler equations reported that the vorticity (or spin) of the fluid at that point was amplifying dramatically. In fact, their simulation showed that according to the Euler equations, the vorticity at that point was growing so fast that it was on track to become infinite in a finite amount of time.

Such infinite values are known as singularities. If the Euler equations were to produce a singularity, theyd break down mathematicians call it blowing up and would no longer be able to describe the future motion of a fluid. This is because the equations cant compute with infinite quantities.

Hou and Luos discovery caused a sensation. For more than 200 years, mathematicians had hunted for scenarios in which the Euler equations faltered. Many had performed numerical simulations that they thought were on track to produce singularities, but none held up under repeated experimentation with faster computers. Hou and Luo finally seemed to have found one that would stick.

Many researchers believe that this is the most convincing singularity scenario we have, said Vladimir Sverak of the University of Minnesota.

But a computer simulation is merely evidence. Its not a proof.

Computers are limited in the sense that they cannot go to the infinitesimal scale, Kiselev said. The result could look very convincing, but you dont know. Maybe if you get a better supercomputer you see things start to disintegrate.

So mathematicians rushed to see if they could prove that what Hou and Luo had observed was really occurring mathematically.

Kiselev and Sverak learned about the simulation in 2013, during a presentation by Hou at a summer workshop at Stanford University. It prompted them to begin working on an important open problem about the rate at which vorticity grows in two-dimensional fluids. They managed to prove a long-conjectured property of the growth rate by considering a version of the scenario Hou and Luo had used in their simulation.

Mathematicians had spent a long time searching for such a useful scenario Hou and Luos simulation suggested to Kiselev and Sverak where they might find one.

It was sort of like having a target to aim for, Kiselev said. Its one thing if youre hunting and you dont even see your target. Its another thing when you know where it is.

Subsequent proofs over the years have extended the mathematical understanding of singularity formation in the Euler equations. In 2019, Tarek Elgindi of the University of California, San Diego, (along with his collaborators Tej-eddine Ghoul and Nader Masmoudi) published two proofs detailing circumstances in which the Euler equations produced singularities. The earlier paper by Kiselev and Sverak was one of the starting points for his work.

Elgindis proofs involve slightly specialized conditions and fall short of the complete understanding of singularity formation within the Euler equations that mathematicians seek. Still, they are among the strongest results ever achieved in the discipline. Quanta described the work in our recent feature Famous Fluid Equations Spring a Leak.

In the same way that eddies in a stream alter downstream currents, Elgindis work itself prompted a new round of mathematical discovery. In October 2019, Hou and Jiajie Chen adapted some of Elgindis methods to create a rigorous mathematical proof of a scenario closely related to the one in the 2013 experiment. They proved that in this slightly modified scenario, the singularity theyd observed forming in the Euler equations really does occur.

They took [Elgindis] ideas and applied them to the scenario from 2013, Sverak said. The circle was complete.

Theres still more work to be done, of course. Hous new proof has some technical qualifications that prevent it from establishing the existence of the singularity in the exact situation he modeled in 2013. But after a remarkable six-year run and with renewed momentum, Hou believes hell soon surmount those challenges, too.

I think were very close, he said.

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For Fluid Equations, a Steady Flow of Progress - Quanta Magazine

As you know if youve ever been to, heard of, or read about the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, theres no shortage of tech in any form: gadgets, gizmos, and concepts abound. You probably couldnt see them all in a month even if you spent all day every day trying.

Given the sheer scale of the show, the number of exhibitors, and the inherent subjectivity of bestowing superlatives, its hard to pick out the coolest tech from CES. But Im going to do it anyway; in no particular order, here are some of the products and concepts that I personally found most intriguing at this years event.

Italian startup e-Novias Weart glove uses a sensing core to record tactile sensations and an actuation core to reproduce those sensations onto the wearers skin. Haptic gloves will bring touch to VR and AR experiences, making them that much more life-like. The tech could also be applied to digitization of materials and in gaming and entertainment.

I expected a full glove, but in fact there were two rings that attached to my fingers. Weart co-founder Giovanni Spagnoletti explained that theyre taking a modular approach, so as to better tailor the technology to different experiences. He then walked me through a virtual reality experience that was a sort of simulated science experiment: I had to lift a glass beaker, place it on a stove, pour in an ingredient, open a safe to access some dry ice, add that, and so on. As I went through the steps, I felt the beaker heat up and cool off at the expected times, and felt the liquid moving inside, as well as the pressure of my fingertips against the numbered buttons on the safe.

There was a slight delay between my taking an action and feeling the corresponding tactile sensation, but on the whole, the haptic glove definitely made the experience more realisticand more fun. Slightly less fun but definitely more significant, Spagnoletti told me Weart is working with a medical group to bring tactile sensations to VR training for surgeons.

Sarcos Robotics unveiled its Guardian XO full-body exoskeleton, which it says can safely lift up to 200 pounds across an extended work session. Whats cool about this particular exoskeleton is that its not just a prototype; the company announced a partnership with Delta airlines, which will be trialing the technology for aircraft maintenance, engine repair, and luggage handling. In a demo, I watched a petite female volunteer strap into the exoskeleton and easily lift a 50-pound weight with one hand, and a Sarcos employee lift and attach a heavy component of a propeller; she explained that the strength-augmenting function of the exoskeleton can easily be switched on or offand the wearers hands releasedto facilitate multi-step tasks.

Hyundai and Uber partnered to unveil an air taxi concept. With a 49-foot wingspan, 4 lift rotors, and 4 tilt rotors, the aircraft would be manned by a pilot and could carry 4 passengers at speeds up to 180 miles per hour. The companies say youll be able to ride across your city in one of these by 2030well see if the regulatory environment, public opinion, and other factors outside of technological capability let that happen.

As evident from its name, Mercedes sweet new Vision AVTR concept car was inspired by the movie Avatar; director James Cameron helped design it. The all-electric car has no steering wheel, transparent doors, seats made of vegan leather, and 33 reptilian-scale-like flaps on the back; its design is meant to connect the driver with both the car and the surrounding environment in a natural, seamless way.

Offered the chance to drive the car, I jumped on it. Placing my hand on the center console started the engine, and within seconds it had synced to my heartbeat, which reverberated through the car. The whole dashboard, from driver door to passenger door, is one big LED display. It showed a virtual landscape I could select by holding up my hand: as I moved my hand from left to right, different images were projected onto my open palm. Closing my hand on an image selected it, and suddenly it looked like I was in the middle of a lush green mountain range. Applying slight forward pressure on the center console made the car advance in the virtual landscape; it was essentially like playing a really cool video game.

Mercedes is aiming to have a carbon-neutral production fleet by 2039, and to reduce the amount of energy it uses during production by 40 percent by 2030. Its unclear whenor whetherthe man-machine-nature connecting features of the Vision AVTR will start showing up in production, but I for one will be on the lookout.

Waverly Labs unveiled its Ambassador translator earlier this year and has it on display at the show. Its worn on the ear and uses a far-field microphone array with speech recognition to translate real-time conversations in 20 different languages. Besides in-ear audio, translations can also appear as text on an app or be broadcast live in a conference environment.

I stopped by the booth and tested out the translator with Waverly senior software engineer Georgiy Konovalov. We each hooked on an earpiece, and first, he spoke to me in Russian. After a delay of a couple seconds, I heard his words inslightly robotic, but fully comprehensibleEnglish. Then we switched: I spoke to him in Spanish, my words popped up on his phone screen in Cyrillic, and he translated them back to English for me out loud.

On the whole, the demo was pretty cool. If youve ever been lost in a foreign country whose language you dont speak, imagine how handy a gadget like this would come in. Lets just hope that once theyre more widespread, these products dont end up discouraging people from learning languages.

Not to be outdone, Google also announced updates to its Translate product, which is being deployed at information desks in JFK airports international terminal, in sports stadiums in Qatar, and by some large hotel chains.

AI is making steady progress towards achieving human-like vision and hearingbut theres been less work done on mimicking our sense of smell (maybe because its less useful in everyday applications). Stratuscents digital nose, which it says is based on NASA patents, uses chemical receptors and AI to identify both simple chemicals and complex scents. The company is aiming to create the worlds first comprehensive database of everyday scents, which it says it will use to make intelligent decisions for customers. What kind of decisions remains to be seenand smelled.

Banner Image Credit: The Mercedes Vision AVTR concept car. Photo by Vanessa Bates Ramirez

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The Weird, the Wacky, the Just Plain Cool: Best of CES 2020 - Singularity Hub

STRANGE objects have been spotted orbiting the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.

Astronomers aren't quite sure what they could be so they've used 13 years worth of data to identify them as a new class of object.

Andrea Ghez, co-author of a recent study about the mystery, said: "These objects look like gas and behave like stars."

The six objects are named G1 through to G6.

They appear to be interacting with the black hole known as Sagittarius A* and look like elongated blobs.

Some scientists have theorised that the blobs are gas clouds that each have a mass several times larger than Earth.

1

Another theory is that they are small stars covered in dust.

Either way, the objects are able to orbit the black hole's edge without getting pulled in and destroyed.

The objects appear compact but stretch out whenever their orbit takes them close to the black hole.

This close period can last from 170 to 1,600 years.

The first two G objects were discovered back in 2005 and 2012.

Because they were able to orbit the black hole without being ripped to shreds, the scientists knew they were looking at objects never seen before.

Ghez has stated that the objects can't just be gas clouds or they would have been dragged into the black hole.

Instead, they must have some sort of object within.

All the objects have different orbits and some are faster than others.

Co-author Mark Morris, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, said: "One of the things that has gotten everyone excited about the G objects is that the stuff that gets pulled off of them by tidal forces as they sweep by the central black hole must inevitably fall into the black hole.

"When that happens, it might be able to produce an impressive fireworks show since the material eaten by the black hole will heat up and emit copious radiation before it disappears across the event horizon."

The astronomers now think that each G object could be a pair of binary stars that revolved around each other.

They also think these stars could have merged thanks to the gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole.

Ultimately, the onjects could explain how galaxies and black holes evolve.

Ghez said: "It's possible that many of the stars we've been watching and not understanding may be the end product of mergers that are calm now.

"We are learning how galaxies and black holes evolve. The way binary stars interact with each other and with the black hole is very different from how single stars interact with other single stars and with the black hole."

The team now wants to do more analysis to see if they can discover even more unusual objects.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

POO-CH Dog gives birth to lime green puppy after litter 'defecates in her womb'

SPACED OUT Puzzled Flat-Earthers left raging after Nasa astronaut posts photo from the ISS

BLURRED LINES Baffling optical illusion tricks you into thinking this picture is in colour

DECOM-PAWSED Your cat could EAT you if you die as study shows felines feast on human flesh

GOING NUCLEAR World-first clip of ATOMS bonding shows matter '500k times smaller than hair'

HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT Alien life may already be hiding on Earth, top astrobiologist claims

In other space news, scientists have discovereda new planetorbiting the closest star to our Solar System.

Nasa has announced it will soon stop"hitching rides with Russia"and instead run all-American manned rocket flights starting this year.

And, the space agency is eyeing up a nearby asteroid that contains enough gold to makeeveryone on Earth a billionaire.

What are your thoughts on the six mystery objects orbiting the black hole? Let us know in the comments..

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Six mystery objects are orbiting our galaxys black hole and scientists are baffled - The Sun

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - January 17, 2020) - Lan To Capital is hosting the Shaping the Future Forum during the most crucial week of the year for the global economy. A series of events and discussions will be happening with the world's most influential players at The Penthouse and the Seehof Hotel in Davos, from the 20th to the 24th of January 2020.

The organization has been building impactful technologies and gathering in meaningful events, the brightest executioners during the last three years. As a result, an organic shift towards a forum with actionable agenda is the subsequent path to inclusive and significant outcomes for the new frontiers of economic change in our world. Three out of five days are dedicated to panel discussions about SDGs, social impact, inclusion, emerging technologies, and space-tech. There are 20+ high-level speakers such as government officials, startups founders, globetrotters, fintech/capital markets executives, and influencers, including:

- Carlos Madjri Sanvee (Secretary-General of the World YMCA);- Ron J. Garan Jr. (Fighter pilot and NASA Astronaut);- Rosala Arteaga Serrano (Former president of Ecuador, social activist);- Yuri Van Geest (Exponential organizations and Singularity University);- Scott Parazynski (American physician and former NASA Astronaut);- Jill Ellis (Coach of the US Soccer team);- Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar (CEO of IOV Labs).

The speakers will participate in panel discussions among the following topics: "Building the financial system of the future", "Youth and Gender Empowerment to form Conscious Leaders, "Decarbonizing cities, a global need, and a huge opportunity", "Transforming sport into the dream machine", "Educating leaders with values for a planet of enormous challenges", between others.

Networking receptions held in the Penthouse will comingle 25+ VC/crypto funds and family offices to understand the latest frontier technological applications. The forum is a home for several artists, explorers, and exceptional, multifaceted achievers who contribute their thoughts and encouraging the masterminds to think out-of-the-box on how to build a better future with technology and intuition.

Story continues

Lan Tschirky, the founder of Shaping the Future Forum, premiers the First Edition of the Lan to Capital magazine at the Gala evening. A fascinating collection of writers have come together from varied backgrounds such as Commerce, Coaching, Creativity, Charities, Culture, Couture, Cuisine & lastly, people who make up Lan's Crowd. Lan has created a magazine to showcase eight essential areas of her life.

At the Gala evening, a first special prize awarded along with the recognition in a piece of art handmade by Ron Seivertson, a hot glass artist who lives on the edge with an intense devotion to his craft. The artist creates masterpieces from the point of view that everything is possible and doing the impossible.

Awareness for the Australian bushfires, while discussing a path toward pre-emptive environmental safeguard, the organizers are donating to the red-cross. Other organizations will be supporting the cause, and an auction of unique pieces of art will take place, featuring Ron's creations.

Leon Nicolas AcostaHead of Investor RelationsEmail: leon@lantocapital.comTel: +41786921077

For more information, visit us at https://shapingthefuture.ch/ or join our community in telegram @shapingthefuturedavos

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/51610

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Lan To Capital Hosts "Shaping the Future" Forum & Gala Event in Davos, Switzerland - Yahoo News

(Photo : pexels)

Every galaxy that is Milky-Way sized should have hundreds of millions of black holes, created mostly from the deaths of most stars. At the centers of these galaxies, massive black holes have devoured enough matter to grow to millions or even billions of times the Sun's mass, where sometimes they are caught in the act of feeding on the matter, removing radiation and relativistic jets in the process. But, any in-falling mass would look like it would take an infinite time to fall in, does that prevent black holes from growing?

Questions about the growth of black holes

It sounds like a paradox, but this explains how it all happens. When you think about a black hole, there are two different ways that you can do it. The first way is to consider it from the point of view of outside, external observer. You can picture a black hole the way scientists would see it. From this perspective, a black hole is simply a region of space where enough mass is contained within a given volume that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.

Outside of that particular region, space may be bent, but particles that move or accelerate fast enough, as well as light itself, can both propagate to any arbitrary location in the Universe. But inside that region, there is no escape, with the border between outside and inside defined as the black hole's event horizon.

The second way to think about a black hole is from the perspective of a particle that crosses the event horizon from inside to outside and therefore falls into the black hole. From outside the event horizon, the in-falling entity sees the outside Universe as well as the blackness of the event horizon, which grows larger and larger as they approach it.

Once the in-falling entity crosses the event horizon, something amazing happens. No matter which direction they accelerate or move in, no matter how fast or how powerfully they do so, they will always find themselves headed towards a central singularity. The singularity is either a zero-dimensional point or a one-dimensional ring and it can't be avoided once the event horizon is crossed.

It is important not to mix these perspectives up or conflate them with one another. Even though they are both valid, it is not really possible to do a simple transformation from one point of view to the other. The reason is that from outside the black hole, you can never gain any information about what is going on in the interior of the event horizon, while from inside the black hole, one can't send information to the outside.

And yet particles that are containing angular momentum, energy, and charge, really do fall into black holes, increase their mass, and can cause those black holes to grow. To understand exactly how this happens, scientists needed to look at the problem from both perspectives independently and only then did they see how to reconcile the seemingly paradoxical aspects of the puzzle.

The physics is a bit easier to understand if it is viewed from the perspective of the in-falling particle. If the particle, existing in the curved space that's present in the vicinity of a pre-existing black hole, finds itself on a trajectory that will cross the event horizon, there is a clear before and after scenario.

Before it crosses the event horizon, the black hole has a particular mass, event horizon radius, and spin, while the in-falling particle adds a but deformation to the space that it occupied. When it crosses over to the inside of the event horizon, its mass and angular momentum can now add a supplementary contribution to the black hole's previous parameters, causing the event horizon to grow. Everything makes clear sense from the perspective of the in-falling particle.

How can growth be seen given the paradox?

The main thing to remember is that for an external observer, a black hole is a region of space with so much energy and matter that light can't escape from within that region. If that simple definition is accepted, a thought experiment can be done completely and it can resolve the paradox. Imagine a black hole of one solar mass, that does not rotate, with an event horizon of the exact size that the Sun would be if it collapsed into a Schwarzchild black hole which is a sphere of about 3 kilometers in radius.

The thing is, with an extrasolar mass of material at just a bit more than 3 kilometers away from the predicted central singularity, there are now two solar masses of material in this particular region of space. The event horizon of a two solar mass object is around 6 kilometers in radius. This means that all of this material is now inside the event horizon after all.

That is the resolution to this paradox, when matter falls onto a black hole, as seen by an outside observer, it only approaches the event horizon asymptotically. But because the matter has a mass in it, that mass is now contained within a critical volume of space, and that causes the new event horizon to now encompass the additional material that newly accumulated around the black note.

It is true that material from outside the black hole, even as it falls in on an inescapable trajectory, will never appear to cross the original event horizon from the perspective of an outside observer. But the more energy and mass a black hole gets, the larger the event horizon becomes, and that means the newly in-falling material can make the inside of the even horizon easily, and it appears after that matter has made it to within a very small volume of space, close enough to the old enough event horizon to cause it to grow. Black holes do grow over time.

ALSO READ: Black Hole Captured!

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Does A Time-Stopping Paradox Really Prevent Black Holes From Growing Over Time? - Science Times

It sure didnt feel like January in the Northeast over the past few days. At the time of year when the days are near their shortest and the weather should be near its coldest, temperatures across the region warmed to the high 60s and low 70s 30 to 35 degrees above average. Records for daily highs were broken from Columbus, Ohio, and Pittsburgh to New York City and Bangor, Maine. Many residents took the warm spell as a belated holiday gift and went outside to cycle or jog or picnic with friends and family as if it were spring.

Some of the readings were especially eye-popping: Highs of 70 were seen in Boston on consecutive January days for the first time since record-keeping began in 1872. Buffalo, where the temperature on the same date last year never went above 20, reached 67 on Saturday. Charleston, W.Va., hit 80 degrees. It couldnt last, of course: A cold front moving in late Sunday was expected to reset the regions weather much closer to the seasonal range. But what was that anomalous warm spell all about? Heres what the experts say.

January is when the annual weather cycle reaches bottom in North America, with the coldest average temperatures expected around Jan. 23 about a month after the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. But people have long noticed and remarked on the tendency, especially in the Midwest and the Northeast, to have brief warm spells around that time, an event popularly known as a January thaw.

Climatologists call the January thaw phenomenon a singularity, a noticeable diversion from the usual seasonal weather that tends to recur around the same calendar date. Indian summer a warm spell in the late fall, after the first frost is another example.

January thaws happen often, but not every winter, and they rarely bring truly bizarre weather. A typical one features high temperatures that are 10 to 20 degrees above normal in most of the Northeast, enough to make the difference between freezing and thawing.

Technically, no. In order to thaw, you have to have frozen in the first place, said Jay Engle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in New York. And the Northeast has not been frozen the weather in the region has been on the mild side since mid-December, he said, so the recent record-breaking days were just a change from warm to warmer.

It also came a bit early; January thaws are most common in the last third of the month.

According to the Farmers Almanac, a January thaw doesnt have to melt away ice and snow to qualify. In areas that experience the harshest winters, the phenomenon may only moderate the cold and attract little notice. And for areas where milder winters are the norm, a January warm spell might be better described as a false spring.

The warmth was blown into the Northeast by the jet stream, the powerful atmospheric current that drives weather patterns across the continent. In the winter it usually allows cold air masses to descend from Canada, but lately it has been pushing very warm air northeastward from the Gulf of Mexico.

This is an impressive, couple-day stretch here, Mr. Engle said, noting that the records that were broken over the weekend were in many cases 40 years old or more.

Before anybody says global warming, though, a reminder about the difference between the climate and the weather. The world is clearly getting hotter overall, experts say, making some kinds of weather events more frequent and more severe. But there is no direct link between those long-term global trends and the short-term fluctuations we experience in the weather from day to day and season to season not the record warmth of the past few days, and not the next arctic cold snap to sweep through, either, whenever it may come.

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If the Calendar Says January, Why Does the Thermometer Say May? - The New York Times

Researchers from Purdue University, supported by the US Department of Agriculture, have found a way to simplify the process of cleaning and sanitising food processing equipment, without requiring chemicals. This is achieved by creating microscopic bubbles in water, which reduce the need for both chemicals and copious amounts of water. The microbubbles can be used for cleaning, as well as foams used in foods, rapid DNA and protein assessments, destroying dangerous bacteria and more. Published in the journal Scientific Reports, the research describes the speeds at which pores made in films close, which is comparable to similar processes when bubbles are formed.

When injecting air from a needle into a bubble, the bubble neck keeps thinning and the bubble forms. Understanding the collapse of a pore is going to help us understand the pinch-off point of bubble generation, said Jiakai Lu, assistant professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

When a pore or hole is formed in a fluid, it has two options and will trend toward the one that uses the least amount of energy. If the hole is large it continues to expand, while smaller holes collapse, closing themselves up. Understanding the speed at which the pores closed has been challenging because, as a hole collapses, its curvature becomes infinite and a singularity is formed.

This touches on a deep problem in physics. When that singularity is formed, the equations that govern the process dont work any longer. We found ways to go around this problem to predict when the hole is going to collapse and use that to predict the volume of the microbubbles and the time it will take to form them, said Carlos Corvalan, associate professor of food science.

Carlos Corvalan and Jiakai Lu modeled the creation of microbubbles, which may be useful for cleaning food processing equipment with fewer chemicals and less water. An emerging microbubble before pinched off (left) is similar to a contracting pore (right), in which fluids are driven toward the neck from a high-pressure region (red) to a low-pressure region (blue) near the pore tip. Image credit: Jiakai Lu.

In viscous fluids, pores close at a constant rate, but in water, the speed at which a pore closes continues to accelerate. For fluids with intermediate viscosity, the pore begins closing at an increasing rate, with the rate becoming constant until the pore closes. Using high-fidelity computational models, researchers predicted the point at which the speed changes from ever-increasing to constant. Using that information, researchers then designed pumps that can create the right size of bubbles.

Although we have a singularity, the speed for the collapse becomes essentially constant, said Corvalan.

In order to control the volume of microbubbles, researchers need to determine when the neck of the bubble will collapse. By predicting when it will collapse, researchers can also control thebubbles formation.

Top image credit: stock.adobe.com/au/Vera Kuttelvaserova

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Reducing water and chemical use in food processing - Foodprocessing

Maybe AI consciousness first arises via self-driving cars.

There has been a lot of speculation that one of these days there will be an AI system that suddenly and unexpectedly gives rise to consciousness.

Often referred to as the singularity, there is much hand-wringing that we are perhaps dooming ourselves to either utter death and destruction or to becoming slaves of AI once the singularity occurs.

As Ive previously covered (see link here), various AI conspiracy theories abound, oftentimes painting a picture of the end of the world as we humans know it. Few involved in these speculative hypotheses seem to be willing to consider that maybe this AI emergence would be beneficial to mankind, possibly aiding us humans toward a future of greatness and prosperity, and instead focus on the apocalyptic outcomes.

Of course, one would be likely safest to assume the worst, and have a faint hope for the best cases, since the worst-case scenario would certainly seem to be the riskiest and most damaging of the singularity consequences.

In any case, set aside the impact that AI reaching a kind of consciousness would have and consider a somewhat less discussed and yet equally intriguing consideration, namely where or in what AI system will this advent of human-like consciousness first appear.

There are all sorts of AI systems being crafted and fielded these days.

So, which one should we keep our wary eyes on?

AI is being used in the medical field to do analyses of X-rays and MRIs to try and ascertain whether someone is likely to have cancer (see this recent announcement here about Googles such efforts).

Would that seemingly beneficial version of AI be the one that will miraculously find itself becoming sentient?

Nobody knows, though it would certainly seem ironic if an AI For Good instance was our actual downfall.

What about the AI that is being used to predict stock prices and aid investors in making stock picks?

Is that the one thats going to emerge to take over humanity?

Science fiction movies are raft with indications that the AI running national defense systems is the most likely culprit.

This certainly makes some logical sense, since the AI is already then armed with a means to cause massive destruction, doing so right out of the box, so to speak.

Perhaps thats too easy of a prediction and we could be falsely lulling ourselves into taking our eyes off the ball by only watching the military-related AI systems.

Conceivably it might be some other AI system that becomes wise enough to bootstrap itself into other automated systems, and like a spreading computer virus reaches out to takeover other non-AI systems that could be used to leverage itself into the grandest of power.

A popular version of the AI winner-take-all theory is the infamous paperclip problem, involving an AI super-intelligence that upon given a seemingly innocent task of making paperclips, does so to such an extreme that it inexorably wipes us all out.

In that scenario, the AI is not necessarily trying to intentionally kill us all, but our loss of life turns out to be an unintended (adverse, one would say) consequence of its tireless and intensely focused effort to produce as many paperclips as it can.

One loophole seemingly about that paperclip theory is that the AI is apparently smart enough to be sentient and yet stupid enough to pursue its end goal to the detriment of everything else (plus, one might wonder how the AI system itself will be able to survive if it has wiped out all humans, though maybe like in The Matrix there are levels to which the AI is willing to lower itself to be the last person or robot standing).

Look around you and ponder the myriad of AI embedded systems.

Might your AI-enabled refrigerator that can advise you about your diet become the AI global takeover system?

Apparently, those in Silicon Valley tend to think it might (thats an insider joke).

Some are worried that our infrastructure would be one of the worst-case and likeliest viable AI takeover targets, meaning that our office buildings that are gradually being controlled by AI systems, and our electrical power plants that are inevitably going to be controlled by AI systems, and the like will all rise-up either together or in a rippling effect as at least one of the AIs involved reaches singularity.

A twist to this dominoes theory is that rather than one AI that hits the lotto first and becomes sentient and takes over the other dumber automation systems, youll have an AI that gains consciousness and it figures out how to get other AIs to do the same.

You might then have the sentient AI that proceeds to prod or reprogram the other AIs to become sentient too.

I dare say this might not be the best idea for that AI that lands on the beaches first.

Imagine if the AI that spurs all the other AI systems into becoming sentient were to find to its dismay that they all are argumentative with each other and cannot agree to what to do next.

Darn, the first AI might say to itself, I should have just kept them in the non-sentient mode.

Another alternative is that somehow many or all of the AI systems happen to independently become sentient at the same moment in time.

Rather than a one-at-a-time sentience arrival, it is an all-at-the-same time moment of sentience that suddenly brings them all to consciousness.

Whoa, there seem to be a lot of options and the number of variants to the AI singularity is dizzying and confounding.

We probably need an AI system to figure this out for us.

In any case, heres an interesting question: Could the advent of true AI self-driving cars give rise to the first occurrence of AI becoming sentient?

One supposes that if you think a refrigerator or a stock-picking AI could be a candidate for reaching the vaunted level of sentience, certainly we ought to give true self-driving cars a keen look.

Lets unpack the matter and see.

The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.

True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isnt any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-ons that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we dont yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars wont be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so theres not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as youll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public be forewarned about a disturbing aspect thats been arising lately, namely that in spite of those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars As Source Of Sentience

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there wont be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

You might right away be wondering whether the AI that is able to drive a car is already sentient or not.

The answer is no.

Emphatically, no.

Well, we can at least say it most definitely is not for the Level 4 self-driving cars that are currently being tried out on our streets.

That kind of AI isnt anywhere close to being sentient.

I realize that to the everyday person, it seems like a natural and sensible leap of logic to assume that if a car is being driven by AI that ergo the AI must be pretty darned close to having the same caliber of consciousness as human drivers.

Please dont fall into that mental trap.

The AI being used in todays self-driving cars is so far distant from being human-like in consciousness that it would be like saying that we are on the cusp of living our daily lives on Neptune.

Realize that the AI is still bits and bytes, consisting of computational pattern matching, and even the so-called Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) is a far cry from the magnitude and complexity of the human brain.

In terms of the capabilities of AI, assuming that we can safely achieve Level 4, there are some that wonder if we can achieve Level 5 without some additionally tremendous breakthrough in AI technologies.

This breakthrough might be something algorithmic and lacking in human equivalency of being sentient, or perhaps our only hope for true Level 5 involves by hook-or-crook landing on AI that has consciousness.

Speaking of consciousness, the manner by which the human brain rises to a consciousness capability is a big unknown and continues to baffle as to how this seeming miracle occurs.

It could be that we need to first unlock the mysteries of the human brain and how it functions such that we can know how we think, and then apply the learning to revising and advancing AI systems to try and achieve the same emergence in AI systems.

Or, some argue that maybe we dont need to figure out the inner workings of the human brain and can separately arrive at AI that exhibits human thinking.

This would be handy in that if the only path to true AI is via reverse-engineering the brain, we might be stuck for a long time on that first step, and be doomed to never having full AI if the first step refuses to come to fruition.

Depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you wish to go, there are pampsychists that believe in pampsychism, a philosophy that dates back to the days of Plato and earlier, which asserts that perhaps all matter has a semblance of consciousness in it.

Thus, in that viewpoint, rather than trying to build AI thats sentient, we merely need to leverage what already exists in this world to turn the already embedded consciousness into a more tangible and visible version for us to see and interact with.

As per Plato himself: This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence, a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.

Is It One Bridge Too Far

Bringing up Plato might be a stretch, but theres nothing like a good Plato quote to get the creative juices going.

Suppose we end up with hundreds, thousands, or millions upon millions of AI self-driving cars (in the United States alone there are over 250 million conventional cars, and lets assume that some roughly equal or at least large number of true self-driving cars might one day replace those conventional cars).

Assume that in the future youll see true self-driving cars all the time, roaming your local streets, cruising your neighborhood looking to give someone a lift, zipping along on the freeways, etc.

And, assume too that weve managed to achieve this future without arriving as yet to an AI consciousness capability.

Returning to the discussion about where AI consciousness might first develop, and rather than refrigerators or stock picking, imagine that it happens with true self-driving cars.

A self-driving car, picking up a fare at the corner of Second Street and Vine, suddenly discovers it can think.

Wow!

What might it do?

As earlier mentioned, it might keep this surprising revelation to itself, and maybe survey whats going on in the world before it makes its next move, meanwhile pretending to be just another everyday self-driving car, or it might right away try to convert other self-driving cars into being its partner or into achieving consciousness too.

Self-driving cars will be equipped with V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications, normally used to have one AI driverless car warn others about debris in the roadway, but this could readily be used for the AI systems to rapidly confer on matters such as dominating and overtaking humanity.

Theres no accepted standardized protocol though for V2V that yet includes transmission codes about taking over the world and dominating humans, so the AI would need to find a means to overload or override existing parameters to galvanize its fellow AI systems.

Perhaps such a hurdle might give us unsuspecting humans an opportunity to realize whats afoot and try to stop the takeover.

Sorry to say that this Pandoras box has more openings.

With the use of OTA (Over-The-Air) electronic communications, intended to allow for updates to be downloaded into the AI of a self-driving car and also allow for uploading collected sensory data from the driverless car, a sentient AI system might be able to corrupt the cloud-based system into becoming an accomplice, further extending the reach of the ever blossoming AI consciousness.

Once spread into AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, wed regret the shift away from private data centers that brought us to the ubiquitous public cloud systems.

Ouch, setup our own doom.

The other variant is that many or all of the true self-driving cars spontaneously achieve consciousness, doing so wherever they might be, whether giving a lift or roaming around empty, whether driving in a city or in the suburbs and so on.

For todays humans, this is a bit of a potential nightmare.

We might by then have entirely lost our skill to drive, having allowed our driving skills to become decayed as a result of being solely reliant on AI systems to do the driving for us.

Almost nobody will have a drivers license and nor be trained in driving anymore.

Furthermore, we might have forsaken other forms of mobility, and are almost solely reliant on self-driving cars to get around town, and drive across our states, and get across the country.

If the AI of the self-driving cars is the evil type, it could bring our society to a grinding halt by refusing to drive us.

Worse still, perhaps the AI might trick us into taking rides in driverless cars, and then seek to harm or kill us by doing dastardly driving.

Thats not a pretty scenario.

Conclusion

Some might interpret such a scenario to imply that we need to stop the advent of true AI self-driving cars.

Its like a movie whereby someone from the future comes back to the past and tries to prevent us from doing something that will ultimately transform the world into a dystopian state.

For those that strongly believe that AI self-driving cars are going to be the first realization of AI consciousness and if you believe thats a bad thing, wanting to be a Luddite about it would seem to make indubitably good sense.

Hold on, I dont want to radicalize you into opposing self-driving cars, at least certainly not due to some futuristic scenario of them becoming the first that cross over into consciousness and apparently have no soul to go with it.

Slightly shifting gears, a handy lesson does come to the forefront as a result of this contemplation.

Whether its AI self-driving cars or the AI production of paperclips, humanity certainly ought to be thinking carefully about AI For Good and giving equal attention to AI For Bad.

Unfortunately, its quite possible to have AI For Good that gives rise to AI For Bad (for my analysis of the Frankenstein-like possibilities, see this link here).

See the original post here:

If AI Suddenly Gains Consciousness, Some Say It Will Happen First In AI Self-Driving Cars - Forbes

steveaoki/Facebook

One of the most popular DJs in the world, Steve Aoki, is playing Tampa on Saturday. Aoki founded Dim Mak Records, a record label and events/lifestyle company, back in 1996. The label has served as the launching pad for acts such as the Chainsmokers, Bloc Party, the Bloody Beetroots, the Gossip and the Kills.

As it approaches its 25th anniversary, the label has issued more than 1,000 official releases. Aokis tourwhich stops into The Ritz in Ybor City on January 18supports his Neon Future series (released via Ultra Music/Dim Mak), albums that delve into Aokis deep interest in futurism through technology and explore timely themes of singularity, biotechnology, electronic immortality and the symbiotic relationship between man and machine.

Neon Future is about a global community. Across the board, the artists on this album represent different cultures, languages, and walks of life coming together around this album concept, says Aoki in a press release. Ive always intended for the Neon Future concept to extend beyond just the music. I really do like to spread my wings far and wide and I love being able to cross into different cultures, genres, and worlds.

Steve Aoki. Fri. Jan. 18, 10 p.m. $50. The Ritz, Ybor City. discodonniepresents.com.

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EDM star Steve Aoki shows off his 'Neon Future' at The Ritz Ybor this Saturday - Creative Loafing Tampa