A look at scientific developments in 2023. Major advances in nuclear fusion, CRISPR gene-editing therapy, artificial intelligence, and astronomy have made this a special year.
A look at scientific developments in 2023
In this article we’re going to have a look at scientific developments in 2023. Scientists make important new discoveries every year, and sometimes these discoveries do not attract as much attention as they should. While the year 2023 is coming to an end, in this report we review some important developments of the past year.
New drugs for weight loss
The news that was talked about a lot in 2023 was the expansion of the use of diet drugs such as Ozempic for weight loss. In addition to weight loss, these drugs reduced the risk of heart attack. This drug and many other drugs have helped thousands of people to lose weight.
Also, several studies this year showed that the drugs also reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke in obese people. These drugs have also provided more awareness about the origin and root of obesity. Scientific evidence has shown that obesity is the result of hormonal dysfunction.
Climate milestones have become clearer and there is still time to act
Climate milestones were also important and newsworthy topics in 2023. In the past, dangerous natural cycles have turned the planet into a “snowball” or started periods of extreme heat and extinction of up to 90% of organisms.
Scientists have repeatedly warned this year about such situations as a result of human actions. Global warming of just 1.5 percent above pre-industrial levels could trigger several global milestones, including the melting of ice sheets, researchers have warned.
Two studies also showed a slowing of the gyre currents in the Southern Ocean. These currents act like the beating heart of the earth. But the good news is that there is still time to take action.
Repeating the efforts of physicists for nuclear fusion
Another scientific developments in 2023 is repeating the efforts of physicists for nuclear fusion. This summer, scientists said they released more energy from a peppercorn-sized capsule than they took in. This action was a repetition of the test that was announced at the end of 2022. The fact that man has finally conquered the energy source of the stars is a historic act.
The negative side is that these achievements were achieved using facilities whose main purpose is to test military weapons whose purpose is to kill millions of people!
This facility in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is so involved in atomic weapons that some physicists say that it is better to invest exclusively with the aim of providing clean energy. A nuclear war will cause climate change to a much greater extent than fossil fuels.
A look at the youth of the universe with a new telescope
Astronomers estimate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old, and because distant objects look like they were in the very distant past, astronomers have been able to peer into the distant past, about the first billion years of the universe. But that first billion years is important; Because it is the time when stars and galaxies were formed. In 2023, the James Webb Space Telescope began to transmit images of the formation of the universe.
An interesting discovery in these images is the oldest super black hole located in a galaxy known as UHZ1. From the perspective of an earthly observer, this galaxy looks like 13.2 billion years ago; That is, it was 470 million years after the Big Bang.
Giant gravitational waves shake the universe
In the spring of 2023, scientists announced the discovery of large earthquakes in space and time. This discovery was the result of more than 20 years of observation and detailed observations of pulsars (Pulsars); That is, burnt stars that rotate hundreds or even thousands of times every second and emit radio waves.
Scientists say that these waves are caused by the movement of black holes towards each other or a more strange phenomenon, i.e. defects in the fabric of space known as cosmic strings.
Treatment for sickle cell anemia
In 2023, two new treatments for sickle cell disease based on very complex genetic changes were obtained. These treatments include the first treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration using the gene editing technique known as CRISPR.
This disease is caused by a genetic variant with the production of abnormal hemoglobins.
Patients can be cured through a bone marrow transplant, but only about 25% of patients can find a compatible donor. Both new treatments use different ways to change the “DNA” of bone marrow cells so that these cells produce normal hemoglobin.
Reading the minds of paralyzed people
In May 2023, scientists announced that they had learned to decipher human thoughts from brain scans. This is done with an artificial intelligence system as a translator. These findings could restore the ability to communicate for severely paralyzed people.
This problem and inability to write and speak are caused by various causes, including stroke or neurological diseases. In the new system published in Nature Neuroscience, the artificial intelligence system analyzed the relationship between brain scan patterns and words, and artificial intelligence was finally able to convert the brain patterns into words.
Chat JPT played the role of a doctor
In 2023, doctors spoke enthusiastically about Chat GPT-4. Although this is a version of GPT chat that was built in late 2022, in 2023 we really understood what big language models can do.
ChatGPT can diagnose complex medical issues request tests and even get high marks in medical tests. However, too much trust in artificial intelligence in diagnosis and treatment also brings risks; But there are also many capacities to help facilitate and speed up the work of doctors.
Discovery of intelligent life on Earth
A new study published in November dispels the myth that only humans can imagine the past and future and that animals live in the present. It has been found that rats can imagine and plan ahead. This new discovery may explain why, for example, city-dwelling rats smuggle slices of pizza into subway cars so they can eat away from the eyes of other hungry rats.
Humans dream of discovering intelligent life in the universe and on other planets, but our experience here on Earth shows that we cannot detect intelligent life right here in front of our eyes. We should hope that 2024 will be another year full of scientific advances, including the discovery of some facts hidden from our eyes nearby.
Jim Simons, the king of quantitative analysis, was a mathematician who used algorithms and data to launch America’s most successful mutual fund and solve the mystery of the market.
The Biography of Jim Simons; Capitalist who solved the puzzle of the market with math
When it comes to investing, no one comes close to Jim Simons ; Not Warren Buffett , not Steve Cohen and not even George Soros , who are probably more familiar names to you. “Renaissance Technology” company, Siemens, has a famous hedge fund called Medallion, which has average annual return of 66% for 30 years. In simpler terms, if you had invested $100 in the Medallion fund in 1988, 30 years later this figure would have reached $398.7 million!
Stranger than that, Simons hired people who knew nothing about investing; Instead, Medallion’s employees were mathematicians and scientists like himself. While ordinary investors relied on economic intuition and instinct, consulting with executives and analyzing earnings reports to make trades, Simons took a different path to investing.
As a veteran mathematician, Simons believed that the market behaves rationally; So he decided to enter the field of capital with a scientific approach. He made decisions based on large sets of data, computer models, and algorithms, and inspired the revolution that swept Wall Street.
Jim Simons was never calm; It was not enough for him to be a mathematician, to be a professor at MIT and Harvard, nor to crack codes for the US National Security Agency during the Cold War. According to his first wife, Barbara Blustein, in The Man Who Solved the Market Riddle, “Jim learned from an early age that money equals power.”
Jim Simons, the pioneer of investing with computer models and known as the “Quant King”, died at the age of 86 on May 10, 2024 (May 21, 1403) in Manhattan, New York. This is the story of a mathematician who, with the help of mathematical magic and algorithms, produced the world’s biggest money-making machine in his mysterious company and became the biggest investor in history.
First days
James Harris Simons, the only child of Matthew Simons and Marcia Kantor, was born on April 25, 1938, in Brookline, a suburb of Boston. His mother worked as a volunteer at Jamie’s school and saw the fulfillment of her own dreams in her son. Jimmy’s father was a sales representative for 20th Century Fox but later worked in his father-in-law’s shoe factory. Matthew later told his son that he wished he hadn’t given up his promising career in the film industry for what was expected of him. The lesson Jimmy learned from his father was: “Do what you love, not what you feel you have to do.”
What Jimmy loved to do more than anything else was think about math. His mind was always occupied with numbers and shapes. At the age of three, he could multiply and divide numbers by two and knew all the powers of two up to the number 1024. At the age of four, when his father stopped for gas, Jimmy was pondering one of Xenon’s paradoxes , known as the two-part paradox.
At the age of eight, when the family doctor told Jamie that his ideal career would be in medicine, Jamie replied, “I want to be a mathematician or a scientist.” The doctor insisted that there was no money in mathematics, but Jimmy said he didn’t care about money.
As he had hoped, Simons majored in mathematics at MIT, skipping his freshman year because of the advanced mathematics course he had taken in high school. With too much self-confidence, he decided to graduate with abstract algebra in the second semester; But he could not keep up with his classmates. So he bought a book on abstract algebra and studied it all summer until he finally “bloomed,” as he put it.
The next year, when he came up with Stokes’ Theorem, a surprising combination of calculus, algebra, and geometry, he did so well in class that students sought his help. Simons was delighted to see that powerful theorems and formulas could reveal the secrets of truth and connect the disparate fields of mathematics and geometry. He said: “Mathematical concepts were beautiful and elegant to me.”
The most difficult mathematical problems are not solved; From the Riemann Hypothesis to P vs. NP
In the world of mathematics, there are unsolved problems that the smartest mathematicians have not been able to solve for years; These questions are so important that a million-dollar prize has been set aside to solve some of them.
Simons earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics after three years at MIT, and got his first taste of investing while studying for a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He went to a brokerage in San Francisco to trade soy futures.
Simons was lucky in his professional life but unlucky in his personal life
During these days, Simons married his first wife, Barbara Bluestein, and had three children, one of whom died in a bicycle accident. Simons and Barbara’s marriage ended in divorce 15 years later. Simons had two children with his second wife Marilyn Howris, a Stony Brook economics student, one of whom died due to drowning; The death of her two children was shocking to her and she couldn’t understand how she could be so lucky in her professional life but so unlucky in her personal life.
Simons returned to MIT in 1961 to teach, feeling that his future path was clear. In a 2020 interview with the American Institute of Physics, he said: “I remember one day I was sitting in the library and I said to myself, well, first I will become an assistant professor, then an assistant professor, and then a professor, and I will continue to live like this until I die. But at that moment I thought that maybe there are other things in the world.”
In 1963, Simons accepted a research position at Harvard University, teaching an advanced graduate course on partial differential equations. Simons didn’t know much about the subject, but he found teaching a good way to learn. He used to tell his students that he learned the subject a week or two before the class; A confession that was funny to the students.
Decoding the Cold War
A year later, Simons also left Harvard to join the IDA intelligence group to decipher coded messages from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Institute for Defense Analyzes was affiliated with the National Security Agency, which is the largest and most secret intelligence agency in the United States.
Starting at IDA, Simons’ salary doubled and he was able to clear his debts. In addition, he could pursue his own mathematical projects while collaborating with the government. The only problem with working at IDA was that he couldn’t tell anyone about his achievements, because everyone in the group was sworn to secrecy.
Jim Simons (left) with two other colleagues at IDA
Simons joined the IDA during a turbulent period, as complex Soviet codes had not been systematically deciphered for more than a decade. However, working in an intelligence agency taught Simons how to build mathematical models to recognize and interpret patterns in seemingly meaningless data.
Siemens was terrible at developing computer programs
In order to decode the codes, Simons first defined an attack plan; Then he designed an algorithm to test and implement his strategy. Siemens was terrible at developing computer programs and had to go to the organization’s programmers for coding; But during this time, he strengthened other skills that were used later in his professional life. “I realized that I liked designing algorithms and testing them on the computer,” he said.
Jim Simons worked for the National Security Agency for more than three years before being fired for protesting the Vietnam War. In an article for the New York Times, Maxwell Taylor, the head of the IDA, asserted that the United States was about to win a war that was worth it. In a letter to the editor, Simons wrote that “any political gains from military victory cannot possibly offset its enormous economic, intellectual, and moral costs.”
Three days later, the US president announced the end of the bombing of Vietnam, which marked the end of the war. Simons assumed the news meant he could go back to work, but he was told not to bother going back.
Inventing a method of investing in overtime
While working at IDA, Jim Simons devoted his free time to studying the stock market. With the help of three other colleagues, he designed a new system for stock trading and claimed that their method can have at least 50% annual profit.
The unique feature of the Simons system was that it did not try to identify or predict different states of the stock market with economic theory or other conventional methods, and it did not seek to investigate why the market entered certain states.
Simon’s model was the forerunner of revolutions in the financial field
For Simons and his colleagues, it was not the “why” that mattered, but the strategies with which market conditions could be used to their advantage. For most investors, this approach was completely unfamiliar, but not for people who were gamblers. For example, poker players guess the mood of their opponents by judging their behavior and choosing their strategy based on this guess.
Jim Simons and his colleagues also proposed a similar approach to forecast stock prices, relying on a complex mathematical tool called the “Hidden Markov Model”. Just as a gambler may infer the state of mind of an opponent based on his decisions, an investor may infer the state of the market from its price changes.
Simons’ argument was that it is not important to understand all the underlying levers of the stock market but rather to find a mathematical system that matches these levers with the ability to make consistent returns. The Simons model was the forerunner of revolutions in the financial field; Including factor investing, the use of models based on unobservable states, and other quantitative investment methods that swept the investment world decades later.
The golden age of mathematics
After being fired from IDA at the age of 30, Simons managed to become the head of the mathematics department of Stony Brook University in New York with the suggestion of his mathematician friend. Simons made a discovery in Stony Brook about the reduction of shapes in curved and three-dimensional spaces. When he showed his discovery to the brilliant physicist Shiying-Shen Chern, Chern realized that the theory could apply to all dimensions, not just three-dimensional space. Chern and Simons introduced the Chern-Simons invariant constant in their 1974 paper “Characteristic Forms and Geometric Variables”, which was used in various mathematical fields.
Jim Simons teaching mathematics at the university
In 1976, at the age of 37, Simons received the American Mathematical Society’s Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry, the highest honor in the field, for his paper with Chern, as well as his earlier research on minimal manifolds. A decade later, theoretical physicist Edward Witten and others discovered that Chern-Simons theory has applications in a wide range of areas of physics, including dense matter, string theory, and supergravity. This theory was even critical to the methods used by companies like Microsoft to develop quantum computers capable of solving extremely complex problems, including drug development and artificial intelligence.
Entering the field of transactions
By 1977, Jim Simons was convinced that the currency markets were extremely profitable. World currencies were moving up and down regardless of the price of gold, and the British pound had fallen. According to Simons, a new era of instability had begun. In 1978, Simons finally left academia to start a small firm focused on currency trading; A decision that neither his father liked nor the mathematicians who knew him.
Mathematicians usually have a complicated relationship with money
Mathematicians usually have a complicated relationship with money. They understand the value of wealth, but for many of them, wealth accumulation is a low-value distraction from their much more valuable mission. Academics didn’t say anything to Simons directly, but some believed that his rare talents were being wasted.
But Simons saw the story differently. By the age of forty, he had experienced a career in deciphering, had climbed the heights of mathematics, and had set up his own successful mathematics department. Now he was sure that he could conquer the trading world as well.
For centuries, investors have been trying to solve the mystery of the market and dominate it; But they rarely achieve great success. Some investors and analysts considered market fluctuations completely random and believed that all possible information was already included in the prices; So only events that are impossible to predict can make prices go up or down. But Simons came from the world of mathematics and was used to scrutinizing large sets of data and finding order and patterns where others saw only random occurrences.
Jim Simons concluded that the stock market does not always react logically and explainably to news or events and that relying on traditional research makes it difficult to predict prices. However, prices seemed to show at least a few distinct patterns even in chaotic arithmetic markets.
Simons decided to treat the financial markets like a chaotic system. Just as physicists create beautiful models by analyzing large amounts of data to identify laws in nature, Simons wanted to create mathematical models to identify order in financial markets. His approach was very similar to the strategy he had devised years ago at IDA. At that time, Simons said that the markets are in various hidden states that can be revealed by mathematical models.
Renaissance’s original Long Island office was located near clothing boutiques, pizzerias, and the Stony Brook Railroad.
To test this strategy in the real world, Simons launched Monemetrics, an investment firm in Long Island, New York, later renamed Renaissance Technologies. Manometrics was derived from two words “Money” and “Econometrics”. Simons wanted to show that he could generate a lot of wealth by using math and analyzing financial data. So, instead of hiring an investor, he hired a team of mathematicians like himself to analyze market data for months, identify trends, and write mathematical formulas to make money from the stock market.
One of these mathematicians who was willing to give up his lucrative job at IDA to make Simons’ dream come true was Leonard Baum, who had helped Simons write the IDA research paper. It didn’t take long for Baum to develop an algorithm for the Renaissance. If the value of the currency went below a certain level of the trend line, the algorithm said to buy it; And if it went above this line, it was time to sell. Baum, who until one or two years ago did not think about anything else except mathematics, now only thought about currency transactions.
The birth of the medallion fund
Renaissance started its business with foreign exchange, commodity, and bond trading and chose not to enter the stock market for the time being because their diversity is high and the value of each stock is highly dependent on the unique circumstances of the companies.
Jim Simons dreams of a trading system that is completely driven by algorithms without the intervention of human judgment; But the computers of the eighties did not have the ability to run fully automatic programs. For this reason, the Renaissance initially used both mathematical models and human judgment, which became troublesome for him; For example, Baum bought tens of millions of dollars in bonds in 1984, but held them until they fell in value and put the company under heavy pressure; Until Simons went as far as giving up on the renaissance.
Simons dreamed of a fully automated trading system without the intervention of human judgment
Realizing the limits of human judgment, Simons added James Ax, a friend from his doctoral days at Berkeley to the Renaissance team. The group James led collected data from the 1800s and fed it into computers to discover new hidden patterns. Simons believed that if he had enough data, he could make more accurate predictions.
Simons and Ax launched a new hedge fund called Medallion, named after the prestigious math awards they won. The medallion fund initially had many problems, but eventually became the most successful hedge fund in history. After ten years of improving algorithms and progressing the processing power of computers, the turning point of the Renaissance came in 1990.
With the arrival of James X in the renaissance, Simons’ dream became closer to reality
Edward Trapp, the first modern mathematician who made a huge investment fortune using the Cammy Simons strategy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal article, “Computer Formulas Are the Secret to Market Success”:
A computer model is a simplified version of reality, like a street map that shows how to travel from one point of a city to another. If you design them right, you can use its rules to predict what will happen in new situations.
Renaissance models were so successful in trading that Siemens continued to trust its computers even in decisions that didn’t seem logical. The only problem was that Renaissance was very small, and after ten years its assets were only a quarter of those of rival DE Shaw; David Shaw not only used computer models for trading, but unlike the Renaissance, he also went to the stock market.
Simons knew that in order to leave a legacy, he had to enter the stock market; That’s why he hired Robert Mercer and Peter Brown, who had become famous for the great speech-to-text achievement at IBM. The two looked at language as a game of possibilities in which some words followed other words. Siemens wanted a similar system that could predict financial market trends. Brown and Mercer designed an automated stock trading system in 1995 that was written in half a million lines of code, compared to the tens of thousands of lines of code in the old system.
Robert Mercer (left) and Peter Brown played key roles in many of the Renaissance’s successes
With Renaissance entering the stock market, the medallion fund soared. In 2000, Medallion returned an astonishing 98.5% including losses, during the dot-com bubble, during which many telecommunications companies went bankrupt and larger companies such as Amazon and Cisco lost much of their market value. They gave.
The Medallion fund made more than $100 billion in profits between 1988 and 2018, and as of summer 2019, its annual return before deficits was about 66%, and after deficits was about 39%. In 1993, the fund was closed to new investors, and since 2005, only Renaissance employees are allowed to invest in it. With their windfall, these employees bought so many mansions in the Old Field neighborhood of Long Island that the neighborhood was nicknamed the “Renaissance Riviera.”
Medallion earned more than 100 billion dollars in profit in 30 years
Renaissance’s assets are now around $50 billion, and with a 44% fee, which is higher than any other large hedge fund, the Medallion fund has an annualized return of more than 30%, which is totally worth it. By comparison, Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway fund has a compound annual return of just 20%.
Medallion’s astonishing performance made Simons the 50th richest person in the world at the time of his death, with a fortune of $31.4 billion. Simmons first appeared on Forbes magazine’s list of the richest Americans in 2004 with a net worth of $2.5 billion.
Currently, Renaissance is led by Peter Brown and has about 300 employees consisting of 90 scientists with PhDs in mathematics, physics, computer science, and related fields. The research database of this company hosts more than 40 terabytes of data daily and uses 50,000 computer cores with a global connection of 150 gigabytes per second.
The secret of Renaissance success
Quantitative strategies, based on more conservative models, have become popular on Wall Street since Simons revolutionized the trading world in the 1980s, and the funds now account for little more than 20 percent of all equity holdings.
But how Renaissance was able to achieve such startling results remains among the company’s top secrets, and employees are not allowed to talk about Renaissance’s algorithms. Simmons also had a very secretive personality and rarely appeared in public. Although he never talked about the Renaissance Algorithm, he did share the secret of his success; “he never turned his back on the model.” Once Simons had decided what to do, he stood his ground until what the model predicted happened.
The success of the Renaissance is also a reminder of the predictability of human behavior. Renaissance studies the past because it is certain that investors will make similar decisions in the future. At the same time, company employees avoid emotional and emotional biases by relying on the scientific method. They hypothesize, then test and measure, and rely on data instead of instinct when making decisions.
Humanitarian actions
In 2009, Simons decided to step down from the management of Renaissance and hand over the leadership of the company to Robert Mercer and Peter Bevan. Having amassed an impressive fortune over two decades, Simons decided to spend a large portion of it on philanthropic causes.
Siemens has spent more than $6 billion on philanthropic causes
He and his wife, Marilyn, established the Simons Foundation in 1994 to provide scholarships for the fields of biology, mathematics, physics, computer science, and neuroscience. In 2012, the idea of ”Siemens Collaborations” was conceived to support research into the inner workings of the brain, and in 2016, the Flatiron Institute became a center for computational science and projects related to astrophysics, biology, mathematics, neuroscience, and quantum physics. .
Jim Simons and his wife Marilyn Simons
According to estimates, Simons spent more than $6 billion of his fortune on philanthropic causes and was ranked the sixth most philanthropic person in America by Forbes magazine. Jim credited Marilyn as the driving force behind the Simons Foundation, joking, “I just make money and Marilyn gives it all to charity.”
Speaking at MIT in 2010, Simons outlined the five pillars that have shaped his life and career in mathematics, investing, and philanthropy: “Do something new; Don’t go with the crowd; Surround yourself with the smartest people you can find; Go for beauty; Don’t give up easily and wish for luck!”
In this report, we review some of the strangest science stories that we came across last year.
The strangest science stories of the past year
Some scientists are working on tackling climate change or curing cancer, but others are more focused on finding out if time travel is really possible.
The report explores where “love” is felt in the body, the scientific value of giant piles of bird poop, and talking to whales as an exercise in communicating with aliens and extraterrestrials.
Here, we review 10 of the weirdest science stories of the past year.
Brain computers
Brain computers is the first science stories of the past year. Nothing like experimenting on the human brain in a crazy glass jar. This is despite the fact that researchers approached this case strangely and worryingly last year.
An Australian company called Cortical Labs has grown human brain tissue from stem cells and attached them to computer chips, growing neurons in simulations and allowing them to perform computational tasks and even play the popular game of Pong. Teaches Pong.
Another group developed brain organoids called “Brainoware,” which are literally tiny three-dimensional brains and taught them to recognize sounds and perform mathematical calculations.
In another study that was published late last year, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison created the first functional tissue of the human brain with 3D printing technology to examine brain function and investigate various neurological disorders, which can be used to study various neurological problems and disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease is useful.
While these systems are still too crude to demonstrate anything close to realizing consciousness, we’d better be prepared to set some ethical guidelines.
The strangest science stories of the past year
Did James Webb detect stars made of dark matter?
The James Webb Space Telescope may have spotted the first signs of theoretical “dark stars,” which are invisible objects that generate heat from the decay of dark matter particles in their cores, astronomers say.
Because the James Webb Space Telescope can look deeper into the universe than any other instrument, we are always open to discovering truly new and surprising things with it.
James Webb observes giant, ancient galaxies that expand our understanding of how the universe formed. That’s why some astrophysicists say that instead of messing with the standard model of cosmology, maybe what we’re seeing right now are “dark stars,” hypothetical bodies that generate heat from decaying dark matter particles in their cores.
These monsters are 10,000 times larger than the Sun, 10 million times heavier, and 10 billion times brighter (albeit in the infrared spectrum), which makes them look like galaxies from this distance.
This idea is interesting and at the same time completely speculative, but luckily it is testable. So we may have an answer to that soon.
Eerie dreams of artificial intelligence
Among these strange science stories, AI is the next one. The world of artificial intelligence is moving so fast that it’s hard to believe that just a few months ago we were laughing at the unrealistic results of its video production efforts. But now, within a short period of time, it has reached a place where it often leaves us with our fingers in our mouths.
Visualizer systems like ModelScope and Runway’s Gen-2 are designed to produce short videos based on text messages, and the results are amazing.
Google also recently unveiled its newest artificial intelligence called Lumiere, which is specialized for video production and editing only by receiving text commands.
We now stand at a point in history that seems both interesting and scary, because the continuous development of artificial intelligence, while offering new possibilities to mankind, is also accompanied by dangers that the greats of this field, such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, have warned of. They have warned of its unmanaged development.
The strangest science stories of the past year
Artificial intelligence fashions feet in shoes
Artificial intelligence has shown that it can also enter the world of fashion, but not in the way you might think.
An Italian company active in the field of fashion called “Capable” has unveiled a line of colorful clothing that not only attracts the human eye but also deceives artificial intelligence.
These flamboyant patterns are designed in such a way that they also confuse artificial intelligence object recognition algorithms so that the wearer sees these clothes as giraffes or zebras.
This technology is very expensive, but at least it tries to make future fashion more fun than redesigning an old coat.
Calling all aliens
This science stories among other sience stories is about aliens. Scientists have recently made contact with a “non-human intelligence”, although not the aliens we are thinking of. At least not yet.
Scientists from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) were able to talk to a whale in its own whale language as an exercise in communicating with aliens. This exercise could come in handy the day we probably finally meet extraterrestrials.
Meeting with aliens is a subject that mankind always has in mind and seems to be waiting for such an event to happen. Scientists are also now looking to practice communicating with extraterrestrials in the future by trying to talk to whales in their own language.
Communication between humans who speak different languages is difficult enough. This is despite the fact that we all have the same biological characteristics. But aliens could not only have their own language but probably have completely different ways of communicating. For example, they may convey a complete emotional spectrum through sound, frequency, tone, smell, taste, and density of the passing gas.
The team called it the first human-whale communication exchange, and all they did in the study was play a recording of a whale saying “hello” over and over until the whale got bored and left. That area was distanced.
The idea is that scientists can make conversations with whales more interactive so that eventually it can help us create filters that can pick up the structures of any alien message.
Scientists say whales are a good place to start. They are highly intelligent and have complex social communication systems that can be deciphered. Also, if we attack them, the only casualties might be a few yachts, not strategic world locations.
Scientists say we hope to manage the first close encounters with aliens with the help of whales.
where is the love?
Even the most hard-hearted people feel and experience love in some way, even if it is the love of a pet.
Scientists say there are 27 different types of love and they sought to determine where in their body people feel these 27 different types of love and how strong each one is.
So participants in one study were asked to point to a drawing of the human body, color the spot they wanted, and describe how physically and mentally pleasurable it was.
Interestingly, each type of love was felt in the head, and not surprisingly, most of them were also felt in the chest.
Love for children or parents was strongly felt in the heart and chest.
The strength and intensity of the feeling of love also differed according to its type. Love for beauty, wisdom, God, strangers, or country was felt more in the head, while participants inscribed true love across the entire body.
Of course, according to the researchers, expectations and preconceptions probably influenced the participants’ answers here.
Astrophysicists have discovered that time passed more slowly in the early universe than it does now.
So time seems to be speeding up. Physicists studied the ticking of quasars billions of years away in space-time and found that one ancient second had passed as much as five seconds today.
It should be said that according to scientists, time did not feel slower for anyone at that point, although we know that everything is relative. But if there were people back then who could see us in the future, they would wonder why we are all moving and living in such a hurry.
This phenomenon is the result of “time dilation” which is caused by the deviation of the relativistic effects of the fabric of space-time. Just like the planet that revolves around a black hole in the movie Interstellar.
Time dilation is one of the physical concepts related to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which is expressed on the basis of relativity in such a way that the passage of time is examined differently from the perspective of two observers with different speeds. In general, the faster we move, the slower time passes and these two have an inverse relationship.
History hidden in a pile of bird droppings
On a rock in Argentina is something that probably wouldn’t be on a tourist website’s list of attractions, unless it’s interesting to scientists. Talk about a pile of excrement.
This unusual pile of excrement was created by generations of Andean condors that returned to the same spot where their nest was every year.
The Andean vulture with the scientific name (Vultur gryphus) is the name of a species of the New World vulture family. The Andean vulture is the largest flying bird in the world with a maximum wingspan of 3.3 meters.
When the scientists split this hill, they realized that it actually preserved 2200 years of history. By studying the layer by layer of this unpleasant mound, they found that these birds initially feasted mostly on the carcasses of native species, but after the arrival of European immigrants, they showed an interest in sheep and cattle.
Scientists could even say that the vultures have left this place for several centuries and moved their place of residence due to a period of volcanic activity in this area.
The genetic mystery of a woman who feels no pain
A new genetic study has identified specific genetic mutations that appear to allow a Scottish woman to feel no pain.
Jo Cameron is the name of this Scottish woman who feels no pain, fear, or anxiety and her wounds heal faster than usual.
Interestingly, this superpower of his was discovered in his 60s.
When scientists researched him, they found that these features were mostly due to mutations in two genes called FAAH and FAAH-OUT. Of course, hundreds of other genes, including those associated with wound healing, mood regulation, and drug levels, were also suppressed or enhanced.
Charged with contradictions
It seems that this woman is a very interesting case for the world of science, and research on her can help scientists create new treatments to relieve pain or mental illnesses.
Causality (the relationship between cause and effect) is the key to our experience of reality. For example, dropping a glass will break it, so the glass cannot shatter before being dropped. But in the quantum world, these rules don’t necessarily hold, and scientists have now shown how these wonders can be harnessed to charge quantum batteries.
In a sense, quantum batteries are powered by contradictions. On paper, they work by storing energy in the quantum states of atoms and molecules. Of course, as soon as the word “quantum” enters the conversation, you know something weird is about to happen. In this case, a new study has shown that quantum batteries can work by violating cause and effect as we know it.
Now, scientists at the University of Tokyo have taken advantage of this strange phenomenon to create a battery that charges faster and more efficiently. They conducted a laboratory experiment using lasers, lenses, and mirrors that act as a large-scale quantum battery.
Basically, the causality in quantum batteries can exist in a time superposition, leading to another strange effect where a low-power charger can charge a battery more efficiently than a high-power charger. Thus, this battery is charged by disrupting our understanding of the flow of time.
Korean researchers have produced heat-resistant materials that can withstand temperatures of up to 1000 degrees Celsius, and not only withstand high temperatures, but also withstand intense ultraviolet radiation, and are ideal for use in space. So here we will talk about inventing a material resistant to heat of 1000 degrees Celsius.
Inventing a material resistant to heat of 1000 degrees Celsius
A research team at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) has produced a refractory material that maintains its optical properties even at a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius and under strong ultraviolet radiation.
According to SA, this material can be used in various applications from aerospace to thermal photovoltaic (TPV) systems.
Thermal radiation is a term used to define the electromagnetic radiation emitted by all materials whose temperature is above absolute zero. This radiation comes from the heat created during the movement of the charges in the material and its release in the form of electromagnetic radiation.
Scientists have been working on exploiting this radiation as a kind of energy source. The heat from facilities such as thermal power plants and industrial sites can be used for heating, cooling, and even energy production if suitable thermal refractory materials are available.
Most of this research has focused on deploying technology in general environmental conditions. To expand its scope of application, newer materials that can operate in harsh environments are sought.
Electricity generation from indirect solar radiation
In our efforts to phase out fossil fuels, large-scale energy production projects using sunlight are underway in various parts of the world. However, the spectrum of solar radiation that enters the Earth and remains unused is another renewable resource that scientists want to tap into.
As an alternative to renewable solar and wind energy, whose power output varies depending on weather conditions, friendly thermoelectric energy generation technology, says Jungbum Kim, senior researcher at KIST, whose team developed the new refractory materials. The environment that uses the radiant energy emitted from the sun and high-temperature environments to generate electricity has received attention.
Typically, materials such as tungsten, nickel, and titanium nitride are used as refractory conductors. However, these materials are easily oxidized at higher temperatures.
According to a press release from the Korean researchers, they used pulsed laser deposition techniques to fabricate lanthanum-doped selective barium oxide (LBSO) in a nanoscale thin film. This material can maintain its performance even when it is exposed to a temperature of 1000 degrees Celsius and intense ultraviolet radiation with a power of 9 megawatts per square centimeter.
The research team also made a thermal emitter in the infrared spectrum using LBSO and found the material to be stable when used in multilayers or as a thin film. This opens up the possibility of using LBSO for thermovoltaic (TPV) power generation.
Interestingly, this material allows thermal radiation to be transferred directly to the PV cells, thereby preventing its oxidation by air.
The LBSO provision will help address climate change and the energy crisis by accelerating the commercialization of thermoelectric power generation, Kim added in a press release.
The researchers are confident that LBSO will find applications beyond power generation and waste heat recovery from industrial equipment. Because the material is resistant to UV exposure, it can also handle heat generated by absorption or exposure to strong sunlight. This usually occurs in harsh environments and can help develop applications in the aeronautics and space fields.
The findings of this research have been published in Advanced Science magazine.