Singularity University

Surprising results of a recent simulation have shown that a black hole might only swallow 1 percent of a star that falls into it. The rest ends up being blown away from the black hole in a sort of cosmic Slurp and Burp. Black holes are messy eaters—not unlike a five-year-old with a bowl of spaghetti. A star starts out as a compact body but gets spaghettified: stretched to a long, thin strand by the extreme tides of the black hole. As half of the matter from the now-shredded star gets slurped towards the black hole, only 1 percent of it is actually swallowed. The black hole simply can’t swallow all that much, so what it can’t swallow smothers the central engine and gets steadily flung away. When observed like they would be by our telescopes, the simulations explain a lot.

Kellie Nuttall specializes in the Future of Mobility and Smart Cities, with a particular focus on the role of IOT, big data and Artificial Intelligence. Kellie leads Deloitte's Analytics and Artificial Intelligence practice in Australia. She speaks on how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping business, and how leaders must grasp AI's fundamentals and embrace its transformative potential. When: August 29th, 2024 at 3PM PT Link to Join: https://lnkd.in/eCYCk4eJ Join us for an exclusive, in-depth info session designed to answer all your questions and provide a behind-the-scenes look at the program. This is your opportunity to understand how the Singularity Executive Program equips executives and leaders with the tools, knowledge and mindset to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

How many hours of sleep do you usually get each night? Do you use any technology to track the quality of your sleep?

How important is sleep? Is there such thing as your brain being "too active" at night? To study how sleep changes the brain, the team implanted electrodes into multiple parts of the hippocampus in mice and rats to monitor their brain activity. Using optogenetics—a way to turn neurons on or off using light—in rodents, they artificially disrupted BARR activity as the critters slept after learning several memory tasks. As a result, sharp-wave ripples, the type of brain activity usually associated with solidifying memory, lasted far longer. Surprisingly, it made memory worse. On the surface, it doesn’t make sense: Wouldn’t more activity during sleep be better for memory?

Imagine if we could stop HIV with a single shot. In a way, the neutered HIV becomes a parasite that can fight off the natural virus. To be clear, TIPs— therapeutic interfering particles— doesn’t cure HIV. Like antiviral drugs, it keeps the virus at bay. But rather than taking a cocktail of pills every day, a single jab could last months with lower chance of resistance. Thanks to antiviral medications, HIV infection is no longer a death sentence. With a cocktail of drugs, people with HIV can keep the virus in check. Introduced more recently, PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, can guard uninfected people from potential infections. But antivirals come with side effects. Nausea, fatigue, dizziness, and pain are common. When taken for years—which is typical—the drugs raise cholesterol levels and increase the chances of depression, diabetes, and liver and kidney damage. They’re also expensive and very hard to come by in some regions of the world. The new approach is a virus-like living drug. Like its evil twin, HIV, it replicates and spreads in the body. Because both viruses use the same cell machinery to reproduce, the engineered virus dominates precious resources, elbowing out disease-causing viruses and limiting their spread. TIPs also kept the virus’s levels at bay in cells from HIV-positive people.

"Cars are faster than humans, but that doesn't mean we stopped walking. When we're moving huge amounts of stuff over huge distances, we need engines, whether that's airplanes or boats or cars. And we see this technology as an engine for the imagination." -David Holz We have zoom, we have text messages and social media, but we still meet up in-person with our family and friends. Though we have computers and smart phones, people do still read magazines and paper books. These sort of exponential technologies tend not to replace the human experience, but rather augment it. Singularity Expert @JennyWright believes that generative AI will inspire artists to be more imaginative and more creative, rather than replace them. Join us for more conversations like this at su.org/executive-program Have you found expanded imagination in your exploration of these tools?

the AI industry’s aggressive data-gathering practices may have led to a consent crisis “Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training AI models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an MIT-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used AI training data sets, discovered an ’emerging crisis in consent,’ as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.” Looking for more tech news like this? Visit SingularityHub.com

Would $1,000 a month for three years with no strings attached significantly change your life? “The initial results from what OpenResearch, an Altman-funded research lab, describes as the most comprehensive study on ‘unconditional cash’ show that while the grants had their benefits and weren’t spent on items such as drugs and alcohol, they were hardly a panacea for treating some of the biggest concerns about income inequality and the prospect of AI and other automation technologies taking jobs.” Looking for more tech news like this? Visit SingularityHub.com

This definitely sounds like something out of science fiction... will this be the inspiration for the next big space-pirate trilogy? A light sail designed using artificial intelligence is about 1000 times thinner than a human hair and weighs as much as a grain of sand – and it could help us create a spacecraft capable of reaching another star sooner than we thought. The Breakthrough Starshot mission to travel to Alpha Centauri – the closest star to our solar system – was announced in 2016 and invited researchers to design a spaceship powered by light. Looking for more tech news like this? Visit SingularityHub.com

We don't actually know how the physics of flight works, yet we build flying things all the time. We're building and deploying AI's, and we can test their outcomes, but we don't always know exactly how they're doing what they're doing either. "So how do we meet the unknowability of the world? experimentation. you don't really need to know how the world works to be able to engage with it." Source: Aaron Frank, Singularity Executive Program