Day: August 22, 2023

Simulations suggest some black holes could be moving at nearly one-tenth the speed of light

Posted on by Robin Edgar

A pair of astrophysicists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has found via simulations that some black holes might be traveling through space at nearly one-tenth the speed of light. In their study, reported in Physical Review Letters, James Healy and Carlos Lousto used supercomputer simulations to determine how fast black holes might be moving Read more about Simulations suggest some black holes could be moving at nearly one-tenth the speed of light[…]

Our Inability To Recognize That Remixing Art Is Transformative Is Now Leading To Today’s AI/Copyright Mess

Posted on by Robin Edgar

If you’ve never watched it, Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix” series (which was recently updated from the original version that came out years ago) is an excellent look at how stupid our copyright laws are, and how they have really warped our view of creativity. As the series makes clear, creativity is all about Read more about Our Inability To Recognize That Remixing Art Is Transformative Is Now Leading To Today’s AI/Copyright Mess[…]

Liberté, égalité, Fraternité: France Loses Its Marbles On Internet Censorship – wants to control content you see by owning your browser

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Over the years we’ve covered a lot of attempts by relatively clueless governments and politicians to enact think-of-the-children internet censorship or surveillance legislation, but there’s a law from France in the works which we think has the potential to be one of the most sinister we’ve seen yet. It flew under our radar so we’re Read more about Liberté, égalité, Fraternité: France Loses Its Marbles On Internet Censorship – wants to control content you see by owning your browser[…]

AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, judge rules – Only humans can be creative, apparently

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Copyright issues have dogged AI since chatbot tech gained mass appeal, whether it’s accusations of entire novels being scraped to train ChatGPT or allegations that Microsoft and GitHub’s Copilot is pilfering code. But one thing is for sure after a ruling [PDF] by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia – AI-created Read more about AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, judge rules – Only humans can be creative, apparently[…]

Scientists design novel nonlinear circuit to harvest clean power using graphene

Posted on by Robin Edgar

Obtaining useful work from random fluctuations in a system at thermal equilibrium has long been considered impossible. In fact, in the 1960s eminent American physicist Richard Feynman effectively shut down further inquiry after he argued in a series of lectures that Brownian motion, or the thermal motion of atoms, cannot perform useful work.   Now, Read more about Scientists design novel nonlinear circuit to harvest clean power using graphene[…]

Visualizing the mysterious dance: Quantum entanglement of photons captured in real-time

Posted on by Robin Edgar

[…] Knowing the wave function of such a quantum system is a challenging task—this is also known as quantum state tomography or quantum tomography in short. With the standard approaches (based on the so-called projective operations), a full tomography requires large number of measurements that rapidly increases with the system’s complexity (dimensionality). Previous experiments conducted Read more about Visualizing the mysterious dance: Quantum entanglement of photons captured in real-time[…]