At the Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California, a 16-year-old sea lion named Ronan loves to put on a show. With her head bobbing in time to a percussive beat, she hits her marks not just with accuracy — but with flair. Her timing is so precise, researchers say, it outpaces even the best of us.

“She is incredibly precise, with variability of only about a tenth of an eyeblink from cycle to cycle,” said Peter Cook, a cognitive neuroscientist at New College of Florida and lead author of a new study out today in Scientific Reports. “Sometimes, she might hit the beat five milliseconds early, sometimes she might hit it 10 milliseconds late. But she’s basically hitting the rhythmic bullseye over and over and over again.”

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Dual-use research that leads to applications for both civilian and military or security purposes is geographically widespread and more scientifically influential than is research that has strictly civilian applications.

An analysis of data from bibliometric databases and US patent records found that 14% of 600,000 scientific papers published between 1981 and 2005 originated from dual-use research projects (see ‘Dual-use attracts attention’). The study also found that dual-use research publications are cited more than their non-dual-use research counterparts.

Experts say dismantling the ocean observation system will ‘severely degrade’ the accuracy of weather predictions

The Trump administration’s plan to dismantle an ocean observation system vital to understanding the climate crisis and marine ecosystems would “severely degrade” the accuracy of weather predictions and El Niño forecasts, with economic consequences for the US, European and American scientists have warned.

Decommissioning the US system, which plays a major part in a global ocean observation network, would lead to a massive increase in error in the annual estimates of ocean heating rates, according to research published last month.

As a result, the forecasts and early warning systems for storms, tropical cyclones and El Niño would degrade, “sometimes dangerously so”, according to Sabrina Speich, an expert in global ocean monitoring at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris and chair of the ocean expert panel of the Global Climate Observing System.

With the publication today of five deeply researched and peer-reviewed papers, Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and dozens of collaborating physicists have cemented our confidence in the core plasma physics assumptions at work within our upcoming ARC fusion power plant.

The scientifically rigorous papers, with 58 co-authors, span 226 pages in a special edition of the the Journal of Plasma Physics. They detail how an ARC plant will produce roughly 1.1 gigawatts (GW) of fusion power that we’ll convert into 400 megawatts (MW) of net electricity delivered continuously to the grid — enough to power about 280,000 average American homes.

[...]

1. Overview of the physics basis for the ARC fusion power plant
2. Power and particle exhaust for the ARC fusion power plant
3. ARC disruption physics and strategy
4. Performance and transport in the ARC tokamak
5. ARC physics basis — magnetohydrodynamics

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1171000/mathematicians-issue-warning-as-ai-rapidly-gains-ground-new-declaration-argues-the-techn

There’s a phenomenon called the rhyme-as-reason effect that says people are more likely to believe something is true if it rhymes. A 2000 study published in the journal Psychological Science with the excellent title Birds of a Feather Flock Conjointly examined this phenomenon. 100 volunteers were given aphorisms that either rhymed (“Life is mostly strife”) or were modified to not rhyme (“Life is mostly struggle”) and asked to rate them for accuracy. The group that was given the rhyming versions rated them as more accurate.

That’s why “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” worked for Johnnie Cochran a lot better than “If it doesn’t fit, you must find my client not guilty” probably would have.

“Mathematicians should find it quite striking that tech companies are suddenly interested in their work,” said Kevin Buzzard, a mathematician at Imperial College London, in a statement. “The Leiden Declaration is a well-thought-through response to what is currently happening, as AI continues to disrupt this space.”

The point here is that "AI" grifters are latching onto mathematics, not vice versa. In reality mathematicians invented computers, have been using them ever since, and realize that "AI" has never existed.

An experiment with 2,520 participants backs Richard Feynman’s answer to every diner’s dilemma: do I want to try something new?

http://archive.today/CM9G2

Original article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2509612123