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Thermometer, a new calibration technique tailored for large language models, can prevent LLMs from being overconfident or underconfident about their predictions. The technique aims to help users know when a model should be trusted.

Much of the water in the West is transported across vast geographical areas by large infrastructure projects known as interbasin water transfers. Two of these projects in particular make up 85% of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions associated with U.S. interbasin transfers -- one in Arizona and the other in California -- according to the new research.

A research team has recently demonstrated that analog hardware using ECRAM devices can maximize the computational performance of artificial intelligence, showcasing its potential for commercialization.

A research team has recently demonstrated that analog hardware using ECRAM devices can maximize the computational performance of artificial intelligence, showcasing its potential for commercialization.

Scientists have hypothesized that moir excitons -- electron-hole pairs confined in moir interference fringes which overlap with slightly offset patterns -- may function as qubits in next-generation nano-semiconductors. However, due to diffraction limits, it has not been possible to focus light enough in measurements, causing optical interference from many moir excitons. To solve this, researchers have developed a new method of reducing these moir excitons to measure the quantum coherence time and realize quantum functionality.

Controlling the crystal phase of cobalt nanoparticles leads to exceptional catalytic performance in hydrogenation processes, scientists report. Produced via an innovative hydrosilane-assisted synthesis method, these phase-controlled reusable nanoparticles enable the selective hydrogenation of various compounds under mild conditions without the use of harmful gases like ammonia. These efforts could lead to more sustainable and efficient catalytic processes across many industrial fields.

A new study places the origin of the Imazighen in the Epipaleolithic, more than twenty thousand years ago. The research concludes that the genetic origin of the current Arab population of north Africa is far more recent than previously believed, placing it in the seventh century AD. The team has designed an innovative demographic model that uses artificial intelligence to analyze the complete genomes of the two populations.

A new 3D printing method developed by engineers is so simple that it uses a polymer ink and salt water solution to create solid structures. The work has the potential to make materials manufacturing more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

A new 3D printing method developed by engineers is so simple that it uses a polymer ink and salt water solution to create solid structures. The work has the potential to make materials manufacturing more sustainable and environmentally friendly.

To diagnose heart conditions including heart attacks and heart rhythm disturbances, clinicians typically rely on 12-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) -- complex arrangements of electrodes and wires placed around the chest and limbs to detect the heart's electrical activity. But these ECGs require specialized equipment and expertise, and not all clinics have the capability to perform them. Scientists showed that, with help from an AI tool, cardiologists can diagnose heart attacks using a simpler, easier and more accessible electrocardiogram technology.

Photovoltaic (PV) technologies, which convert light into electricity, are increasingly applied worldwide to generate renewable energy. Researchers have now developed a molecular treatment that significantly enhances the efficiency and durability of perovskite solar cells. Their breakthrough will potentially accelerate the large-scale production of this clean energy.

Scientists uncover a pivotal enzyme, XccOpgD, and its critical role in synthesizing C G16, a key compound used by Xanthomonas pathogens to enhance their virulence against plants. This breakthrough opens new avenues for developing targeted pesticides that combat plant diseases without harming beneficial organisms. Insights into XccOpgD's enzymatic mechanism and optimal conditions offer promising prospects for sustainable agriculture, bolstering crop resilience and global food security while minimizing environmental impact.

Recently, researchers developed a non-invasive method combining electrical impedance tomography and extracellular voltage activation to evaluate drug effects on ion channels. The resulting printed circuit board sensor allows real-time monitoring of how newly developed drugs can affect ion flow in channels, providing a cost-effective and accurate alternative to traditional methods like patch-clamp techniques and paving the way toward more efficient and shorter preclinical testing in the drug discovery process.

Fewer side effects, improved chances of healing: the goal of precision medicine is to provide patients with the most individualized treatment possible. This requires a precise understanding of what is happening at the cellular level. Researchers have now succeeded in mapping the interactions of 144 active substances with around 8,000 proteins. The results could help to identify previously unknown potential benefits of existing drugs.

Researchers have developed a new model to explain the formation of giant planets such as Jupiter, which furnishes deeper insights into the processes of planet formation and could expand our understanding of planetary systems.

What if the 'Market Economy' always existed? Archaeologists tried to answer this question by researching how much Bronze Age people used to spend to sustain their daily lives. Their results show that, starting at least 3,500 years ago, the spending habits of prehistoric Europeans were not substantially different from what they are today.

Soil liquefaction that results in infrastructure damage has long been a point of contention for urban planners and engineers. Accurately predicting the soil liquefaction risk of a region could help overcome this challenge. Accordingly, researchers applied artificial intelligence to generate soil liquefaction risk maps, superseding already published risk maps.

Soil liquefaction that results in infrastructure damage has long been a point of contention for urban planners and engineers. Accurately predicting the soil liquefaction risk of a region could help overcome this challenge. Accordingly, researchers applied artificial intelligence to generate soil liquefaction risk maps, superseding already published risk maps.

As you may remember, when faced with determining whether trans women should compete against biological women in the Olympics, the IOC threw up its hands and punted, declaring that each separate sport had to make its own rules on the issue. This has led, in the present Olympics, to biological males qualifying to box in the women’s division. The results are predictable, for even men who become transwomen retain a substantial amount of the size, strength, musculature, and other athletic advantages that biological men have over biological women. Hormone suppression doesn’t equalize those athletic abilities.

Nevertheless, according to the NBC News story below, two biological males who identify as women—people who were disqualified from boxing as women in previous competitions—have qualified for the IOC. Note that they both seem to have been raised as women, so they may well believe that they are indeed biological women. Ergo, they may well not think of themselves as having “transitioned”, so I won’t call them “transwomen.” Nevertheless, they are both almost certainly biological men with disorders of sex development (“DSDs”), and their competing against biological women is just as unfair—but not nearly as consciously unfair—as transwomen competing against biological women.

Click to read (the story is by Matt Lavietes):

Excerpts:

Two boxers who were disqualified from competing with women at a global event last year have been permitted to fight in the Paris Olympics, the International Olympic Committee confirmed.

Imane Khelif of Algeria and Lin Yu‑ting of Taiwan failed to meet gender eligibility tests at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi last year, prompting their disqualifications. But they have been cleared to compete in the women’s 66-kilogram and women’s 57-kilogram matches in Paris this week, the IOC confirmed in an email Tuesday.

 At the time of their disqualifications, the president of the International Boxing Association, which governs the World Boxing Championships, alleged that the boxers’ chromosome tests came back as XY (women typically have two X chromosomes, while men typically have an X and a Y chromosome).

“Based on DNA tests, we identified a number of athletes who tried to trick their colleagues into posing as women,” the association’s president, Umar Kremlev, told Russia’s Tass news agency at the time. “According to the results of the tests, it was proved that they have XY chromosomes. Such athletes were excluded from competition.”

. . .In an email Tuesday, the IOC said that “all athletes participating in the boxing tournament of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 comply with the competition’s eligibility and entry regulations, as well as all applicable medical regulations.”

The IOC updated its rules regarding athletes’ gender eligibility, including its transgender participation guidelines,  in 2021 to defer to each sport’s governing body. The IOC no longer recognizes the IBA as the governing body over Olympic boxing, and instead refers to the Paris 2024 Boxing Unit — an ad-hoc unit developed by the IOC — for its eligibility standards.

In other words, the IOC made up the qualifications, ignoring what the International Boxing Association says. And they made them up on the spot. Why on earth would they do that? The article continues:

Critics in the United States, where the issue of whether trans women should be permitted to compete in women’s sports has been hotly debated in recent years, condemned the inclusion of Khelif and Lin in this week’s competition. Some questioned whether their participation was fair to other female competitors, while others directed incendiary language toward the boxers. [JAC: Check out the “incendiary language”, which isn’t incendiary at all, and comes from Riley Gaines.]

Khelif is scheduled to compete against Italy’s Angela Carini on Thursday, and Lin is scheduled to fight against Uzbekistan’s Sitora Turdibekova on Friday.

Here’s Khelif from the Wikipedia article, which adds some details (below):

ALGÉRIE PRESSE SERVICE | وكالة الأنباء الجزائرية , CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

From Wikipedia:

In March 2023, Khelif was disqualified for failing to meet eligibility criteria shortly before her gold medal bout at the 2023 IBA Women’s World Boxing Championships. The Algerian Olympic Committee said Khelif was disqualified for medical reasons. It later emerged that the disqualification was due to high levels of testosterone.[7][8]

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), using different rules to the IBA, cleared Khelif to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, confirming that she complied with all necessary eligibility and medical regulations for the event,[8][12] without detailing what these eligibility rules were.[10] The IOC noted that Khelif was a woman according to her passport and that this was not a “transgender issue“.

She defeated Angela Carini in 42 seconds at the 2024 Olympics, after Carini withdrew citing intense pain in her nose. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, tweeted about the match, writing, “Angela Carini rightly followed her instincts and prioritized her physical safety, but she and other female athletes should not have been exposed to this physical and psychological violence based on their sex.”[14]

And from The Daily Fail, the details of the match between Khelif and Carini:

 A boxer deemed a ‘biological male’ today won against an Italian woman in one of the most controversial Olympic bouts ever.

The fight between Italy‘s Angela Carini and her Algerian opponent Imane Khelif took just 46 seconds, with the Italian throwing her helmet onto the floor as the clash was abandoned, yelling: ‘This is unjust.’

The 25-year-old refused the handshake and fell to the canvas sobbing having received just two punches from Khelif – who had been banned from a major boxing contest before the Olympics.

00:17 02:24 Read More

 

Khelif was thrown out of last year’s world championships after failing testosterone tests carried out to establish gender qualification.

After the match was stopped, the referee raised Khelif’s hand in the air. But a visibly furious Carini yanked her own hand away from the fight official and walked off.

Ignoring the Algerian, the Italian fighter then plunged to her knees and burst into tears as she said she had never felt such strong blows in a contest before.

Speaking after the match, the heartbroken Italian said: ‘I’m used to suffering. I’ve never taken a punch like that, it’s impossible to continue. I’m nobody to say it’s illegal.

‘I got into the ring to fight. But I didn’t feel like it anymore after the first minute. I started to feel a strong pain in my nose. I didn’t give up, but a punch hurt too much and so I said enough. I’m leaving with my head held high.’

Khelif failed testosterone tests last year (the testosterone levels of biological men vs women are nonoverlapping), has a Y chromosome, and I’m guessing that this is a biological male, though it could be a rare intersex person. To know for sure, you’d have to check the internal reproductive anatomy to see if they have the equipment for making sperm or eggs. But testosterone levels, which can be suppressed are irrelevant; what matters is whether the person is a biological male or female. Nor does it matter what their genitalia are: if Khelif went through a male puberty, then it’s a biological male and carries substantial strength and speed advantages, as well as punch strength (see below), over biological women, regardless of testosterone suppression. Finally, it doesn’t matter whether these two people were raised as male or female, what matters is whether they have a disorder of sex development that affects their athletic ability. Here are a few tweets showing the ill-fated and unfair match:

A couple of punches to the head and it’s all over. /2 pic.twitter.com/6egSrRj51s

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 1, 2024

IOC allowed this male boxer to fight a woman. He won. Fight abandoned after 46s /4 pic.twitter.com/YwUfZQ6ssb

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 1, 2024

“None giusto!”.
“it’s not fair!” Says Angela /6 pic.twitter.com/ukqReaRHbP

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 1, 2024

And the end, with tears. It’s heartbreaking:

Angela Carini’s Olympic dreams smashed today. She breaks down in tears. /7 pic.twitter.com/CBNK2pNFo4

— FairPlayForWomen (@fairplaywomen) August 1, 2024

The loser’s statement, even sadder:

“I wanted this victory at all costs. Just for my father.”

Italian boxer Angela Carini emotionally discusses winning for her late father after securing a spot at the Paris Olympics.

She just forfeited her match against Imane Khelif, who is male. pic.twitter.com/zypHELjldX

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) August 1, 2024

I’ve written before (see here and here) that taking testosterone suppressors does not eliminate the athletic advantages of natal men over natal women, especially if they’ve gone through male puberty. You can track down the references by going to the thread of Emma Hilton, a biology professor at the University of Manchester. The thread starts here:

There have been two academic reviews of musculoskeletal changes in transwomen suppressing testosterone.

Both conclude that loss of muscle mass and strength is small, and that strength advantage over females is retained.

Citations to follow.

— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) March 6, 2021

Here’s the huge difference in punching power (my emphasis) between biological men and women (it will probably be somewhat reduced if the man suppresses his testosterone, but not equalized). The reference is at the bottom of the figure.

It’s manifestly unfair to women to force them to compete against biological males who identify as women.  This might be another question to ask to the Presidential candidates—if they have a debate.

h/t: Luana

The most widely recognized explanation for planet formation is the accretion theory. It states that small particles in a protoplanetary disk accumulate gravitationally and, over time, form larger and larger bodies called planetesimals. Eventually, many planetesimals collide and combine to form even larger bodies. For gas giants, these become the cores that then attract massive amounts of gas over millions of years.

But the accretion theory struggles to explain gas giants that form far from their stars, or the existence of ice giants like Uranus and Neptune.

The accretion theory dates as far back as 1944 when Russian scientist Otto Schmidt proposed that rocky planets like Earth formed from ‘meteoric material.’ Another step forward happened in 1960 when English astronomer William McCrea proposed the ‘protoplanet theory,’ stating that planets form in the solar nebula. In the decades since then, the accretion theory was refined and added to, and in modern times, astronomers have gathered more observational evidence that supported it.

However, the theory has some holes that still need plugging.

According to the theory, forming a core large enough to become a gas giant takes several million years, and protoplanetary disks dissipate too soon for that to happen. Protoplanets also tend to migrate toward their star as they grow, and they may not gather enough mass before the star consumes them.

The accretion theory faces another problem that’s surfaced since we’ve discovered more exoplanets in other solar systems. It struggles to explain hot Jupiters and super-Earths.

Over the years, the development of streaming instability and pebble accretion has overcome some of these problems. Streaming instability explains how particles in a gas disk experience drag and accumulate into clumps, which then collapse gravitationally. Pebble accretion explains how particles from centimetres to meters in diameter experience drag and form planetesimals. Both of these have strengthened the accretion theory, but astronomers still hunger for a complete theory of planet formation.

Researchers have developed a new model that incorporates all the physical processes involved in planet formation. Their work, which is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, is titled “Sequential giant planet formation initiated by disc substructure.” The lead author is Tommy Chi Ho Lau, a doctoral candidate at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in München, Germany.

The new model shows that substructures in a protoplanetary disk called annular perturbations can trigger the formation of multiple gas giants in rapid succession. Critically, this model matches up with some of the most recent observations.

Planets form in unstable gas disks around stars. The researchers show how small, millimetre-sized dust particles accumulate in the disk and become trapped in the annular perturbations. The authors call these migration traps. Since they’re trapped, the particles can’t be gravitationally drawn toward the star. A lot of material from which planets form accumulates in these compact regions in the disk, which creates the conditions for rapid planet formation.

“We find rapid formation of multiple gas giants from the initial disc substructure,” the researchers write in their paper. “The migration trap near the substructure allows for the formation of cold gas giants.”

This is an image of the HL Tau planet-forming disk taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA has imaged many of these protoplanetary disks with gaps. The gaps have been interpreted as rings carved out of the disk by forming planets, but this new model has a different explanation. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

The process creates a new pressure maximum at the outer edge of the planetary gap, which triggers the next generation of planet formation. This results in a compact chain of giant planets, which is what we see in our Solar System. The process is efficient because the first gas giants that form prevent the dust needed to form the next planet from drifting inward toward the star.

“When a planet gets large enough to influence the gas disk, this leads to renewed dust enrichment farther out in the disk,” explains Til Birnstiel, co-author and Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at LMU and member of the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence. “In the process, the planet drives the dust—like a sheepdog chasing its herd—into the area outside its own orbit.”

These panels are snapshots from five different times in one of the simulations that show sequential planet formation. The solid line represents gas density, and the dashed line represents dust density. Each dot is a formed planet. As time passes, the dust density peak moves further from the star, shepherded along by newly formed planets. Image Credit: Lau et al. 2024.

The process then repeats itself. “This is the first time a simulation has traced the process whereby fine dust grows into giant planets,” said Tommy Chi Ho Lau, the study’s lead author.

The Atacama Large Millimetre-submillimetre Array (ALMA) specializes in observing protoplanetary disks. It can see through the dust that obscures planet formation around young stars. It’s found gas giants in young disks at a distance beyond 200 AU. In our Solar System, Jupiter is at about 5 AU, and Neptune is at about 30 AU. The authors say that their model can explain all of these different architectures. It also shows how our Solar System stopped forming planets after Neptune because the material was all used up.

“This work demonstrates a scenario of sequential giant planet formation that is triggered by an initial disc substructure,” the authors write in their conclusion. “Planetary cores are formed rapidly from the initial disc substructure, which can then be retained at the migration trap and start gas accretion.” The results show that “… up to three cores can form and grow into giant planets in each generation.”

How the substructures form is beyond the scope of this work. More research is needed to investigate this.

This work can explain how gas giants form, but it can’t explain how the timing worked in our Solar System. That requires more research into how gas accretion works, which the astronomical community is actively pursuing.

“Further investigations specifically on gas accretion are required to model the formation time of the Solar System’s giant planets,” the authors conclude.

The post A New Model Explains How Gas and Ice Giant Planets Can Form Rapidly appeared first on Universe Today.