https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-flat/
KEY POINTS: The shape of the Universe didn’t have to be flat; it could have been positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere or negatively curved like a higher-dimensional horse’s saddle. The reason space can be curved is that its shape is not absolute, but rather determined by a mix of factors like its mass and energy distribution, as well as its expansion rate. Nevertheless, when we measure it, we find that our Universe really is flat. Here’s what we can learn from that, and why, from a cosmic perspective, it matters so much.
EXCERPTS: Right now, we’ve only measured the curvature to a level of 1-part-in-400, and find that it’s indistinguishable from flat. But if we could get down to these ultra-sensitive precisions, we would have the opportunity to confirm or refute the predictions of the leading theory of our cosmic origins as never before. We cannot know what its true shape is, but we can both measure and predict its curvature.
[...] Although the Universe appears indistinguishable from flat today, it may yet turn out to have a tiny but meaningful amount of non-zero curvature. A generation or two from now, depending on our scientific progress, we might finally know by exactly how much our Universe isn’t perfectly flat, after all, and that might tell us more about our cosmic origins, and what flavor of inflation actually occurred, than anything else ever has... (MORE - missing details)
https://uwaterloo.ca/news/media/top-ai-c...four-times
PRESS RELEASE: New research from the University of Waterloo shows that artificial intelligence (AI) still struggles with some basic software development tasks, raising questions about how reliably AI systems can assist developers. As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly incorporated into software development, developers have struggled to ensure that AI-generated responses are accurate, consistent, and easy to integrate into larger development workflows.
Previously, LLMs responded to software development prompts with free-form natural language answers. To address this problem, several AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, have introduced “structured outputs”. These outputs force LLM responses to follow predefined formats such as JSON, XML, or Markdown, making them easier for both humans and software systems to read and process.
A new benchmarking study from Waterloo, however, shows that the technology is not yet as reliable as many developers had hoped. Even the most advanced models achieved only about 75 per cent accuracy in the tests, while open-source models performed closer to 65 per cent. The study evaluated 11 LLM models across 18 structured output formats and 44 tasks designed to assess how reliably the systems followed structured rules.
“With this kind of study, we want to measure not only the syntax of the code – that is, whether it’s following the set rules – but also whether the outputs produced for various tasks were accurate,” said Dongfu Jiang, a PhD student in computer science and co-first author on the research. “We found that while they do okay with text-related tasks, they really struggle on tasks involving image, video, or website generation.”
The study was a collaborative effort involving Waterloo’s Jialin Yang, an undergraduate student, and Dr. Wenhu Chen, an assistant professor of computer science, and incorporated annotations from 17 other researchers at Waterloo and around the world.
“There have been a lot of similar benchmarking projects happening in our labs recently,” Chen said. “At Waterloo, students often begin as annotators, then organize projects and create their own benchmarking studies. They’re not just using AI in their studies – they’re building, researching and evaluating it.”
While LLM-structured outputs are an exciting step for software development, the researchers say the systems are not yet reliable enough to operate without human oversight. “Developers might have these agents working for them, but they still need significant human supervision,” Jiang said.
The research, “StructEval: Benchmarking LLMs’ Capabilities to Generate Structural Outputs,” appears in Transactions on Machine Learning Research and will be presented at ICLR 2026.
Thought of this word last night as a sort in-between state arising between the object and the subject. So I looked it up on Google and lo and behold that is exactly what it means. The state arises out of the dynamic interaction of object and subject (or the agent and the enviroment)--an iterative or feedback loop that is a third mode of being or relatedness.
"Transjectivity is a concept developed by Dr. John Vervaeke that describes a co-created, relational reality existing between the subject (observer) and the object (world), rather than being solely inside the mind (subjective) or solely in the world (objective). It focuses on the dynamic interaction and feedback loop between an agent and its environment.
Key Aspects of Transjectivity
Definition: Co-created relatedness where the agent and the world shape each other.
Examples: Common examples include the meaning of a tool (e.g., a hammer's "hammer-ness" relies on a human hand and a physical object), falling in love, danger, or the "home" feeling.
The "Transject": Instead of a static subject or object, a "transject" is a property or pattern of connectedness that emerges from this reciprocal interaction.
Meaning Crisis: Vervaeke uses this concept to address the meaning crisis by arguing that meaning is not purely subjective (in our heads) nor purely objective (in the physical, scientific world), but lies in the "transjective" relationship between us and the world.
John Vervaeke: Coined as a crucial tool for understanding cognition, consciousness, and meaning in his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
Connection to Metaxu: Vervaeke notes a similarity between his concept of the transjective and philosopher William Desmond’s idea of the metaxu (the middle ground).
Posthumanism: The concept is also applied in Critical Posthumanism Network studies to understand how human identity and technology interact.
This concept effectively bridges the gap between inner experience and outer reality, highlighting that true understanding is inherently interactive."
Both Heidegger and M Merleau-Ponty understood this idea of transjectivity in the very nature of being. For Heidegger the objects we are constantly surrounded with are used FOR specific intents, like machines and tools and utensils and implements. We encounter these objects in the mode of being in the world, habituated towards using them in a state he called equipmental comportment. The objects are thus always "ready at hand", as transjects, but only become "present at hand", or objects, when they break or malfunction or don't fit. That's when we become aware of them as objects. Like the glasses one wears, always being experienced THRU and never objectively AT until they break at which time they become objects present to us.
M Merleau-Ponty saw perception itself as a transjective form of being. He realized that it only is ever happening while our bodies are moving about and appropriating the various qualities of our environment. Even the body itself is a transject, neither wholly objective nor subjective, and appears in our experience as the enworlding medium or "transparence" thru which phenomenal being manifests itself. It is out of the transjectivity of the body, as being the energetic nexus of all ongoing interactions, that we encounter the world as the split domain of objective and subjective being.
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120210
INTRO: For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that the properties of the perovskite family of materials can be used to create so-called quantum bits. The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, pave the way for more affordable materials in future quantum computers.
According to the researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, behind the study, few within the field believed it would be possible. The reason is that the atoms in perovskite materials should, in theory, interact so strongly that the qubit would collapse before the calculation could be completed. However, the experiments conducted by the Linköping team show that it works.
“Our findings open up an entirely new research field,” says Yuttapoom Puttisong, associate professor at Linköping University. The researchers hope that this new research field will eventually contribute to the construction of a functional quantum computer capable of performing advanced calculations that today’s traditional supercomputers cannot manage.
A quantum computer operates using quantum bits, or qubits, to process information. They can be compared to ones and zeros in a traditional computer. What sets them apart is that a qubit does not need to be in one state or the other; instead, it can exist in all states between one and zero. This is known as superposition. As a result, far more information can be handled in a smaller space.
There are many different ways to create a qubit. The most common technique at present is superconducting qubits, used by IBM, Google and others in their attempts to build a quantum computer. However, they are extremely sensitive and operate only at temperatures mere thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. Achieving such cooling requires significant energy and space, making the technology difficult to scale... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119818
INTRO: Diseases historically absent from the United States have been showing up in Florida, Texas, California and other U.S. states in recent years. To understand why, look to Peru. That’s where researchers from Stanford and other institutions analyzed the connection between a cyclone and a massive outbreak of dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease that can cause fever, rash, and life-threatening symptoms like hemorrhage and shock. Their findings, published March 17 in One Earth, reveal that warmer, wetter weather linked to climate change is making disease epidemics more likely.
"Health impacts of climate change aren't something we're waiting for,” said study lead author Mallory Harris, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Maryland who conducted the research as a PhD student in biology at Stanford. “They're happening now."
Dengue fever, transmitted by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, sickens an estimated tens of millions of people worldwide each year, according to the World Health Organization, and has surged more than 10-fold globally since 2000. A 2023 cyclone and coastal El Niño in a normally dry region of Peru was followed by a dengue fever outbreak 10 times larger than normal.
Using a statistical technique developed in economics, the researchers asked what share of this historic outbreak was due to the unusual 2023 weather, by modeling what would have happened without the storm. In collaboration with scientists at the Peruvian Ministry of Health and the Latin American Center of Excellence in Climate Change and Health, the team estimated that 60% of dengue cases in the hardest hit districts were directly caused by extreme rainfall and warm temperatures during the cyclone. That translates to roughly 22,000 additional people falling ill who otherwise would not have.
The link goes like this: heavy rains flood low-lying areas, knock out water and sanitation infrastructure, and create pools of water ideal for breeding Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. Warm weather turbocharges mosquito breeding and disease transmission processes. By comparison, cooler areas hit by the cyclone saw no significant effect of extreme precipitation on dengue incidence... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120219
INTRO: he U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that up to 40% of the nation’s food supply goes to waste every year—mainly because it spoils during transportation, storage and distribution—even after reaching retail stores and consumers’ homes.
But spoiled food is not the only concern. Contaminated or degraded food can pose serious public health risks. At the same time, food waste also harms the environment: Most food packaging relies heavily on petroleum-based plastics that wind up in landfills and oceans for decades, said Changyong “Chase” Cao, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Case Western Reserve University.
“At every step, from farm to table, there is lots of loss and waste,” he said. To address both food spoilage and plastic pollution, Cao and a team of researchers are working to develop more sustainable packaging solutions.
With a new grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, they’re developing advanced nanocomposite materials for sustainable food-packaging designed to help food stay fresh longer while reducing the environmental impact.
Cao is leading the three-year project in collaboration with Gary Wnek, professor of macromolecular science and engineering at the Case School of Engineering, and Qin Wang, professor at the University of Maryland. The interdisciplinary team brings together expertise in engineering, polymer materials and food science to address challenges affecting both environmental sustainability and the global food supply.
“Packaging often works quietly in the background, but it has a huge impact,” Cao said. “If we can help food last longer while also reducing environmental harm, the benefits extend across the entire food system.”
According to the World Health Organization, about half of agricultural products spoil because of inadequate packaging, and contaminated food contribute to foodborne illnesses, resulting in about 420,000 deaths annually. In the United States alone, the USDA estimates nearly $161 billion in food loss annually at the retail and consumer levels, much of which could be significantly reduced if product shelf-life were extended even by a day.
These challenges highlight the urgent need for high-performance, next-generation food packaging films capable of extending shelf-life, preserving nutritional quality, communicating product freshness and minimizing food waste... (MORE - details, no ads)
https://theconversation.com/all-5-fundam...ple-278099
INTRO: A new study reveals all five fundamental nucleobases – the molecular “letters” of life – have been detected in samples from the asteroid Ryugu.
Asteroid particles offer a glimpse into the chemical ingredients that may have helped kindle life on Earth. The Ryugu samples were returned from space in 2020 by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa2 mission.
In 2023, an international team reported they had found one of the nucleobases in these samples – uracil. Now, in a study published in Nature Astronomy today, a team of Japanese scientists has confirmed all five nucleobases are present in this pristine asteroid material.
This means these ingredients for life may have been widespread throughout the Solar System in its early years... (MORE - details)
