AI Jet Dogfighting

A ground crew preps the X-62 Variable In-flight Simulator Aircraft (VISTA) at Edwards Air Force Base to fly on Nov. 30, 2023 (Michael Marrow/Breaking Defense)

WASHINGTON — High in the skies above the desert sands of Edwards Air Force Base in September 2023, a team composed of members of the Air Force, DARPA and industry had an AI-controlled F-16 and a human-controlled one maneuver against each other in dogfights — a feat the team is claiming to be a “world first.”

In the span of a couple weeks, a series of trials witnessed a manned F-16 face off against a bespoke Fighting Falcon known as the Variable In-flight Simulator Aircraft, or VISTA. A human pilot sat in the VISTA’s cockpit for safety reasons, but an AI agent did the flying, with results officials described as impressive — though they declined to provide specific detail, like the win/loss ratio of the AI pilot, due to “national security” reasons.

The AI agents employed by the team “performed well in general,” meaning that “our ongoing research is a clear signal that we’re moving in the right direction,” Air Force Test Pilot School Commandant Col. James Valpiani said in a briefing with reporters today.  READ  MORE...

Robot Factory

 

Material Moving Faster Than Light

New research suggests that the universe is filled with particles capable of traveling faster than light, LiveScience reports — and that this scenario holds up as a potentially "viable alternative" to our current cosmological model.

The idea is a little far-fetched, sure, but it's worth hearing out. These hypothetical particles, known as tachyons, aren't likely to be real — but they're not some hokey bit of sci-fi, either. The potential for their existence is something physicists have been giving serious thought for decades, raising fundamental questions about the nature of causality.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, the researchers posit that tachyons are what make up dark matter, an unobservable — and despite being widely considered to exist by scientists, technically hypothetical — substance that is thought to account for around 85 percent of all matter in the universe.  READ MORE...

Retirement

 Many Americans worked for 40-50 years in a job with one company or spend a few years at several companies, and when they retire, they say goodbye to the marketplace forever.

There are also many Americans who work 40-50 years and when it comes time to retire, they say no to retirement and continue to work until they are forced out or until they die.

There are also those Americans who worked for 40-50 years and when it comes time to retire, they cannot retire either because they did not save for retirement or the company for which they worked had no retirement plan.

Then there are those Americans who are very wealthy and don't need the money who continue to work just to see how much money they can generate over a lifetime.

My wife and I retired in 2015; she was 62 and I was 67.  I got full social security benefits, and her monthly allocation was reduced because she retired early.  During my last place of employment, I had set aside money to pay for her health insurance for three years until she was old enough for Medicare.  I did this so we could retire together.

Neither my wife nor I had a company pension plan and had to rely on social security and savings to pay our monthly bills.  Fortunately, we had saved enough over our marriage to compensate for not having a pension plan.

We were lucky...  although, many people do not believe in luck.  So, maybe we were just fortunate to have the insight to start saving money when we did.

It also helped that we had NO DEBT and had to plans to buy anything that we could no pay off by the end of the month.

Our lifestyle was simple and had been simple for several years, so we had very little to give up when we actually retired.  In other words, we sacrificed nothing to retire like some people have to do.  In fact, we did not change our lifestyle at all.

IF YOU ARE WANTING TO RETIRE, IT IS NEVER TOO EARLY TO START PLANNING FOR THAT EVENTUALITY...

Somewhat Political

 

China Scan Norfolk US Naval Base

In a display of its growing space prowess and surveillance capabilities, radar images of a US Navy base taken by a Chinese satellite are circulating online. Appearing first on China’s domestic social media platform Weibo, defense analysts later identified the spacecraft as the Taijing-4 03 “flat-plate radar imaging satellite” and identified the naval facility as the Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

The radar image showed three aircraft carriers, what appeared to be two Arleigh Burke-class warships. Four other vessels in the image, however, cannot be identified.

The Norfolk base, on the east coast of the US, is one of the premier naval bases responsible for projecting power and operations in the Atlantic Ocean and is home to the Military Sealift Command and the submarines of the Atlantic Fleet. It is also the world’s largest shore-based naval establishment, supporting 75 ships and 134 aircraft alongside 14 piers and 11 aircraft hangars.  READ MORE...

Lucky Man

 

Construction Technologies

 

New Subatomic Particle Detected

The BESIII collaboration have reported the observation of an anomalous line shape around ppbar mass threshold in the J/ψ→γ3(π+π-) decay, which indicates the existence of a ppbar bound state. The paper was published online in Physical Review Letters.

The proximity in mass to 2mp is suggestive of nucleon-antinucleon bound states, an idea that has a long history. Before the birth of Quark Model, a nucleon-antinucleon bound state was already proposed by Prof. E. Fermi and Prof. C. N. Yang.

There is an accumulation of evidence for anomalous behavior in the proton-antiproton system near the ppbar mass threshold, e.g., J/ψ→γppabr , J/ψ→γπ+π-η' and the proton's effective form factor determined from e+e-→ppbar, exhibiting a narrow peak or a very steep falloff around the ppbar mass threshold, which inspired many speculations and renewed the interests on the nucleon-antinucleon bound state.     READ MORE...

Friday Pic2

 

In The NEWS

Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> Heisman Trust returns trophy to 2005 Heisman winner Reggie Bush; Bush forfeited the trophy in 2010 due to Bush receiving improper benefits while playing for Southern Cal (More)

> Tupac Shakur's estate threatens Drake with lawsuit over the use of the late rapper's AI-generated vocals without permission in "Taylor Made" diss track (More)

> Spanish soccer league LaLiga in talks to host league matches in the US beginning with 2025-26 season (More)


Science & Technology
In partnership with IntelGenx

> Brief and reversible suppression of key gene in fruit flies gives rise to cancer tumors; breakthrough challenges longstanding belief cancer can only be initiated by permanent genetic mutations (More)

> Bioluminescent animals evolved as early as 540 million years ago, study suggests; trait emerged at the same time as some animals developed eyes (More) | Cambrian explosion 101 (More)

> NASA confirms it reestablished contact with Voyager 1, months after communications problems arose (More) | The craft launched in 1977 and is now 15 billion miles from Earth; see map here (More)


Business & Markets
> Markets close mixed (Dow -0.1%, S&P 500 0.0%, Nasdaq +0.1%) as earnings reports continue to roll in (More) | Shares of Meta drop 16% on weak revenue guidance, despite beating first quarter estimates (More)

> Consulting giant McKinsey reportedly under federal criminal investigation for its role in opioid-related work for pharmaceutical firms (More) | Russia seizes $440M from JPMorgan Chase, which it says had been frozen following the invasion of Ukraine (More)

> AI coding startup Cognition secures $175M investment from Founders Fund, brings valuation to $2B (More) | IBM to acquire cloud infrastructure company HashiCorp for $6.4B (More)


Politics & World Affairs
> Arizona House passes repeal of near-total abortion ban by 32-28 vote, sending bill to the state Senate; law was first passed in 1864 (More) | Supreme Court hears arguments over whether a federal law allowing emergency room doctors to perform abortions in certain cases supersedes state restrictions on the procedure (More)

> Supreme Court to consider today whether former President Donald Trump can claim immunity in election interference case (More) | Former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, 17 others indicted in Arizona "fake electors" plan (More) | Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D, NJ-10) dies at age 65 from reported cardiac arrest (More)

> Pro-Palestinian protesters clash with police at the University of Texas and University of Southern California as campus demonstrations spread across the US (More) | House Speaker Mike Johnson (R, LA-4) appears at Columbia University protest, calls on White House to bring in National Guard (More)

SOURCE:  1440 News

A Loan is Still DEBT

 

There is a new company out there that has been airing a lot of advertising on the television...

NEW DAY USA is the company to which I refer.

They want to sell LOANS to veterans and their spouses based upon the equity in the house that they own.

One of those people on these commercials is a retired Navy Admiral who claims to know the VETERAN MENTALITY...

I was in the US NAVY for 6 years and let me tell you that NAVAL OFFICERS have no clue as to the Veteran Mentality when it comes to enlisted personnel.

Officers do not fraternize with the enlisted man and the only way you can know the veteran mentality from an enlisted point of view is to fraternize with them.

Officers may know officers but even that is questionable because LOWER RANKING officers do not fraternize with HIGHER RANKING officers.  It is just not done.  

You simply DO NOT BUDDY AROUND with those that you supervise for fear of playing favorites.

This commercial is just a clever way of tricking people into getting loans with this new company.  And I don't know about you but if you get a loan from anywhere, IT IS STILL CONSIDERED DEBT that has to be paid off.  If you use your house as collateral, then you risk losing your house if you don't pay back the loan.

The commercial says they are giving a little hand up and not a handout.

Debt is debt regardless of what you call it.

Gorilla & Lion Cub

 

AI Detects Hidden Details in Painting

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be trained to see details in images that escape the human eye. Now an AI neural network has identified something unusual about a face in a Raphael painting: It wasn't actually painted by Raphael.


The face in question belongs to St Joseph, seen in the top left of the painting known as the Madonna della Rosa (or Madonna of the Rose).


Scholars have in fact long debated whether or not the painting is a Raphael original. While it requires diverse evidence to conclude an artwork's provenance, a newer method of analysis based on an AI algorithm has sided with those who think at least some of the strokes were at the hand of another artist.


Researchers from the UK and US developed a custom analysis algorithm based on the works that we know are the result of the Italian master's brushwork.     READ MORE...

Creating a Sea in the Middle of the Desert

 

Start me Up

 

Increasing Efficiency of Solar Panels

Lehigh University researchers have created a revolutionary solar cell material with up to 190% external quantum efficiency, pushing beyond conventional efficiency limits and showing great promise for enhancing future solar energy systems. Further development is required for practical application, supported by a U.S. Department of Energy grant.




It shows great potential for advancing the development of highly efficient next-generation solar cells, which are vital for meeting global energy demands.

A team from Lehigh University has created a material that could significantly enhance the efficiency of solar panels.

A prototype using the material as the active layer in a solar cell exhibits an average photovoltaic absorption of 80%, a high generation rate of photoexcited carriers, and an external quantum efficiency (EQE) up to an unprecedented 190%—a measure that far exceeds the theoretical Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit for silicon-based materials and pushes the field of quantum materials for photovoltaics to new heights.     READ MORE...

Off to Market

 

In The NEWS

Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
In partnership with The Ascent

> Taylor Swift's "Tortured Poets Department" sells 700,000 vinyl records, breaking the record for most vinyl sales in a week after just three days (More)

> WNBA No. 1 draft pick Caitlin Clark to sign eight-year, $28M contract with Nike, which includes a signature shoe and is the highest-ever sponsorship deal for a women's basketball player (More)

> Grammy-winning artist Megan Thee Stallion accused in lawsuit of sexual harassment by her former cameraman (More) | Multiple crewmembers injured during accident on set of Amazon MGM Studio's upcoming film "The Pickup" (More)


Science & Technology
> Microsoft releases Phi-3, framed as a "small" language model with almost 4 billion parameters; says it performs as well as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 in answering complex questions (More) | Meta adds multimodal AI to its Ray-Ban smart glasses, allowing users to query AI based on items in the field of vision (More)

> Scientists create artificial cells that change shape and respond to their surroundings like living cells; breakthrough has applications in regenerative medicine, drug delivery, and more (More)

> Underground Antarctic experiment reportedly detects seven potential neutrino events; the particles are the most abundant in the universe but weigh nothing and rarely interact with matter (More) | More on the "ghost" particle (More)


Business & Markets
> US stock markets close higher (S&P 500 +1.2%, Dow +0.7%, Nasdaq +1.6%) as investors sift through strong batch of earnings reports (More) | Tesla reports 9% drop in Q1 revenue, the biggest year-over-year decline since 2012; announces new models ahead of timeline, with shares rising over 13% in after-hours trading (More)

> The Federal Trade Commission votes 3-2 in approving final rule banning most employers from using noncompete clauses nationwide, effective in 120 days; FTC estimates about 30 million workers are currently prevented from joining competitors (More)

> Modern-day convenience store Foxtrot abruptly closes all 33 stores across Chicago, Austin, Dallas, and Washington, DC; comes five months after its merger with Chicago boutique grocer Dom's Kitchen and Market (More)


Politics & World Affairs
> Campus pro-Palestinian protests continue at a number of universities across the country; some call for the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik following student arrests (More) | See updates on the war (More)

> UK lawmakers pass bill allowing officials to send certain migrants seeking asylum to Rwanda; officials say the policy is meant to deter the smugglers trafficking migrants to the country (More)

> Argentina President Javier Milei announces country's first quarterly budget surplus in 16 years; the Libertarian Milei was elected in November on a platform of cutting spending and slowing runaway inflation, which had reached 100% year-over-year (More)

SOURCE: 1440 News

An American Tragedy

 

If you are not aware that Donald Trump has 91 felony charges against him, then you are so apathetic that there is absolutely no reason to reach out to you at all...

However, I do not think that is the case for a majority of Americans...

Obviously, it is Democratic District Attorneys that have brought these charges against Donald Trump and it is obvious that Democratic Judges are presiding over these court cases.

It is highly UNLIKELY that Republicans are involved in any of this perversion of justice...  that incidentally, this country will regret down the road.

FOR MONTHS, we have heard how pleased Democrats are with these charges against Trump because, as they claim, no one is above the law.

I have even heard people laugh ON AIR because Trump is in so much trouble and will soon be paying out tons of money.  They anticipate that he will go bankrupt and go to jail for his crimes.

HOWEVER...  it appears that each time the Democrats attack Trump, his numbers relative to the November 2024 election GO UP...

Now Democrats are bitching that Trump is getting too much publicity over these trials which if that is the case, they brought on themselves.

AND THEREIN LIES THE TRAGEDY...  the Dems got what they wanted and soon realized it was not what they really wanted at all.

The other side is getting the last laugh....