Neutrinos, Book Club, Air Conditioning. July 13, 2018, Part 1

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🗓️ 13 July 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

In 1988, physicist Stephen Hawking’s wildly popular A Brief History of Time introduced general audiences around the world to scientists’ questions about the Big Bang, black holes, and relativity. Many of those questions remain unanswered, though the science has advanced in the 30 years since the book was first published. Hawking, who passed away this spring, was known not just for this book, but for his enthusiastic and persistent communication with the public about science. And this summer, the Science Friday Book Club celebrates his legacy on the page, and off. Join Ira and the team at Science Friday as we read A Brief History of Time and ponder the deep questions about matter, space, and time. We’ll read the book and discuss until late August. And we want to hear from you! Neutrinos are particles that are constantly raining down in the universe. They are created from nuclear reactions in places like our sun, distant stars, and even on Earth. But the source of higher-energy cosmic neutrinos formed deeper in the universe is still a mystery. Researchers have built telescopes to detect these low and high energy neutrinos as they pass through the Earth. One of these telescopes is IceCube, which is buried deep beneath the ice in the Antarctic. In September, IceCube detected one of these cosmic neutrinos and alerted the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope and other observatories. These telescopes were able to trace the source of the neutrino to a flare up in a blazar—a black hole at the center of a galaxy—4 billion light-years away. When the mercury soars dangerously high, air conditioning can help save lives that might otherwise be lost to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and other stresses brought about by heat waves. But there’s a downside: it can take a lot of electricity to keep you cool. New research published in PLOS Medicine earlier this month assesses what happens when the demand for air conditioning rises with the temperature, and why saving those lives might also cost lives. Senior author Tracey Holloway, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A little bit later, we'll be having our book club, where we'll be talking about Stephen Hawking's a brief history of time. But first, people like to say that our brain is like a computer, right? It's a usual metaphor. But in reality, no computer comes close to matching the power and complexity of the human brain.
0:21.8	But that hasn't stopped technologists from trying to build an even better computer that acts even, well, closer to the human brain.
0:29.2	And one company is closer now to that goal.
0:32.5	Here to tell us more about this milestone in brain-inspired computing is Amy Nordrum, news editor at IE CREPRIE Spectrum. Well, there's all other selected short subject in the size. Hi, Amy. Hi, Ira. So what's the breakthrough reach this week? Yeah, well, this field of neuromorphic computing, as it's called, has a bunch of big research projects going on right now, and one of the biggest is called Spinnaker out of Europe.
0:55.1	And this week, a group related to that project announced that they had done the largest
0:58.8	simulation on their computer to date. So they did a simulation of a neural circuit that contained
1:04.1	80,000 neurons and 300 million synapses. So they were able to run this simulation and then
1:09.4	compare it to traditional software running on
1:11.6	supercomputers today that's typically used to do these kinds of neural simulations.
1:15.6	And they found that the results of their new hardware, their new system, were as accurate as this top-of-the-line state-of-the-art neural simulation software that most scientists are using on supercomputers today.
1:29.3	So this is a good step for the project.
1:31.2	It means that they're on the right track.
1:35.3	And then as they continue to scale up their neuromorphic computer called Spinnaker,
1:39.1	the project will hopefully be able to produce results that are even more accurate and do it with less power and faster than the supercomputers that are used today for these kinds of things.
1:48.0	And why do they think they need to create such a computer like this? They just wanted to get, to recreate the human brain? Is that the idea?
1:52.0	Yeah, the thinking is that since our traditional computers really aren't designed,
1:56.0	similar to the brain, if you really want to study the brain in depth, if you want to run a lot of simulations on it,
2:00.0	learn more about how the brain learns and adapts and the plasticity elements of it, you really should design a computer that works a lot like the brain. And so in theory, if they continue to scale this project up, they'd be able to do a lot more accurate simulations of our own brains. What if you could get close to that? Think of the ethics and ethics considerations here. Absolutely. I talked with the researcher involved with this project.
2:21.4	Lost. If you could get close to that. Think of the ethics and ethics considerations here?
2:18.0	Absolutely.
2:18.6	I talked with the researcher involved with this project.
2:21.3	Last night, Sasha Von Albaata and was asking her about this possibility.
	...

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