Wall Street Fund Wants To Hire r/WallStreetBets Users To Help Pick Meme Stocks

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Cindicator Capital is the kind of investment fund that relies on software and algorithms to model investment strategies based on any number of disparate factors. In the wake of the WallStreetBets subreddit throwing hedge funds into chaos and driving stock prices to non-sensical extremes, Cindicator has posted a job listing on LinkedIn hoping…

NASA “mole’s” attempts to dig into Mars failed. What’s next?

The mission team for NASA’s InSight lander called off its attempts to try to dig deeper into Mars with the heat probe known as “the mole.” Meanwhile, the rest of the mission gained an extension to December 2022. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nasa-calls-halt-to-attempts-by-insight-mole-to-dig-into-mars…

Periodic and phase-locked modulation in the pulsar PSR B1929+10 investigated with FAST

Using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), astronomers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and elsewhere have conducted single-pulse observations of a pulsar known as PSR B1929+10. Results of the monitoring campaign shed more light on the periodic and phase-locked modulation in this source. The study was presented in a paper published December 18 on arXiv.org. Source: https://phys.org/news/2020-12-periodic-phase-locked-modulation-pulsar-psr.html…

Scientists predicted a large sunspot. Now it’s here

Last week, scientists from the National Solar Observatory predicted a large sunspot would emerge before Thanksgiving. Now the sunspot – AR2786 – is in view. Here’s how they did it. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/nso-predicts-large-sunspot-thanksgiving-nov2020…

Laser Fusion Reactor Approaches ‘Burning Plasma’ Milestone

Iwastheone shares a report from Science Magazine: In October 2010, in a building the size of three U.S. football fields, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory powered up 192 laser beams, focused their energy into a pulse with the punch of a speeding truck, and fired it at a pellet of nuclear fuel the size of a peppercorn. So began…

A One Hundred Thousand-Fold Enhancement In the Nonlinearity of Silicon

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. … [The scientists] have increased the nonlinearity of silicon 100,000 times by creating a nano-optical resonator, so that all-optical switches can be operated using a…

Astronomers Trace Mysterious Fast Radio Burst To Extreme, Rare Star

The first detection of a fast radio burst inside the Milky Way leads scientists back to a magnetar, partially solving a long-standing mystery. CNET reports: Sifting through a trove of radio telescope data in 2007, Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University, spotted something unusual. Data obtained six years earlier showed a brief, energetic burst, lasting no more than 5…

The Subtle Effects of Blood Circulation Can Be Used To Detect Deepfakes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: This work, done by two researchers at Binghamton University (Umur Aybars Ciftci and Lijun Yin) and one at Intel (Ilke Demir), was published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning this past July. In an article titled, “FakeCatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals,” the authors describe software…

How the Brain Handles the Unknown

Uncertainty can be hard for humans. It drives anxiety, an emotion neuroscientists are trying to understand and psychologists are trying to better treat. From a report: Under the threat of a virus, job insecurity, election uncertainty, and a general pandemic life-in-limbo that is upending school, holidays and more, people are especially anxious. Before the pandemic, anxiety was already climbing in the…