Google Boasts With AI Chip Design

Google’s AI Group has published an addendum to a 2020 paper about their chip-design program “AlphaChip”. In a blog post, the group claims that “AlphaChip has generated superhuman chip layouts” since 2020. Their addendum details that the AI-designed chips have been “manufactured and deployed in datacentres all over the world” and that they outperform human-designed chips on various measures, such as material use and efficiency, if not by much. If AIs rise to take over the world, at least we won’t have to feel stupid about having built their chips.

This episode of Science News covers dark energy. Dark energy is (probably) real, but physicists still don’t know what it’s made of or how to interact with it. One idea that solves this problem is that dark matter isn’t made of anything, but is a consequence of the universe being holographic. While that idea has been floating around since the ‘90s, it's had a few problems. Now a pair of physicists claim to have solved that problem. Let’s take a look. You can take the quiz here.

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Dinosaurs Might Have Suffered Through Asteroid Double Whammy

Geologists from the University of Edinburgh, U.K., report that a second large asteroid impacted Earth at around the same time as the large one that has been held responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are believed to have fallen victim to the aftermath of the impact of an asteroid with a diameter of about 10 kilometres that left a crater in Middle America about 66 million years ago. The new crater is just off the West Coast of Africa, stems from an asteroid with approximately half a kilometre in diameter, and has been dated to around the same time. It’s unclear how much this made things worse for dinosaurs, but it probably didn’t help. Paper here.

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A New Attempt at Space-Based Solar Power

Putting a solar array in space and beaming the energy down to earth is a nice idea in principle. In practice, as several independent studies have found, it makes no sense either economically or ecologically. The most widely pursued plans use large receiver stations in geostationary orbits that beam the energy down with microwaves. The startup Aetherflux wants to do it with swarms of satellites in low earth orbit and beam the energy down with infrared lasers. Lasers are known to be highly energy inefficient and the earth’s atmosphere isn’t as transparent in the infrared as in the microwave range. I very strongly doubt the economics of this one will work out. But if you like retro sci-fi art, the company is now hiring.

Our podcast “Science with Sabine” is available on Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Castbox, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Radio Public, and YouTube.