Daily Archives: June 5, 2022

NEW YORK, June 03, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C., a nationally recognized shareholder rights law firm, is investigating potential claims against Medallion Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: MFIN), RBB Bancorp (NASDAQ: RBB), Dentsply Sirona, Inc. (NASDAQ: XRAY), and Singularity Future Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGLY). Our investigations concern whether these companies have violated the federal securities laws and/or engaged in other unlawful business practices. Additional information about each case can be found at the link provided.

Medallion Financial Corp. (NASDAQ: MFIN)

On December 29, 2021, the SEC charged Medallion and its President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Murstein, with illegally engaging in two schemes in an effort to reverse the companys plummeting stock price. Specifically, the two had engaged in illegal touting by paying Ichabods Cranium and others to place positive stories about the company on various websites, including Huffington Post, Seeking Alpha, and TheStreet.com.

On this news, Medallions stock fell up to 27% during intraday trading on December 29, 2021, thereby injuring investors.

For more information on the Medallion investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/MFIN

RBB Bancorp (NASDAQ: RBB)

On February 18, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced the abrupt departure of Tammy Song, the EVP and Chief Lending Officer of RBB Bancorps wholly owned subsidiary Royal Business Bank.

Four days later, on February 22, 2022, RBB Bancorp announced its President and CEO (Alan Thian) would take a leave of absence, effective immediately, pending an internal investigation being conducted by a special committee of the Companys board of directors.

On this news, RBB Bancorps stock price declined by $2.69 per share, or approximately 10.45%, from $25.75 to $23.06 over two trading days.

For more information on the RBB Bancorp investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/RBB

Dentsply Sirona, Inc. (NASDAQ: XRAY)

On April 19, 2022, the Company issued a press release announcing the termination of Chief Executive Officer, Don Casey, effective immediately, and that Casey will also cease to serve as a member of the Companys Board.

Following this news, shares of Dentsply Sirona dropped sharply by $6.52 per share, over 13%, to close at $42.20 per share on April 19, 2022.

For more information on the Dentsply Sirona investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/XRAY

Singularity Future Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: SGLY)

On May 5, 2022, Hindenburg Research (Hindenburg) published a report entitled Singularity Future Technology: This Nasdaq-Listed Companys CEO Is a fugitive, on the Run for Allegedly Operating a Massive Ponzi Scheme. The Hindenburg report alleged, among other things, that singularitys CEO, Yang Jie, is a fugitive on the run from Chinese authorities for running an alleged $300 million Ponzi scheme that lured in over 20,000 victims and fled to the U.S. while at least 28 other individuals involved in the case were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 6 months to 15 years. The Hindenburg report further alleged that Singularitys massive [cryptocurrency] mining rig deal appears to be a brazen undisclosed related party deal and that [w]e see little evidence that Singularitys proprietary crypto mining rigs ever existed in the first place. The photos and descriptions of Singularitys miners match precisely with another brand called KOI Miner.

On this news, Singularitys stock price fell $1.95 per share, or 28.89%, to close at $4.80 per share on May 5, 2022.

For more information on the Singularity Future investigation go to: https://bespc.com/cases/SGLY

About Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is a nationally recognized law firm with offices in New York, California, and South Carolina. The firm represents individual and institutional investors in commercial, securities, derivative, and other complex litigation in state and federal courts across the country. For more information about the firm, please visit http://www.bespc.com. Attorney advertising. Prior results do not guarantee similar outcomes.

Contact Information:

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C.Brandon Walker, Esq. Melissa Fortunato, Esq.(212) 355-4648investigations@bespc.comwww.bespc.com

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Bragar Eagel & Squire, PC Is Investigating Medallion, RBB, Dentsply Sirona, and Singularity Future and Encourages Investors to Contact the Firm -...

Today, Oak Ridge National Laboratorys Frontier supercomputer was crowned fastest on the planet in the semiannual Top500 list. Frontier more than doubled the speed of the last titleholder, Japans Fugaku supercomputer, and is the first to officially clock speeds over a quintillion calculations a seconda milestone computing has pursued for 14 years.

Thats a big number. So before we go on, its worth putting into more human terms.

Imagine giving all 7.9 billion people on the planet a pencil and a list of simple arithmetic or multiplication problems. Now, ask everyone to solve one problem per second for four and half years. By marshaling the math skills of the Earths population for a half-decade, youve now solved over a quintillion problems.

Frontier can do the same work in a second, and keep it up indefinitely. A thousand years worth of arithmetic by everyone on Earth would take Frontier just a little under four minutes.

This blistering performance kicks off a new era known as exascale computing.

The number of floating-point operations, or simple mathematical problems, a computer solves per second is denoted FLOP/s or colloquially flops. Progress is tracked in multiples of a thousand: A thousand flops equals a kiloflop, a million flops equals a megaflop, and so on.

The ASCI Red supercomputer was the first to record speeds of a trillion flops, or a teraflop, in 1997. (Notably, an Xbox Series X game console now packs 12 teraflops.) Roadrunner first broke the petaflop barrier, a quadrillion flops, in 2008. Since then, the fastest computers have been measured in petaflops. Frontier is the first to officially notch speeds over an exaflop1.102 exaflops, to be exactor 1,000 times faster than Roadrunner.

Its true todays supercomputers are far faster than older machines, but they still take up whole rooms, with rows of cabinets bristling with wires and chips. Frontier, in particular, is a liquid-cooled system by HPE Cray running 8.73 million AMD processing cores. In addition to being the fastest in the world, its also the second most efficientoutdone only by a test system made up of one of its cabinetswith a rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt.

Most supercomputers are funded, built, and operated by government agencies. Theyre used by scientists to model physical systems, like the climate or structure of the universe, but also by the military for nuclear weapons research.

Supercomputers are now tailor-made to run the latest algorithms in artificial intelligence too. Indeed, a few years ago, Top500 added a new lower precision benchmark to measure supercomputing speed on AI applications. By that mark, Fugaku eclipsed an exaflop way back in 2020. The Fugaku system set the most recent record for machine learning at 2 exaflops. Frontier smashed that record with AI speeds of 6.86 exaflops.

As very large machine learning algorithms have emerged in recent years, private companies have begun to build their own machines alongside governments. Microsoft and OpenAI made headlines in 2020 with a machine they claimed was fifth fastest in the world. In January, Meta said its upcoming RSC supercomputer would be fastest at AI in the world at 5 exaflops. (It appears theyll now need a few more chips to match Frontier.)

Frontier and other private supercomputers will allow machine learning algorithms to further push the limits. Todays most advanced algorithms boast hundreds of billions of parametersor internal connectionsbut upcoming algorithms will likely grow into the trillions.

So, exascale supercomputers will allow researchers to advance technology and do new cutting-edge science that was once impractical on slower machines.

When exactly supercomputing first broke the exaflop barrier partly depends on how you define it and whats been measured.

Folding@Home, which is a distributed system made up of a motley crew of volunteer laptops, broke an exaflop at the beginning of the pandemic. But according to Top500 cofounder Jack Dongarra, Folding@Home is a specialized system thats embarrassingly parallel and only works on problems with pieces that can be solved totally independently.

More relevantly, rumors were flying last year that China had as many as two exascale supercomputers operating in secret. Researchers published some details on the machines in papers late last year, but they have yet to be officially benchmarked by Top500. In an IEEE Spectrum interview last December, Dongarra speculated that if exascale machines exist in China, the government may be trying not to shine a spotlight on them to avoid stirring up geopolitical tensions that could drive the US to restrict key technology exports.

So, its possible China beat the US to the exascale punch, but going by the Top500, a benchmark the supercomputing fields used to determine top dog since the early 1990s, Frontier still gets the official nod.

It took about 12 years to go from terascale to petascale and another 14 to reach exascale. The next big leap forward may well take as long or longer. The computing industry continues to make steady progress on chips, but the pace has slowed and each step has become more costly. Moores Law isnt dead, but its not as steady as it used to be.

For supercomputers, the challenge goes beyond raw computing power. It might seem that you should be able to scale any system to hit whatever benchmark you like: Just make it bigger. But scale requires efficiency too, or energy requirements spiral out of control. Its also harder to write software to solve problems in parallel across ever-bigger systems.

The next 1,000-fold leap, known as zettascale, will require innovations in chips, the systems connecting them into supercomputers, and the software running on them. A team of Chinese researchers predicted wed hit zettascale computing in 2035. But of course, no one really knows for sure. Exascale, predicted to arrive by 2018 or 2020, made the scene a few years behind schedule.

Whats more certain is the hunger for greater computing power isnt likely to dwindle. Consumer applications, like self-driving cars and mixed reality, and research applications, like modeling and artificial intelligence, will require faster, more efficient computers. If necessity is the mother of invention, you can expect ever-faster computers for a while yet.

Image Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

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Wickedly Fast Frontier Supercomputer Officially Ushers in the Next Era of Computing - Singularity Hub

Memories are like scenes in a movie, and the brain is an excellent video editor.

Take a normal day as an example. A morning routineshower, coffee, checking emailsis seamlessly cut into one continuous scene. Other goings-on throughout the day become separate cuts, so when recalling one memorya fabulous bagel sandwich deli, for examplethe memory pops into the mind on its own. Yet ultimately we still retain a continuous narrative of our lives that shapes who we are, without memories blending into each other in an incomprehensible plot.

How does the brain do that?

A new study in Nature points to a surprising cluea protein called CCR5. The name may sound familiar. Its well known as an entryway for HIV infection. Its also the gene that skyrocketed to fame in 2018, when a rogue scientist used CRISPR-Cas9 to engineer the worlds first gene-edited babies, triggering a global backlash and landing him in prison.

Part of the worry for the babies is that CCR5 is a multitasker. In the brain, for example, it dwells in cells at high levels in the hippocampus, a region critical for memory. CCR5 has previously been linked to memory functions, prompting questions on how the edits could alter the babies cognition down the line.

The new study offers additional clues. In mice, CCR5 acts as the scissor tool in video editing. As the brain continuously processes new experiences into memories, high levels of CCR5 essentially snip the timeline into distinct episodes. While normally helpful, CCR5 levels rise during aging and often become overzealous. The result is memory lossa mind that struggles to link memories into comprehensive events.

Our memories are a huge part of who we are, said study lead author Dr. Alcino Silva at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The ability to link related experiences teaches us how to stay safe and operate successfully in the world.

The good news? Using an FDA-approved drug for HIV treatment, the team restored an aging minds ability to link memories in mice, a result that could have substantial clinical implications, the team said.

Memories may seem like amorphous wisps inside a mind, but they have strong neurobiological underpinnings.

When we encounter new experiences, a select group of neurons inside a part of the hippocampus encodes these data. How these neurons are selected is still relatively mysterious, but scientists have engineered ways to prime certain neurons to participate in the memory so that theyre more active and likely to participate.

Once a memory is stored, this network of neurons is called an engram. The process is very loosely similar to a computer allocating memory storage to save a new document. Activating any component of the engram triggers the whole network to activate, which retrieves the memory.

This process relies on a dance of a myriad of proteins. Neurons are like hotels with multiple protein locksreceptorsand keys, called ligands. The locks are generally dotted on the surface of the cell. Each requires the right key to unlock it. Unlocking triggers a cascade of molecule signaling inside cells, which eventually changes how a neuron behaves; it might get more excitable, or more inhibited and less inclined to network with others. Less networking means less memory encoding, and potentially less memory linking.

How does the brain know that two events are occurring closely in time? Addressing this question requires an understanding of how time is encoded in memorya major unknown in memory research, said Andrea Teceros and Dr. Priya Rajasethupathy at the Rockefeller University, who were not involved in the study.

In the new study, the team honed in on CCR5 as a key protein to delink a memory stream. Although mostly known as part of the immune system, CCR5 is a receptor highly expressed in the hippocampus, and previous studies suggested a potential role in memory.

The team began with a popular setup for memory tests for mice. They first placed the mice into one cage to explore, and five hours later, placed them into a different cage with wildly different decorations. Here the mice received a quick and mild electrical zap, enough to startle them and make them freeze in fear. This encoded two different memories. Two days later, when placed back into the first benign cage, the mice also frozeshowing that theyve linked the first cage and the second, where they actually received the shock, into one memory.

The time gap was key. When the team extended the five-hour gap between the two cages to 24 hours, the mice could no longer link the memories.

The switch turned out to be CCR5. The protein levels briefly shot up 12 hours after the initial encoding, and tanked soon aftera trajectory that parallels the time course for memory linking. Genetically deleting or inhibiting CCR5 prolonged the memory linking window so that the mice could still hook up memories of the two cages up to seven days apart. In contrast, increasing CCR5 further dampened the mices ability to link those memories.

Digging deeper, CCR5 seems to directly tinker with neural activity in the hippocampusthe memory ledgerto dampen its activity. Two memories close in time often share overlapping engrams. Here, mice without CCR5 had greater overlaps between memories of the two cages and higher memory linking compared to normal counterparts.

Like most immune molecules, CCR5 levels rise with age, suggesting they may increasingly hack apart memories. This led the team to wonder: can we inhibit the protein to boost memory function with age?

They tested the theory in middle-aged mice with an FDA-approved drug for HIV, maraviroc, that inhibits the proteins functions. A single infusion directly into the memory center hippocampus improved the aging animals ability to link memories, spread five hours apart, in a subsequent test. Similarly, middle-aged mice genetically lacking CCR5 also linked up memories better than their normal peers.

When we gave maraviroc to older mice, the drug duplicated the effect of genetically deleting CCR5 from their DNAthe older animals were able to link memories again, said Silva.

To Terceros and Rajasthupathy, the results could help with memory loss. Because memory deficits in aging and in Alzheimers disease might be dominated by deficits in retrieval (and thus memory linking) rather than memory storage, which involves separate brain circuits, these results could have clinical implications.

The study is one of the first to interrogate the brains clock for memory linking and segregation. It opens up a world of new questions. How does memory linking affect learning? Can it help time-stamp memories during storage in the mind? As an immune molecule, how does CCR5 further influence memory and other cognitive functions? And what, if anything, happens when human embryos are shoddily deprived of the molecule, as in the case of the CRISPR babies?

For now, the team is mostly eyeing CCR5s therapeutic potential. Our next step will be to organize a clinical trial to test maravirocs influence on early memory loss with the goal of early intervention, said Silva. Once we fully understand how memory declines, well possess the potential to slow down the process.

Image Credit: geralt / 24463 images

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A Critical Immune Protein Helps the Brain Link Memories, and Could Combat Aging - Singularity Hub

Humans are unrivaled in the area of cognition. After all, no other species has sent probes to other planets, produced lifesaving vaccines, or created poetry. How information is processed in the human brain to make this possible is a question that has drawn endless fascination, yet no definitive answers.

Our understanding of brain function has changed over the years. But current theoretical models describe the brain as a distributed information-processing system. This means it has distinct components that are tightly networked through the brains wiring. To interact with each other, regions exchange information though a system of input and output signals.

However, this is only a small part of a more complex picture. In a study published last week in Nature Neuroscience, using evidence from different species and multiple neuroscientific disciplines, we show that there isnt just one type of information processing in the brain. How information is processed also differs between humans and other primates, which may explain why our species cognitive abilities are so superior.

We borrowed concepts from whats known as the mathematical framework of information theorythe study of measuring, storing, and communicating digital information which is crucial to technology such as the internet and artificial intelligenceto track how the brain processes information. We found that different brain regions in fact use different strategies to interact with each other.

Some brain regions exchange information with others in a very stereotypical way, using input and output. This ensures that signals get across in a reproducible and dependable manner. This is the case for areas that are specialized for sensory and motor functions (such as processing sound, visual, and movement information).

Take the eyes, for example, which send signals to the back of the brain for processing. The majority of information that is sent is duplicate, being provided by each eye. Half of this information, in other words, is not needed. So we call this type of input-output information processing redundant.

But the redundancy provides robustness and reliability; it is what enables us to still see with only one eye. This capability is essential for survival. In fact, it is so crucial that the connections between these brain regions are anatomically hard-wired in the brain, a bit like a telephone landline.

However, not all information provided by the eyes is redundant. Combining information from both eyes ultimately enables the brain to process depth and distance between objects. This is the basis for many kinds of 3D glasses at the cinema.

This is an example of a fundamentally different way of processing information, in a way that is greater than the sum of its parts. We call this type of information processingwhen complex signals from across different brain networks are integratedsynergistic.

Synergistic processing is most prevalent in brain regions that support a wide range of more complex cognitive functions, such as attention, learning, working memory, and social and numerical cognition. It is not hardwired in the sense that it can change in response to our experiences, connecting different networks in different ways. This facilitates the combination of information.

Such areas where lots of synergy takes placemostly in the the front and middle of the cortex (the brains outer layer)integrate different sources of information from the entire brain. They are therefore more widely and efficiently connected with the rest of the brain than the regions which deal with primary sensory and movement-related information.

High-synergy areas that support integration of information also typically have lots of synapses, the microscopic connections that enable nerve cells to communicate.

We wanted to know whether this ability to accumulate and build information through complex networks across the brain is different between humans and other primates, which are close relatives of ours in evolutionary terms.

To find out, we looked at brain imaging data and genetic analyses of different species. We found that synergistic interactions account for a higher proportion of total information flow in the human brain than in the brains of macaque monkeys. In contrast, the brains of both species are equal in terms of how much they rely on redundant information.

However, we also looked specifically at the prefrontal cortex, an area in the front of the brain that supports more advanced cognitive functioning. In macaques, redundant information processing is more prevalent in this region, whereas in humans it is a synergy-heavy area.

The prefrontal cortex has also undergone significant expansion with evolution. When we examined data from chimpanzee brains, we found that the more a region of the human brain had expanded during evolution in size relative to its counterpart in the chimp, the more this region relied on synergy.

We also looked at genetic analyses from human donors. This showed that brain regions associated with processing synergistic information are more likely to express genes that are uniquely human and related to brain development and function, such as intelligence.

This led us to the conclusion that additional human brain tissue, acquired as a result of evolution, may be primarily dedicated to synergy. In turn, it is tempting to speculate that the advantages of greater synergy may, in part, explain our species additional cognitive capabilities. Synergy may add an important piece to the puzzle of human brain evolution, which was previously missing.

Ultimately, our work reveals how the human brain navigates the trade-off between reliability and integration of information; we need both. Importantly, the framework we developed holds the promise of critical new insights into a wide array of neuroscientific questions, from those about general cognition to disorders.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Gerrit Bril from Pixabay

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What Is It About the Human Brain That Makes Us Smarter Than Other Animals? New Research - Singularity Hub

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SentinelOne (NYSE: S), an autonomous cybersecurity platform company, today announced SentinelOne XDR Response for Okta, enabling security teams to quickly respond to credential compromise and identity-based attacks. The integration of SentinelOnes XDR platform with Oktas identity management capabilities offers a powerful new solution to accelerate response and minimize enterprise risk.

Attackers exploit endpoint and identity security and access gaps. SentinelOne and Okta are leaders in securing both of these enterprise domains, said Stephen Lee, VP Technical Strategy & Partnerships, Okta. Incorporating SentinelOne Singularity XDR into the Okta identity platform improves the contextual awareness of our solution, ensuring that every identity is verified and malicious actors cannot advance laterally in pursuit of high-value targets. With SentinelOne across enterprise attack surfaces and Okta enforcing identity policies, organizations enjoy the best of both worlds in a single solution.

According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, 82% of breaches involved the human element including the use of stolen credentials. While there are existing solutions that secure various pieces of the enterprise they are often siloed, causing gaps in visibility and making it difficult to achieve a holistic understanding of an organizations security posture.

Groupon is on a constant journey of modernization, adopting new and cutting-edge cloud technologies like SentinelOne Singularity XDR and Okta to best protect our employees and customers, said Ryan Ogden, Director of Information Security, Groupon. Consolidating context from various tools and automating response force multiplies our team to address the growing scale and speed of threats.

SentinelOnes StorylineTM observes all concurrent processes across OSs and cloud workloads, providing rich context for any potential endpoint security incident. When a threat is detected, Singularity XDR informs Okta of the last logged-in user for that endpoint and Okta provides identity context from Okta data. By combining XDR and identity context, the joint solution helps security analysts quickly determine who is doing what on which device, significantly reducing the risk of endpoint or identity-based attacks.

SentinelOne XDR Response for Okta provides a fully automated remediation process, alleviating the burden on the SOC team and allowing analysts to focus on higher-value tasks. Other key use cases include:

Compromising identities and moving laterally to exploit an organizations crown jewels is the blueprint of modern attacks, said Yonni Shelmerdine, Vice President of Product Management, SentinelOne. Organizations need robust endpoint protection and visibility into user sessions to respond effectively to malicious activity. With SentinelOne and Okta, enterprises gain enterprise-grade context for effective security operations.

For more information on the SentinelOne and Okta integration, visit https://s1.ai/okta-sb

About SentinelOne

SentinelOnes cybersecurity solution encompasses AI-powered prevention, detection, response and hunting across endpoints, containers, cloud workloads, and IoT devices in a single autonomous XDR platform.

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SentinelOne and Okta Integration Accelerates Incident Response with XDR and Identity Security - Business Wire

Stephen Hawking, Credit: Ida Lee

"Shortly after my 21st birthday, I went into hospital for tests. They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio-opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays as they tilted the bed. I was diagnosed as having ALS...or motor neuron disease, as it is also known. The doctors could offer no cure and gave me two and a half years to live". (Stephen Hawking. "A Brief History of Time" 1991 film, https://youtu.be/EyHl4l7oRds?t=118).

The previous words from English cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1942 - 2018) don't come close to a complete description of his struggle to be trapped in his own body as his condition gradually paralyzed him and was only able to communicate with movements of his cheeks and the help of a computer to create sentences (https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/stephen-hawking5.htm#:~:text=How%20did%20Stephen%20Hawking%20talk,on%20running%20lists%20of%20words.).

Thankfully, his mind wasn't affected and he was free to ponder about the cosmos.

Hawking had the choice between two major fields of study, particle physics and cosmology. Hawking chose cosmology ("A Brief History of Time" 1991 film). The way he saw it in those days, particle physics was mostly a field to categorize subatomic particles into different families as zoology or botany would do with organisms. Still, cosmology rested on more solid theoretical ground, such as Albert Einstein's general relativity and the theory of Black Holes (collapsed large stars) developed by the father of the atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer. Hawking's "research on general relativity had concentrated mainly on the question of whether or not there had been a big bang singularity" (A Brief History Of Time, chapter 7. Stephen Hawking. Bantam Books. 1996).

In other words, did the universe have a beginning from a single point?

A singularity is defined as a point where the laws of physics break down and space-time loses its meaning due to infinite gravity. Not even light can escape this point of incredible force and infinite density. One type of singularity may be interpreted as a Black Hole (a collapsed large star), as theorized by the British mathematician and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose (born in 1931) and another interpretation of a singularity may be applied to the universe itself, "at the time of the Big Bang (i.e. the initial state of the Universe)" as theorized by Stephen Hawking (What Is A Singularity?. From Universe Today.). Their understanding of singularities was "merged together to be known as the PenroseHawking Singularity Theorems". So both inside a black hole and also at the beginning of the universe, there is a point where infinity rules.

A Black Hole drawing, Credit: Ida Lee

According to Hawking's theorem, there was a beginning in time in an extremely small point-like region of space. The universe began as a singularity. This is the major theme of the 2004 biopic "Hawking", starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The film presents the proof that the Big Bang is the origin of the universe as opposed to cosmologist Fred Hoyle's proposal of an eternal universe with no beginning and no end. It was Fred Hoyle who coined the term "Big Bang" to let others know the absurdity that the universe began at an extremely hot and dense point (Sir Fred Hoyle; Coined 'Big Bang'. Los Angeles Times. latimes.com) and it was Stephen Hawking who established "the existence of cosmological singularities such as the big bang" (Singularity Theorems, https://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/dij/GR-Explorer/singularities/singtheorems.htm).

In 1983, Professor Hawking revised his theory about the universe in collaboration with physicist James Hartle (born in 1939) (James Hartle. In Wikipedia). In this newer version of the universe, there is no boundary, that is, the universe had no point in time that we can describe as an absolute beginning. As an analogy, using the Earth's surface, when you reach the South Pole, "there is nothing south of the South Pole". The South pole is just an ordinary point on the surface of the Earth; it has no privileged position. In the same way, if you go back in time to the moment of the Big Bang, this point isn't special either, it is just an ordinary point of pure space, and time "doesn't exist". Again, "once you trace back the universe to its beginning, the concept of time (as we define it, at least) becomes obsolete" (How Stephen Hawking Worked. HowStuffWorks. By Marianne Spoon. https://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/famous-scientists/physicists/stephen-hawking3.htm).

Professor Hawking combined two fields of physics to be able to understand this timeless state of the universe in its primeval stage; he combined quantum physics and Einstein's general relativity to understand better the Big Bang (Ashutosh Jogalekar. Oppenheimers folly: On black holes, fundamental laws and pure and applied science. In Scientific American. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/). The universe was so small that time separated from space (no space-time continuum), there was no temporal beginning (no boundary), and it was a quantum point of pure concentrated space.

Hawking, as well as Einstein before him, wondered if God had a choice when he created the universe. It seems that God didn't have a choice because "if the no-boundary proposal is correct, (God) had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions" because the universe's beginning is meaningless. He would only be able to choose the laws of the universe in its later evolution (A Brief History Of Time. Stephen Hawking).

However, this universe without a beginning doesn't mean that the universe has existed forever. In simple words, it means that there was no time before the Big Bang. The universe and time itself were created around 14 billion years ago.

"There are innumerable universes besides this one, and although they are unlimitedly large, they move about like atoms in You..." (From the Bhagavata Purana)

In the Hertog-Hawking proposal ("Stephen Hawking's last paper" in collaboration with the Belgian cosmologist Thomas Hertog), they theorize that the multiverse has fewer universes than the traditional conception of a multiverse. Hawking predicts that our universe is finite and a "dead end" when it comes to reproducing other universes, just as other universes may have also stopped inflating, thus reducing the infinite number of universes. Not all universes reproduce, otherwise their theory "can't be properly tested" in an infinite multiverse.

Also, the Hertog-Hawking's multiverse can be "observationally testable" if we consider gravitational waves produced by the interaction of our universe with other universes of the multiverse during inflation right after the big bang. Hopefully, these waves might be detected in the future with space observatories keeping in mind that astronomy has been enhanced with the solid confirmation of gravitational waves in 2015 (From Ku Leuven News, https://nieuws.kuleuven.be/en/content/2018/new-cosmological-theory).

Thomas Hertog explains that if we go back in time, "we arrive at the threshold of eternal inflation where our notion of time ceases to have any meaning" and "Einstein's theory breaks down...". As a consequence, instead of using General Relativity to explain the early universe, Hawking and Hertog use string theory to describe our universe as a hologram where the dimension of time is projected out of eternal inflation. In other words, time emerged from "a timeless state on a spatial surface at the beginning of the Universe" (Stephen Hawking's Final Theory About Our Universe Has Just Been Published, And It Will Melt Your Brain by Michelle Starr, https://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-s-last-physics-paper-theory-on-eternal-inflation-multiverses).

Our universe that evolves in time has a boundary after all: Eternity. There is no beginning because our beginning is insignificant if we consider that we are part of a larger multiverse.

As American cosmologist Alan Guth puts it: "In the picture of eternal inflation...our Big Bang was actually just one event in a larger picture, it was not really the beginning of anything in the absolute sense".

On the left, the universe began in a singularity. On the right, the universe didn't have an absolute beginning.Credit: Ida Lee

Do you prefer the singularity-universe which had a beginning in time in an infinite point of density?

Or the no-boundary universe which had no beginning because time didn't exist before the Big Bang?

How about the multiverse where eternity is our universe's boundary, Einstein's relativity theory breaks down and our notion of time is a hologram?

Which of the three do you prefer?

Roger Penrose was awarded half of the 2020 Nobel prize in Physics (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2020/summary/). The other half wasn't awarded to Hawking. He had passed away in 2018 and the theme of the prize was Black Holes, not Universes.

Hawking also worked on the Black Hole theory, but the Nobel prize isn't awarded posthumously. However, Hawking won many other prestigious awards recognizing his work in cosmology.

"It was wonderful to float weightless free of my wheelchair" (Stephen Hawking, from StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking describing his experience on a zero-gravity flight in 2007, https://youtu.be/TwaIQy0VQso?t=767)

How many more universes would Hawking have created if he had lived longer? I wonder, what is the correct connection between quantum theory and relativity? I wonder how a universe evolves in a timeless state? I wonder if an empty universe has no conscious observers then how...? I wonder if the fate of our universe will be a Big Crunch or a Big Rip or... I wonder if my mind may also float free. I wonder...

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The Many Universes of Stephen Hawking | Paul - NewsBreak Original

In a new blog post, CCP Games detailed the foundation it's building for its sci-fi MMO, EVE Online. The team started to lay out that vision for the free-to-play MMO at EVE Fanfest in May, and is continuing with its tests coming to its Singularity test server.

The updates coming toEVE Online's Singularity server are meant to help build what CCP calls a "sensory experience." Updates to visuals and the audio of New Eden are coming, with higher fidelity than ever seen inEVE Online, all with "minimal impact on client performance."

Additionally, the team is gearing up to test one of the pillars of this new foundation: DirectX 12.

"Furthermore, in preparation for enabling DirectX12 we are planning mass test next week. DirectX 12 is key to modernizing EVE and laying the foundations for the third decade and is a crucial part of the narrative journey that lies ahead in New Eden."

Arguably one of the biggest changes coming visually to Sisi is the Career Agents window. Currently, it's rather drab, with a block of text, a static image of who you are talking to, and not much else. Now, the new layout shows a full model of the agent rendered in EVE's engine, as well as a more clearly laid out conversation table, showing the mission, rewards, and more. It brings more life to the presentation for sure, and hopefully, it's just the start of this new trend of ensuring the characters players interact with feel like more than just static pictures, but living characters within New Eden as well.

You can check out the full news post on theEVE Online website. Recently, we had the chance to talk to CCP's CEO Hilmar Petursson as well as creative director Bergur Finnbogason about EVE Forever, and laying the groundwork for the third decade.

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EVE Online Is Updating The Look Of Career Agents, Testing DX12 And More - MMORPG.com

Just under a year ago, one of the biggest production facilities for cultured meat opened in Israel. Future Meat Technologies Rehovot plant produces 500 kilograms of lab-grown meat per day (thats equivalent to about 5,000 burger patties). Last week, plans for an even bigger facility were revealed, this one in the US. Its specific location has yet to be finalized, but the project will bring cultured meat production to an unprecedented scale.

The bioreactors planned for the US facility will be over 40 feet tall and will hold 250,000 liters (thats 66,043 gallons) of meat. This is a massive scale-up from existing technology; the same manufacturer thats making the US equipment, ABEC, is also making a 6,000-liter bioreactor for a facility in Singapore, and when it goes online in 2023 it will be the biggest of its kind installed to date. Multiplying that by more than a factor of 40, thenand making sure the quality of the final product is still the samewill be no small feat.

The company behind the project is California-based Good Meat. Though the company has been selling its lab-grown chicken in Singapore since 2020, its still awaiting FDA approval to sell its products in the US. Thats not stopping it from going ahead with the ambitious plans for the new facility, though.

The bioreactors will be far and away the largest, not only in the cultivated meat industry, but in the biopharma industry too, said Josh Tetrick, CEO of Good Meats parent company, Eat Just. So the design and engineering challenges are significant, the capital investments are significant, and the potential to take another step toward shifting society away from slaughtered meat is significant.

Cultured meatnot to be confused with plant-based meatis grown from animal cells and is biologically the same as meat that comes from an animal. The process starts with harvesting muscle cells from an animal, then feeding those cells a mixture of nutrients and naturally-occurring growth factors (or, as Good Meats process specifies, amino acids, fats, and vitamins) so that they multiply, differentiate, then grow to form muscle tissuein much the same way muscle grows inside animals bodies.

According to Good Meats website, they use cells from only the best chickens and cows (what makes them the best isnt spelled out), and carefully choose cells most likely to produce flavorful, sustainable meat. Besides being used as starters to grow edible meat in bioreactors, the cells are also immortalized, growing and dividing over and over; cells from one chicken could end up producing thousands of breasts.

Cultivated meat matters because it will enable us to eat meat without all the harm, without bulldozing forests, without the need to slaughter an animal, without the need to use antibiotics, without accelerating zoonotic diseases, Tetrick said.

Meat can be harvested (their word, not mine) just four to six weeks after initiating the growth processbut its not a matter of plucking a ready-to-package breast from a vat and shipping it off to the grocery store. Besides going through safety and regulatory reviews, the harvested cells need to be turned into something resembling traditional meat. Good Meat says it uses 3D printing, extrusion cooking, and molding to refine the shape and texture of the product.

This all starts to sound a little Franken-meaty, but the company emphasizes that its products have nutritional profiles identical to those of conventionally-raised meat. A few of the final formats the meat comes in include chicken nugget bites, sausages, shredded chicken, and chicken breasts.

Its going to take a long time for factory farming to stop being a thing, but as cultured meat continues to become more scalable, that day could be on the horizon. Tetrick thinks itll happen within his generations lifetime. I think our grandchildren are going to ask us about why we ate meat from slaughtered animals back in 2022, he said.

Good Meat is expected to finalize the location of its US plant before summers end, and theyre aiming for domestic production to start by late 2024.

Image Credit: Good Meat

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The World's Biggest Cultured Meat Factory Will Soon Be Built in the US - Singularity Hub

The stock market has been suffering violent price swings amid the Federal Reserves tightening monetary policy, supply chain disruption, high oil prices, and concerns over the possibility of an economic slowdown. However, according to the Commerce Department, the consumer price index (CPI) rose 4.9% in April from a year ago, signaling that price pressures could be easing slightly.

Also, quality retail earnings dominated investor sentiment and stocks posted substantial gains last week, ending seven-week losing streaks for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite and an eight-week slide for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. While explaining the veteran chartist Larry Williams analysis, Jim Carmer said, Larry Williams perfectly called the bottom the week before last. Now his analysis suggests we have got a lot more room to run.

Against this backdrop, we think it could be wise to add the stocks of quality mid-cap companies SentinelOne, Inc. (S), MongoDB, Inc. (MDB), Cloudflare, Inc. (NET), and RingCentral, Inc. (RNG) to ones watch list because Wall Street analysts expect these stocks to soar by more than 70% in price in the near term.

SentinelOne, Inc. (S)

Mountain View, Calif.-based cybersecurity provider S Singularity Platform delivers artificial intelligence (AI)-powered autonomous threat prevention, detection, and response capabilities across an organizations endpoints and cloud workloads, enabling seamless and automatic protection against a spectrum of cyber threats. The company has a market capitalization of $6.63 billion.

On May 4, 2022, S announced that it had acquired Attivo Networks. With the acquisition, the company intends to extend Singularity XDRs capabilities to identity-based threats across endpoint, cloud workloads, IoT devices, mobile, and data wherever it resides, setting the standard for XDR and accelerating enterprise zero trust adoption.

S net revenue increased 295% year-over-year to $65.60 million for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Jan. 31, 2022. The companys annualized recurring revenue grew 123% year-over-year to $292.39 million. Also, its total assets came in at $2.04 billion, up 292.3% year-over-year.

For its fiscal quarter ending July 31, 2022, analysts expect S EPS and revenue to increase 44.7% and 85.5%, respectively, year-over-year. Wall Street analysts expect the stock to hit $43.87 in the near term, which indicates a potential upside of 84.4%.

Click here to checkout our Cybersecurity Industry Report for 2022

MongoDB, Inc. (MDB)

New York City-based MDB provides a general-purpose database platform worldwide and has a market capitalization of $16.14 billion. The company offers MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, a commercial database server for enterprise customers to run in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. Its offerings also include MongoDB Atlas, a hosted multi-cloud database-as-a-service solution.

On April 12, 2022, MDB announced the launch of a pay-as-you-go MongoDB Atlas offering, which can be launched directly from the Google Console. The offering provides developers with a simplified subscription experience and enterprises more choice in procuring MongoDB on Google Cloud, thereby increasing the demand for its solution.

MDBs net revenue increased 56% year-over-year to $266.50 million for its fiscal fourth quarter, ended Jan. 31, 2022. The companys non-GAAP gross profit grew 59.5% year-over-year to $196.61 million. Also, its total assets came in at $2.45 billion, up 74% year-over-year. Its revenue and total assets have increased at CAGRs of 48.5% and 49.5%, respectively, over the past three years.

MDBs EPS is expected to be $0.15 in its fiscal 2024, representing a 140.5% year-over-year increase. In addition, it surpassed the consensus EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. Also, the companys revenue is expected to increase 35.1% year-over-year to $1.18 billion in its fiscal 2023. Wall Street analysts expect the stock to hit $415 in the near term, which indicates a potential upside of 75%.

Cloudflare, Inc. (NET)

NET operates a cloud platform that delivers a range of network services to businesses worldwide. The San Francisco company provides an integrated cloud-based security solution to secure a range of media combinations. It has a market capitalization of $18.27 billion.

On Feb. 11, 2022, NET announced that it had acquired Vectrix, which provides businesses with one-click visibility and control across their SaaS applications. The acquisition adds modern cloud access security broker functionality to the companys industry-leading Zero Trust platform, which could further increase its demand.

NETs revenue increased 54% year-over-year to $212.20 million for its fiscal first quarter, ended March 31, 2022. The companys non-GAAP net income came in at $3.50 million, compared to a $9.30 million loss in the year-ago period. Its non-GAAP EPS came in at $0.01 compared to a $0.03 loss in the prior-year quarter. Its revenue and total assets have increased at CAGRs of 50.9% and 99.7%, respectively, over the past three years.

Analysts expect NETs EPS to increase 200% year-over-year to $0.09 in fiscal 2023. Its revenue is expected to grow 46% year-over-year to $958.40 million in fiscal 2022. Wall Street analysts expect the stock to hit $101.64 in the near term, which indicates a potential upside of 81.5%.

Click here to check out our Cloud Computing Industry Report for 2022

RingCentral, Inc. (RNG)

With a market capitalization of $5.99 billion, San Mateo, Calif.-based RNG provides software-as-a-service solutions that enable businesses to communicate, collaborate, and connect in North America. The company offers business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its Message Video Phone platform. It has strategic partnerships with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and Vodafone Business.

On May 9, 2022, Vlad Shmunis, RNGs founder, chairman, and CEO said, With our industry leadership position, unique partner ecosystem, and most importantly, our great people, I am very optimistic about the future for RingCentral.

RNGs net revenue increased 295% year-over-year to $468 million for its fiscal first quarter ended March 31, 2022. The companys non-GAAP operating income grew 48.5% year-over-year to $49 million. Also, its EPS came in at $0.39, up 44.4% year-over-year. And its revenue and total assets have increased at CAGRs of 33.1% and 38.5%, respectively, over the past three years.

For its fiscal 2022, analysts expect RNGs EPS and revenue to increase 38.1% and 25.9%, respectively, year-over-year to $1.85 and $2.01 billion, respectively. In addition, it surpassed the Street EPS estimates in each of the trailing four quarters. Wall Street analysts expect the stock to hit $118.26 in the near term, which indicates a potential upside of 87.3%.

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S shares were trading at $23.90 per share on Wednesday afternoon, up $0.11 (+0.46%). Year-to-date, S has declined -52.66%, versus a -13.89% rise in the benchmark S&P 500 index during the same period.

Nimesh Jaiswal's fervent interest in analyzing and interpreting financial data led him to a career as a financial analyst and journalist. The importance of financial statements in driving a stocks price is the key approach that he follows while advising investors in his articles. More...

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S: 4 Mid-Cap Growth Stocks That Will Rally More Than 70%, According to Wall Street - StockNews.com