All posts tagged: cycles

What my chickens and seeds taught me about God’s cycles of creation

What my chickens and seeds taught me about God’s cycles of creation

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Is anyone else tired of being told to use less, waste less and shrink your footprint in a society that seems increasingly built to create more trash? Christians have been taught to think of creation care primarily in terms of reduction, especially reducing our waste. I get why. We look around and see garbage everywhere. But what if creation care looks more like bending our lives back into patterns that mirror and support the cycles of creation as God designed them? My wife and I have three daughters, and we used to dump all our uneaten food into the trash. It felt wrong, but we made a simple shift that changed everything. Our leftover food now goes to our chickens. They will eat it, lay eggs for us and feed the compost pile. The compost pile helps produce vegetables in our garden, which will, in turn, produce more meals and more leftovers so the cycle continues. Now, nobody has to finish what’s on their plate. When you’re full, you’re full. This system we …

What my chickens and seeds taught me about God’s cycles of creation

What my chickens and seeds taught me about God’s cycles of creation

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Is anyone else tired of being told to use less, waste less and shrink your footprint in a society that seems increasingly built to create more trash? Christians have been taught to think of creation care primarily in terms of reduction, especially reducing our waste. I get why. We look around and see garbage everywhere. But what if creation care looks more like bending our lives back into patterns that mirror and support the cycles of creation as God designed them? My wife and I have three daughters, and we used to dump all our uneaten food into the trash. It felt wrong, but we made a simple shift that changed everything. Our leftover food now goes to our chickens. They will eat it, lay eggs for us and feed the compost pile. The compost pile helps produce vegetables in our garden, which will, in turn, produce more meals and more leftovers so the cycle continues. Now, nobody has to finish what’s on their plate. When you’re full, you’re full. This system we …

Rapidata emerges to shorten AI model development cycles from months to days with near real-time RLHF

Rapidata emerges to shorten AI model development cycles from months to days with near real-time RLHF

Published by skeptic

Despite growing chatter about a future when much human work is automated by AI, one of the ironies of this current tech boom is how stubbornly reliant on human beings it remains, specifically the process of training AI models using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). At its simplest, RLHF is a tutoring system: after an AI is trained on curated data, it still makes mistakes or sounds robotic. Human contractors are then hired en masse by AI labs to rate and rank a new model’s outputs while it trains, and the model learns from their ratings, adjusting its behavior to offer higher-rated outputs. This process is all the more important as AI expands to produce multimedia outputs like video, audio, and imagery which may have more nuanced and subjective measures of quality. Historically, this tutoring process has been a massive logistical headache and PR nightmare for AI companies, relying on fragmented networks of foreign contractors and static labeling pools in specific, low-income geographic hubs, cast by the media as low wage — even exploitative. …

Morning sunlight shifts sleep cycles earlier and boosts quality

Morning sunlight shifts sleep cycles earlier and boosts quality

Published by José Betancourt

Spending more time in the sun early in the morning may help people fall into healthier sleep patterns, according to a new study published in BMC Public Health. Researchers found that morning light exposure shifts sleep timing earlier and improves sleep quality. Scientists have long known that sunlight plays a crucial role in regulating the body’s internal clock, which helps determine when people feel alert and when they feel sleepy. This internal clock relies heavily on light signals from the environment, particularly natural daylight. In recent decades, however, many people have spent less time outdoors due to office work, screen use, and urban living. These trends intensified during pandemic lockdowns, when outdoor movement was limited for months at a time. Led by Luiz Antônio Alves de Menezes-Júnior from the Federal University of Ouro Preto in Brazil, the researchers behind the new study wanted to better understand whether the timing of sunlight exposure matters, not just the total amount of sunlight people receive. Previous research suggested morning light might be especially important, but few large population …

New solid-state battery design retains 75% capacity after 1,500 cycles

New solid-state battery design retains 75% capacity after 1,500 cycles

Published by Jenni Sidey

A battery that charges fast, holds more energy, and stays safer under stress has become a kind of modern promise. You hear it in electric car ads, in phone launches, and in grid storage plans. Yet the technology behind that promise keeps running into the same hard walls. A new advance from the Paul Scherrer Institute, known as PSI, suggests one of those walls may finally be cracking. Researchers at PSI report a production approach that tackles two stubborn problems in lithium metal all-solid-state batteries, a next-generation design that replaces flammable liquid electrolytes with a solid material. The team says the method helps stop lithium dendrites, which can trigger short circuits. It also steadies the fragile boundary where lithium metal touches the solid electrolyte. The idea sounds technical, but the goal is simple. You want a battery that keeps working after thousands of charge cycles. You also want it to survive fast charging without developing internal damage. The PSI team argues its strategy brings that goal closer. Schematic illustration of (a) the LPSCl pellets manufacturing …

DeepSeek’s conditional memory fixes silent LLM waste: GPU cycles lost to static lookups

DeepSeek’s conditional memory fixes silent LLM waste: GPU cycles lost to static lookups

Published by skeptic

When an enterprise LLM retrieves a product name, technical specification, or standard contract clause, it’s using expensive GPU computation designed for complex reasoning — just to access static information. This happens millions of times per day. Each lookup wastes cycles and inflates infrastructure costs.  DeepSeek’s newly released research on “conditional memory” addresses this architectural limitation directly. The work introduces Engram, a module that separates static pattern retrieval from dynamic reasoning. It delivers results that challenge assumptions about what memory is actually for in neural networks. The paper was co-authored by DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng. Through systematic experiments DeepSeek found the optimal balance between computation and memory with 75% of sparse model capacity allocated to dynamic reasoning and 25% to static lookups. This memory system improved reasoning more than knowledge retrieval. Complex reasoning benchmarks jumped from 70% to 74% accuracy, while knowledge-focused tests improved from 57% to 61%. These improvements came from tests including Big-Bench Hard, ARC-Challenge, and MMLU. The research arrives as enterprises face mounting pressure to deploy more capable AI systems while navigating GPU …