Tootfinder

Broadband and long-duration optical memory in Yb:YSO
T. Sanchez Mejia, L. Nicolas, A. Gelmini Rodriguez, M. Afzelius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13973 https…

Broadband and long-duration optical memory in Yb:YSO
Optical quantum memories are essential components for realizing the full potential of quantum networks. Among these, rare-earth-doped crystal memories stand out due to their large multimode storage capabilities. To maximize the multimode capacity in the time domain, it is key to simultaneously achieve large memory bandwidth and long optical storage time. Here, we demonstrate an atomic frequency comb optical memory in Yb:YSO, with a memory bandwidth of 250~MHz and a storage time of up to 125 $μ…

⏱️ Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-human-brain-visual-memories-precise.html

Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
Researchers at the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in understanding how the human brain forms, stores and recalls visual memories. A new study, published in Advanced Science, harnesses human patient brain recordings and a powerful machine learning model to shed new light on the brain's internal code that sorts memories of objects into categories—think of it as the brain's filing cabinet of imagery.

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Quantum Storage of Qubits in an Array of Independently Controllable Solid-State Quantum Memories
Markus Teller, Susana Plascencia, Samuele Grandi, Hugues de Riedmatten
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11910 …

Quantum Storage of Qubits in an Array of Independently Controllable Solid-State Quantum Memories
Random-access quantum memories may offer computational advantages for quantum computers and networks. In this paper, we advance arrays of solid-state quantum memories towards their usage as random-access quantum memory. We perform quantum storage of path and time-bin qubits implemented with weak coherent states at the single-photon level, in an array of ten temporally-multiplexed memory cells with controllable addressing. The qubits can be stored in arbitrary combinations of memory cells, from …

Reason to Rote: Rethinking Memorization in Reasoning
Yupei Du, Philipp Mondorf, Silvia Casola, Yuekun Yao, Robert Litschko, Barbara Plank
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04782

Reason to Rote: Rethinking Memorization in Reasoning
Large language models readily memorize arbitrary training instances, such as label noise, yet they perform strikingly well on reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate how language models memorize label noise, and why such memorization in many cases does not heavily affect generalizable reasoning capabilities. Using two controllable synthetic reasoning datasets with noisy labels, four-digit addition (FDA) and two-hop relational reasoning (THR), we discover a reliance of memorization on gene…

📉 Bitcoin's 'Mempool' Nearly Empty as Prices Trade Near Lifetime Highs
... although Bitcoin's price remains high, the evidence is the Bitcoin network is dying as transaction volume collapses and miners struggle
#bitcoin #crypto

BTC News: Bitcoin's 'Mempool' Nearly Empty as Prices Trade Near Lifetime Highs. What Next?
Almost all of Bitcoin's actual users have gone away, one observer said, warning of a major crisis.

Interpretable Robot Control via Structured Behavior Trees and Large Language Models
Ingrid Ma\'eva Chekam, Ines Pastor-Martinez, Ali Tourani, Jose Andres Millan-Romera, Laura Ribeiro, Pedro Miguel Bastos Soares, Holger Voos, Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09621

Interpretable Robot Control via Structured Behavior Trees and Large Language Models
As intelligent robots become more integrated into human environments, there is a growing need for intuitive and reliable Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interfaces that are adaptable and more natural to interact with. Traditional robot control methods often require users to adapt to interfaces or memorize predefined commands, limiting usability in dynamic, unstructured environments. This paper presents a novel framework that bridges natural language understanding and robotic execution by combinin…

The Local Structure Theorem for Graph Minors with Finite Index
Christophe Paul, Evangelos Protopapas, Dimitrios M. Thilikos, Sebastian Wiederrecht
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02769

The Local Structure Theorem for Graph Minors with Finite Index
The Local Structure Theorem (LST) for graph minors roughly states that every $H$-minor free graph $G$ that contains a sufficiently large wall $W$, there is a set of few vertices $A$ such that, upon removing $A$, the resulting graph $G':=G - A$ admits an "almost embedding" $δ$ into a surface $Σ$ in which $H$ does not embed. By almost embedding, we mean that there exists a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ whose vertex set is a subset of the vertex set of $G$ and an embedding of $\mathcal{H}$ in $Σ$ su…

Light Storage and Retrieval in an Atomic Tripod System
Shan Zhong, A. J. Sudler, D. Blume, Alberto M. Marino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10220 https://arxiv…

Light Storage and Retrieval in an Atomic Tripod System
Highly-efficient quantum memories are essential for advancing quantum information processing technologies, including scalable quantum computing and quantum networks. We experimentally demonstrate a light storage and retrieval protocol in a tripod system using an ensemble of laser-cooled $^{87}$Rb atoms. The tripod system, which consists of three ground states and an excited state, offers rich dynamics: its use to coherently store and retrieve a weak probe pulse in the $^{87}$Rb $F=1$ ground sta…

High-capacity associative memory in a quantum-optical spin glass
Brendan P. Marsh, David Atri Schuller, Yunpeng Ji, Henry S. Hunt, Surya Ganguli, Sarang Gopalakrishnan, Jonathan Keeling, Benjamin L. Lev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12202

High-capacity associative memory in a quantum-optical spin glass
The Hopfield model describes a neural network that stores memories using all-to-all-coupled spins. Memory patterns are recalled under equilibrium dynamics. Storing too many patterns breaks the associative recall process because frustration causes an exponential number of spurious patterns to arise as the network becomes a spin glass. Despite this, memory recall in a spin glass can be restored, and even enhanced, under quantum-optical nonequilibrium dynamics because spurious patterns can now ser…