Giorgos Nikolaou, Tommaso Mencattini, Donato Crisostomi, Andrea Santilli, Yannis Panagakis, and Emanuele Rodolà, from EPFL, the University of Athens, the University of Rome, and the Archimede Research Center, publish the scientific paper: “Language Models are Injective and Hence Invertible.” The “prompt => LLM answer” function
Lebanon, New Hampshire, United States. Thomas Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, dies. He attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, graduating with a degree in mathematics in 1950. In the summer of 1951, he attended the Institute for Numerical Analysis, a branch of NIST
A U.S. judge has ruled that Google acted unlawfully to crush competition and maintain its monopoly on online search and related advertising. Google was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020 for its control of approximately 90% of the online search market.
ChatGPT launched online, garnering its first million users in less than a week. Its imitation of human conversation sparked speculation about its potential to supplant professional writers, revolutionize software writing, and even threaten Google’s core search business. The organization behind it, co-founded by Elon Musk
The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Mr. Agrawal and two other executives were escorted out of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters that same evening.
Electronics demand soars due to a “perfect storm”: As working and learning from home has become the norm during COVID-19, growing demand for electronic devices such as consoles, PCs, smartphones, and connectivity has skyrocketed. The industry already faced long production and delivery times (about 18
Frank Wilzek of MIT proves the existence of “anyons,” a third realm of elementary particles, in addition to “fermions” and “bosons.” Anyons are only two-dimensional and form at very low temperatures. They are actually quasi-particles, meaning they have the properties of particles but can only
Space X’s Dragon probe, after delivering its payload to the ISS, returns to Earth and is recovered, along with its rocket. This is the first time the Dragon has been reused. It’s a spacecraft that had already been used years earlier.
Among the various arrests following the Brussels attacks (carried out not only in Belgium, but also in Salerno by the Digos, for example), is Abderahmane Ameroud, wounded in the legs in a firefight at a tram stop near Place Meiser, in the Schaerbeek neighborhood. According
Robert W. Farquhar, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, died suddenly of a respiratory problem at the age of 83. He was the creator of innovative, cost-effective, and spectacular NASA missions, competing with the more established, consolidated, and well-known JPL
Syria. The military situation is quite complex: the Russians are intervening with targeted bombing raids, primarily targeting anti-Assad rebels trained by the US government; the Russians are fighting to defend their only naval base in the Mediterranean: Tartus, on Syrian soil. In addition to the
Walt Disney, Italy. A weekly comic book issue dedicated to Goofy the Reporter is planned. Editor Valentina De Poli plans to link the fictional story to the reality of Charlie Hebdo. She considers having Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse raise a pencil like a flag.
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti participates in Mission 42 to the ISS. She thus becomes the first Italian astronaut in orbit.
Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Rana Plaza building, designed for four floors of offices and later expanded to ten floors to house heavy textile machinery, collapses. More than 600 people died inside the crowded building.
Giorgio Napolitano, at 88, is elected to a second presidential term. He wins his sixth presidential term after a serious crisis in the Italian political system, with the Democratic Party unable to support the candidacies of Marini and Prodi in the House, and unwilling to
Russian space enthusiasts have identified the remains of the Soviet Mars 3 probe, the first to land on Mars on December 7, 1971, in some ultra-high-resolution (25cm) photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The probe transmitted for only 14 seconds, and the parachute is clearly
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine Jesuit, is Pope Francis I, the 266th Bishop of Rome and Pope of the Catholic Church, and the eighth sovereign of the Vatican City State. He is the first American Pope and the first Jesuit.
Mali. Northern Mali: France intervenes armedly to support the Malian government against the offensive by Islamic militias. Within a month, the French will take control of almost all strategic centers in northern Mali, losing a helicopter pilot. Casualties among Ansar Dine guerrillas are estimated at
The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket carries approximately 700 kg of supplies to the ISS. The rocket is owned and operated by Elon Musk’s private company Space X. This is the first commercial launch to the ISS. It is the first of twelve planned flights with
Filmmaker and explorer James Cameron, Google Chief Executive Larry Page, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, and others founded Planetary Resources in Seattle: a private company with the aim of exploiting asteroids for mining.
North Korea. State TV reports that President Kim Jong-il (김정일) died of a heart attack during a train journey.
Global Financial Crisis. Greece and Italy are in the eye of the storm due to unsustainable public debt. The spread between Italian BTPs and German Bunds reaches nearly 600 basis points (6%). This level is unsustainable for Italy in the long term. The stock market
Ronald DePinho of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston demonstrates in an experiment on mice that using appropriate chemical signals it is possible to rejuvenate a genetically modified organism. The mice’s DNA is modified so that they do not express telomerase, which repairs chromosomes
Japanese technicians from JASA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in a clean room manage to find traces of material from the asteroid Itokawa, collected by the Hayabusa probe, which returned to Earth successfully on June 14, 2010.
The referendum for the secession of Southern Sudan (with its capital Juba) saw a 98.83% YES vote. The region was at war for nearly twenty years, resulting in approximately 2 million deaths.
The street protests in North Africa spread to Egypt, where several days of demonstrations resulted in around a hundred deaths and thousands injured in clashes with the police. The army also intervened, often showing solidarity with the protesters.
Military operation Moshtarak (“together”) in the southern Afghan provinces of Marija and Helmand: Afghan, American, British, Danish and Estonian forces take control of the area, the former stronghold of the Taliban.
The Russians also agreed to the Georgian ceasefire proposal, but the withdrawal will be delayed by several days and will proceed slowly.
Hezbollah’s military chief, Imad Mughniyeh, one of America’s most wanted men, is killed by a car bomb in Damascus. He had been wanted by Israeli and American intelligence agencies for at least twenty years. He was held responsible for a long list of terrorist attacks:
Moscow. Anna Politkovskaya is assassinated. She was 48 years old, and had written articles for Novaya Gazeta and books condemning Vladimir Putin’s policies, especially in Chechnya. In 2001, she published the book “Chechnya – Russian Dishonor.” In 2000, she received the Golden Pen Award from
Adwaita, a giant Aldabra tortoise that was the pet of Clive of India, introduced to the Calcutta Zoo in 1876, dies. She had been born in 1756, 250 years earlier.
The Hayabusa probe, autonomously piloted due to its enormous distance from Earth and the resulting delay of several seconds, descends onto the asteroid Itokawa to touch it and collect a sample. But things go awry; Japanese engineers on Earth decide to abort the maneuver, the
Al Qaeda attacks with suicide bombers in Sharm El-Sheik and Naama Bay, in 3 hotels and in the old market, causing approximately 90 deaths, 10 of which were Westerners.
suicide bomber blew himself up with a tanker truck in Baghdad next to a Shiite mosque packed for evening service, killing more than a hundred worshippers.
Zacarias Moussaoui, the only defendant in the United States for the September 11, 2001, attacks, confesses to having received orders directly from Osama Bin Laden, and that his task was to crash a plane into the White House in Washington, DC (Moussaoui was arrested before
The Huygens module separates from the Cassini mother probe and heads on a collision course with Titan.
NASA conducts the third and final test of the X-43A aircraft which uses a scramjet engine to reach 10,621 km/h (Mach 10) after being lifted to an altitude of 36,184 m by a Pegasus rocket launched from a B-52 aircraft.
Colin Powell resigns as Secretary of State, replaced by Condoleezza Rice, former National Security Advisor
In Pakistan, the country’s most wanted terrorist, Amjal Faruki, involved in the beheading of Wall Street Journal journalist Pearl, is killed in a firefight; in Syria, a Mossad leader is killed.
The European Union expands to include 10 new countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus (Greek part), Malta
An Italian hostage captured by Iraqi militias is murdered; footage of the killing is released to Qatari TV station Al Jazeera.
J. Richard Gott III and Mario Jurić of Princeton University, using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, announce the discovery of the Sloan Great Wall, the largest structure in the known universe. It is a gigantic wall of galaxies (superclusters) 1.37 billion light-years long,
Russian mathematician Grigori “Grisha” Perelman submitted a paper to www.arXiv.org presenting a proof of the Poincaré Conjecture, formulated in 1904: every compact, simply connected three-manifold (i.e., one on which every closed path can be reduced to a point) is homeomorphic (i.e., topologically identical) to the
Wikipedia already has 10,000 articles. Created in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales of Huntsville, Alabama, the application is based on Nupedia, written for him by Larry Sanger starting in 1999. But it didn’t mature until the two discovered Ward Cunningham’s WikiWikiWeb, web pages that users
From the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Proton launches the International Space Station’s Zvesda module into orbit.
Space Shuttle Endeavour’s STS-92/3A mission delivers the International Space Station’s solar arrays into orbit.
Progressive-independence leader Chen Shui Bian (President of Taiwan) is the first democratically elected president in China.
The merger between FIAT-Auto and GM was announced at Lingotto (20% FIAT-Auto to GM and 5.15% GM to FIAT).
NATO-Russia-Serbia Peace Agreements for the Entry of NATO and Russian Troops into Kosovo
Less than a year after dropping out of Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin announce that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital have agreed to invest $25 million in Google Inc.
The Stardust mission is launched, which will pass through the tail of comet Wild2 in 2004. It also has an aerogel-coated surface to trap and return to Earth particles of comet material, and possibly also particles of interstellar wind. A voluntary web-based photo analysis campaign
The euro is launched as the single European currency; Italy is part of the first group of 11 members. Exchange rate with the USD: 1/1.3; Exchange rate with ITL: 1/1936.27
For the first time, premeditated group murderous behavior by chimpanzees has been observed in the African jungle, a peculiarity that was thought to be typical only of the human race.
First experimental detection of the GHZ entangled state (Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger): entanglement of more than two particles in which the quantum nature of the entangled state is immediately revealed, inexplicable by normal statistics or by unknown hidden variables; it is carried out by Raymond Laflamme, Manny Knill
Chuck Steidel, at the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, finds numerous galaxies 12 billion light-years away; more than 2,000 will be discovered within a few years.
Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, names the 11-dimensional M-Theory, which includes the five string theories known so far as a special case; M-theory includes 1-dimensional strings, 2-dimensional membranes, and 3- or more-dimensional branes; the special cases are Type-I
Christian Solidarity International succeeds in freeing 47,720 Sudanese Coptic slaves
Silvio Berlusconi is forced to resign due to the Northern League’s withdrawal from the majority.
The single-stage-to-orbit DC-X flies for the first time, albeit only for a few hundred meters, then makes a controlled landing. The test is led by Pete Conrad, a McDonnell Douglas executive, the third man on the Moon with Apollo 12, and an astronaut on Gemini
Iraqi agents attempt to assassinate George Bush during his visit to Kuwait.