Latest news with #EmergentVentures
Time Magazine
20-05-2025
- Business
- Time Magazine
Tyler Cowen
Philanthropic organizations are often mired in bureaucracy that can make the process of applying for funding lengthy and tedious. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, is pioneering a different approach. Since 2018, Cowen has run Emergent Ventures, a fellowship and grant program for entrepreneurs working on highly scalable ideas for meaningfully improving society. Applicants answer a handful of questions and get a response in a week or two. To date, the program, which is backed by donors such as Schmidt Futures, has supported over a thousand people—many still in their teens—working on ventures ranging from scientific innovation to personal development. The 2025 cohort includes a University of Chicago research director working on a non-invasive blood glucose monitor and a Vanderbilt University student developing prosthetics and bionic arms. 'I've focused on trying to mobilize talent that otherwise is not discovered or inspired,' says Cowen, who screens most applications Ventures' successes include funding one of the first COVID-19 saliva tests via its Fast Grants program and a prison reform startup that used data analysis to identify over 150,000 safe candidates for early release. With dedicated tracks for applicants in India, Africa and the Caribbean, Ukraine, and Taiwan, grantees have regular meet-ups across the world. Says Cowen, 'Anyone who wins has a direct line to me.'
Irish Times
24-04-2025
- Science
- Irish Times
Beyond the big bang: Irishman's universal evolution theory challenges accepted cosmology
It all started with a big bang has been the commonly accepted origin story of our universe for decades. But what if it's wrong? What if, instead of starting 13 billion years ago as a tiny ball of incomprehensibly hot gas exploding with unimaginable force and expanding eternally into an inexplicable nothingness, it evolved from another universe which in turn evolved from another? Julian Gough, the Irish author, playwright and one-time musician, has unveiled a cosmological theory he believes may better explain the origins of our universe than widely accepted theories. He admits there will be blowback for the 'blowtorch theory' published on his cosmology website The Egg and the Rock but is not fazed by the criticism that will come his way. READ MORE The author, who wrote the last chapter of Minecraft and whose novels have been published in 37 languages, has seen his website achieve a cult following driven by his successful prediction, before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sent back its first data in 2022, that it would observe extremely early, rapid galaxy formation, with those galaxies dominated by supermassive black holes. His predictions saw many scientists actively helping him to develop the new theory and attracted funding from Emergent Ventures (run by the economist and polymath Tyler Cowen ), and O'Shaughnessy Ventures (run by the venture capital investor, quant pioneer, and former board chair of Stability AI, Jim O'Shaughnessy ). His theory posits the idea that sustained, powerful jets from supermassive black holes in the extremely early universe 'actively carved the large-scale structure of the universe we see all around us today, including galaxies, cosmic voids, and filament'. Julian Gough: The Irish author, playwright and one-time musician believes his 'blowtorch' theory may better explain the origins of our universe than widely accepted theories. Photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times He said the JWST 'has shaken the faith of many cosmologists, astronomers and astrophysicists in their models' adding that the telescope's observations 'are causing ongoing chaos and I'm the only guy who accurately predicted, at every stage, what it would see'. Gough's blowtorch theory and the evolutionary cosmology is, he suggested, 'more exciting and attractive right now than the mainstream theory, 'lambda cold dark matter', which, after 50 years of constant tweaking, still didn't see any of this coming'. [ James Webb telescope finds its first exoplanet, raising hopes it will discover life elsewhere in universe Opens in new window ] The blowtorch theory 'is a product of three-stage cosmological natural selection, or what we're now starting to call evolutionary cosmology', Gough said, that draws much from evolutionary biology and 'has huge explanatory and predictive power when applied to our universe'. The core idea is that our universe evolved, in the Darwinian sense, and that it's descended from earlier, simpler universes, which reproduced through black holes. 'Evolution has therefore fine tuned our particular universe to produce, first, some supermassive black holes, which then generate stars and thus galaxies around themselves, which generate many more secondary, star-sized black holes but also the periodic table of the elements, which generate planets, which generate life, which generates technology, which generates huge numbers of small, technologically produced third-stage black holes (for extremely efficient, sustainable, long-term energy production),' Gough said. 'Each of these three evolved developmental steps helps the universe reproduce more efficiently, by generating more black holes – more offspring – from the same amount of matter.' His conclusion is that 'biology is the first half of the periodic table coming to life; technology is the second half of the periodic table coming to life in an evolved developmental process that helps the universe to reproduce'. The James Webb Space Telescope whose observations have 'shaken the faith of many cosmologists, astronomers and astrophysicists in their models', says Julian Gough. Photograph: Nasa According to Gough, the mainstream approach 'has always been, there is one universe, and everything that happens in it is random and arbitrary, and life is just this weird, unlikely accident'. 'But that mainstream approach has great difficulty explaining the extremely rapid, efficient, step-by-step development of our universe since the big bang, from a ball of hot gas to the hyper-sophisticated world we live in. And, unfortunately for the status quo, predictions based on evolutionary cosmology now massively outperform predictions made using the old approach.' Some recent developments seem to be working in the theory's favour. Late last month, Nasa reported that an international team of astronomers using the JWST 'identified bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in an unexpectedly early time in the universe's history'. 'The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time,' it said. Gough said the findings could be explained by an 'enormous jet from a supermassive black hole'. Not everyone is convinced. One Irish-based scientist dismissed Gough's work out of hand: 'This looks like crazy stuff to me and I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole.' Others are far less dismissive. We need a more open-minded dialogue between mainstream and unconventional lines of research to escape the dead end we manoeuvred ourselves into — Dr Jenny Wagner Dr Jenny Wagner, a German cosmologist, physicist and author based at the Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Helsinki, told The Irish Times Gough has developed 'an interesting idea'. She noted that standard observational cosmology collects evidence to track the evolution of the cosmos from the first picture we have, which, she argued, goes from 'the rather homogeneous and isotropic cosmic microwave background to the highly complex landscape it has become with all its galaxy clusters, galaxies, stars, and planets'. Wagner said it was possible to 'only observe and draw conclusions from the single universe we happen to live in. These are the huge drawbacks. It is like studying medicine on a single patient.' She suggested the extremes of thinking were the anthropic principle, where 'the universe is as it is because we are here to observe it, because we are special' and the 'nihilistic answer that everything that is possible is actually created, so there should not be a single universe with fine-tuned conditions for life, but rather a multitude of universes (a multimultiverse) realising every possible scenario. 'Between these extreme ends, the blowtorch theory assumes that there is an evolution of universes. Complexity increases with every step forward and builds upon the previous stage.' Wagner said an 'intriguing part of the blowtorch theory stays at the level of observationally testable predictions in our cosmos: it raises highly important questions on the validity of our current concordance model in cosmology. For instance, do we really need dark matter to explain our observations? The Tarantula Nebula star-forming region which lies about 170,000 light years from Earth. Photograph: European Southern Observatory Dark matter supposedly contributes 85 per cent of the total matter content of the universe. It is a single and elegant concept that can successfully explain many data sets from the cosmic microwave background to the non-linear structures we observe today. 'However, after more than half a century of dark-matter research, all we have is indirect evidence. Cern and other experiments like DAMA/LIBRA, XENONnT or IceCube have not found any particle candidate.' [ Euclid space telescope reveals exquisite images of dark universe Opens in new window ] She said the problem 'lies in the fact that the inconsistencies in our current data do not hint at specific alternative models. There are many ways to resolve the issues, as well. Hence, we need more blowtorches to shed light in a 95 per cent dark and mysterious cosmological model. In particular, we need a more open-minded dialogue between mainstream and unconventional lines of research to escape the dead end we manoeuvred ourselves into.' Clément Vidal, a philosopher at the Vrije University Brussels in Belgium, said Gough 'paints an accurate picture of the crisis in cosmological models, as they are having a hard time to accommodate new observational data from JWST'. He said theories in cosmology 'are in a dark age, and the present crisis deserves to be addressed with new thinking'. He noted that previously Gough predicted using an evolutionary take on cosmology drawing on Lee Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection that galaxies should form as early as 100 million years after the big bang. He said evolutionary theory and thinking have been 'successfully extended well beyond the biological realm, into culture, technology but also economics or psychology. Evolutionary cosmology continues this extension, and offers a new paradigm for cosmology. This is still early, and more effort is needed to further test new predictions, ideally with more detailed models making even more specific predictions, published in peer-reviewed articles so that more scientists can engage in this fascinating debate.' Johannes Jaeger, an evolutionary biologist, systems thinker and philosopher based at the University of Vienna, said Gough's James Webb predictions 'should stand as evidence that he is certainly no crackpot'. He accepted that while 'evolutionary cosmology may be speculative at this point' it could 'contain the kind of explanation that could tell us why the parameters of the universe are fine tuned the way they are. At least, it seems to me, somebody in the physics community should be open to having a look at this theory', and while Gough's ideas 'are no doubt speculative [they] are definitely worthy of checking out. Isn't this how science was meant to work?'
Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Astra Security Raises Funding to Simplify Cybersecurity With AI-Driven Pentesting
The company serves over 800 customers with its AI-powered pentest solutions, designed to mimic hacker behavior. CLAYMONT, Del., February 05, 2025--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Astra Security, the security platform with continuous vulnerability scanning and pentests, today announced the closing of a growth capital round—led by Emergent Ventures, with participation from the Neon Fund, Better Capital, Blume Ventures, and PointOne Capital. The funds will accelerate development and build capabilities to uncover vulnerabilities in cloud environments. The company also plans to double down its focus on using AI to give developers and security engineers the ability to build security detections. The company has been building its platform since 2018 while remaining cash-positive. Last year, Astra Security uncovered nearly 5,500 vulnerabilities per day for its customers with its AI-powered pentest platform. This number is expected to increase threefold by the end of the year as cyber threats continue to evolve at an unprecedented pace. With AI, the speed at which code is being shipped rapidly increases. This means attackers have an even larger attack surface area to find vulnerabilities. AI has become equally popular among hackers for finding loopholes at scale, which can lead to more breaches. "The cybercrime landscape is becoming increasingly complex with AI-based attacks," said Shikhil Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Astra Security. "Traditional, periodic pentesting is no longer enough in today's threat environment, and Astra Security is moving more businesses to continuous pentesting to stay ahead of hackers. The engineering world has become agile, collaborative, and automation-driven, but the cybersecurity industry has lagged behind. It's our mission to breathe life into the security space by integrating AI, adopting a hacker's mindset, and making the tech easy and accessible." Over 800 engineering teams in over 70 countries use Astra Security. AI powers the platform and can constantly mimic hacker behavior to check applications for vulnerabilities through fast detections. This includes PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service), a DAST vulnerability scanner, and an API Security Platform that all work together to find over 13,000 vulnerabilities. Last year, Astra Security helped its customers discover and prioritize remediation of over two million vulnerabilities. "Security is increasingly shifting to the hands of developers, while security teams find themselves more overwhelmed than ever," said Ananda Krishna, co-founder and CTO of Astra Security. "While pentests have been around for over a decade, they are overdue for an AI-first update—simplifying and streamlining the process. We're focused on removing the frustration of continuous security monitoring so businesses can get on with everything else." Astra Security founders Shikhil Sharma and Ananda Krishna have been hackers and builders for over a decade—first helping big brands like Microsoft, Adobe, AT&T, Yahoo, and Blackberry find critical vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. This led to the creation of Astra Security and the company's focus on an AI-powered platform to bring the cybersecurity industry forward. Astra's growth round totaled $2.7 million. The company is rapidly gaining traction among leading organizations. Last year, more than 25% of their customers were mid-sized and large companies, including Loom, HackerRank, ITC, Olx Autos, Mamaearth, Muthoot Finance, Bonusly Singapore Trade Exchange, Oscilar, University of Cambridge, CompTIA, and Prime Healthcare. About Astra Security Astra Security is a cyber security SaaS company simplifying otherwise chaotic penetration with its Pentest Platform. Astra Security's AI-powered offensive vulnerability scanning engine emulates hacker behavior to scan applications for 10,000+ security tests. CTOs & CISOs trust Astra Security because it helps them fix vulnerabilities in record time and move from DevOps to DevSecOps with Astra Security's CI/CD integrations. 800+ companies across the globe use Astra Security. Last year, Astra Security uncovered 2,000,000+ vulnerabilities for its customers, saving customers $69M+ in potential losses due to security vulnerabilities. View source version on Contacts Media Contact onboard@ Sign in to access your portfolio
