Group items tagged

The end of the world is for this month...

what a live, what an interesting person!

http://www.brain-map.org/ yummy! brains...

From the alternative computing series...

I have no access to the pdf, but abstract sounds interesting.

Our friends from NASA have come out with a plan to the human exploration of Venus in the time that everyone is speaking about Mars.

Love the concept acronym, which pretty much says it all... Not sure which astronaut would fancy floating around in an atmosphere where clouds are made of sulphuric acid. Besides I don't see the point of a manned mission if one can't reach the surface.. tele-operation would be easy and so much cheaper.

There is this optical neuron that gets stimulated from motion. Mapping it is difficult in the lab: "The stumbling block is a lack of fine-grained anatomical detail about how the neurons in the retina are wired up to each other." So, use people deciphering from 2D images --> the 3D neuron structure using the human spatial reasoning to figure out what is part of a branching cell and what is just background noise in the images (yet incomparable to their best algorithms' performance) 120.000 users so far mapped 2% of the retina

A British company has produced a "strange, alien" material so black that it absorbs all but 0.035 per cent of visual light, setting a new world record. To stare at the "super black" coating made of carbon nanotubes - each 10,000 times thinner than a human hair - is an odd experience.

Finally! Nowadays blacks were always too bright for my taste...

"No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." I will keep waiting for my darkness-emitting diodes...

A good idea for a card in one of our ACT magic decks!!! In his words AI is "our biggest existential threat" - lol

the "even" in your comment is the key word

Edge.org recently had an interesting piece that ties into all of this recent AI fear mongering: http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai

You've heard of the catastrophic effects of radiation on environments, animals and humans. A seemingly silent and invisible destroyer, radiation can make whole cities inhabitable for hundreds of years. But have you ever wondered what radiation actually looks like? There may be one image that jumps to mind. We saw the same detector setup in the room opposite to ours during the Open Day! Using uranium is just cooler. :)

This is the biggest breakthrough in game AI (and one of the biggest in AI in general) since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess: For the first time, a human professional player was defeated in the game of Go. The approach was a combination of tree search and deep neural networks. Very proud of a former colleague on the team at Google Deepmind!

Funny enough, facebook also had a very similar paper around the same time.

Good old Darwin...

A nanolaser, a thousand times thinner than a human hair.

In this paper published on Nature, AI researchers used deep Q-network with very good adaptability and obtained performances comparable to those of a human games tester.

Bastards! And that was to be my next idea. Still no recurrency as I see it so far, so this is just some fancy way to do a markov model. Not sure if this is that particular paper or an earlier version but here it is for those interested: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~vmnih/docs/dqn.pdf

Very surprising - at least for me ...

And maybe a good thing about antropocene?

The party is over.

They are developing so-called "Avatar" technology which will allow people to control robots remotely, as in the movie "Avatar." With Avatar X, they hope to revolutionize space exploration, resource extraction, and other space-based activities. On the Avatar X website, it says, "AVATAR X aims to capitalize on the growing space-based economy by accelerating development of real-world Avatars that will enable humans to remotely build camps on the Moon, support long-term space missions and further explore space from afar."

first science results reported in Nature (as far as I know) from the Yutu-2 and Chang'e mission .... and they look very good!

Sure they are very useful! It will be even better if they manage to fit the data to modeled circulation of the lunar magma ocean that was formed posterior to the "Theia" body collision with Earth. The collision was the cause of the magma ocean in the first place. The question now is how this circulation pattern of the lava-moon "froze" in time upon phase transition to solid. Because, what crystallizes last in sequence, is more rich in "incompatible" with the crystal structure, elements, we might combine data+models to predict their location. Those incompatible tracers are mainly radioactively decaying elements that produce heat (google publications about lunar KREEP elements (potassium (K), rare earth elements(REE), and phosphorus(P)). By knowing where the KREEP is: - we know where to dig for them mining (if they are useful for something, eg. Phosphorus for plants to be grown on the Moon) - we avoid planning to build the future human colony on top of radioactives, of course. The hope is that the Moon, due to lack of plate tectonics, has preserved this "signature of the freezing sequence". Let's see.

thanks Nasia! very interesting comment

An overview of all the neurotech companies messing with the brain. When reading this I really wonder why we need ethical approval for everything in human research.