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A good historical overview of the Deep Learning revolution. If you think the quote above is an exageration, here are some fresh news from Microsoft: Internal email: Microsoft forms new 5,000-person AI division

Some locations on Mars are known to have water ice just below the surface, but how much has remained unclear. Dundas et al. used data from two orbiting spacecraft to examine eight locations where erosion has occurred. This revealed cliffs composed mostly of water ice, which is slowly sublimating as it is exposed to the atmosphere. The ice sheets extend from just below the surface to a depth of 100 meters or more and appear to contain distinct layers, which could preserve a record of Mars' past climate. They might even be a useful source of water for future human exploration of the red planet.

Scientists are preparing to create "miniature brains" that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives.

no cutting-edge space-related science, but important anyways

The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack. PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/ On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.

lol, while ESA is sending around memos and its managers are spending time talking about validation and verification of AI methods ... US / DARPA is already 5-6 years ahead. Hopefully the ACT can contribute to this with our DA based approach ....

your call

These are lasers whose lasing mode exhibits topologically-protected transport without magnetic fields. The underlying topological properties lead to a highly efficient laser, robust to defects and disorder, with single mode lasing even at very high gain values.

Random branches are collected, scanned to 3D, and connected with servos. Then a neural network is trained to control this "robot".

An interesting project that can teach you something about AI training bias. While the system can generate marvelous portraits, it was trained on images displaying not a smiling expression, so it will most likely fail on smiling photos.

Collecting space rocks.

if a geologist hears you calling them rocks they will curse you collectively. I am in a workshop where some of those are present and I constantly remind myself to call them "minerals".

minerals sound much better indeed ... but what is wrong with rocks ? :-)

one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.

No idea... another one I don't get is the one with the waiter presenting some small black-white thing to the white hair guy on a chair.

love the clockwork orange one

serious gaming came back!

Prince Rupert's drops (PRDs), also known as Batavian tears, have been in existence since the early 17th century. They are made of a silicate glass of a high thermal expansion coefficient and have the shape of a tadpole. Typically, the diameter of the head of a PRD is in the range of 5-15 mm and that of the tail is 0.5 to 3.0 mm. PRDs have exceptional strength properties: the head of a PRD can withstand impact with a small hammer, or compression between tungsten carbide platens to high loads of ∼15 000 N, but the tail can be broken with just finger pressure leading to catastrophic disintegration of the PRD. We show here that the high strength of a PRD comes from large surface compressive stresses in the range of 400-700 MPa, determined using techniques of integrated photoelasticity. The surface compressive stresses can suppress Hertzian cone cracking during impact with a small hammer or compression between platens. Finally, it is argued that when the compressive force on a PRD is very high, plasticity in the PRD occurs, which leads to its eventual destruction with increasing load.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans' psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.

OHB and Luxspace venture to ensure human life on the Moon! Research on O2 production and others.....

Has BH at least completed an orbit yet? Or are they still at 10mins in microgravity?

" The goal of the APT program is to control and direct plant physiology to detect chemical, biological, radiological, and/or nuclear threats, as well as electromagnetic signals. " Now that is an advanced concept...

and look at this exceptional insight: "plants are easily deployed, self-powering, and ubiquitous in the environment, and the combination of these native abilities with specifically engineered sense-and-report traits will produce sensors occupying new and unique operational spaces" :-)

The generated inputs are quite strange, I wonder where else something like this occurs.

I agree soooo very much. An increasing number of journal and scientists are finally coming on board with this open science philosophy and I bet we will soon see a radical change of the whole peer review process and publication business

Let's keep a eye on this... Animals use odor cues to navigate through their environments, helping them locate targets and assess danger. Much of how animal brains organize, read out, and respond to odor stimuli across spatial and temporal scales is not well understood. To tackle these questions, Odor2Action uses a highly interdisciplinary team science approach. Our work uses fruit fly, honeybee, and mouse models to determine how neural representations of odor are generated, reformatted, and translated to generate useful behaviors that guide how animals interact with their environment.

reminds me of the methan smelling source finding study we did ...

I had missed this project somehow :)