Group items tagged

02.28.2013

The ground team for NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has switched the rover to a redundant onboard computer in response to a memory issue on the computer that had been active

intentional swap at about 2:30 a.m. PST today (Thursday, Feb. 28) put the rover

Researchers are trying to plant a digital seed for artificial intelligence by letting a massive computer system browse millions of pictures and decide for itself what they all mean

The system at Carnegie Mellon University is called NEIL, short for Never Ending Image Learning

In mid-July, it began searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is deciding for itself how those images relate to each other

A backup computer that controls “some systems associated with robotics

is not “responding to commands

The crew is safe, there’s no “immediate” change to space station operations, and because the primary computer is working

American physicist David Wineland

and French physicist Serge Haroche speaks to the media in Paris after they were named winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.

for experiments on quantum particles that have already resulted in ultra-precise clocks and may one day help lead to computers many times faster than those in use today.

NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images, to characterize scenes and to recognize attributes, such as colors, lighting and materials, all with a minimum of human supervision

since late July and already has analyzed three million images, identifying 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images

sometimes, what NEIL finds can surprise even the researchers

Hyung-In Moon is a genius, says Hyung-In Moon

Korean scientist Hyung-In Moon took the concept of scientific peer review to a whole new level by reviewing his own papers under various fake names

Moon's research — which included a study on alcoholic liver disease and another on an anticancer plant substance — can't be trusted

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has battled for the past 50 years

a highly respected computer scientist indicated at last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that he and his team may be close to a breakthrough that could boost the rate at which the physicist communicates, which has fallen to a mere one word per minute in recent years.

For the past decade Hawking has used a voluntary twitch of his cheek muscle to compose words and sentences one letter at a time that are expressed through a speech-generation device connected to his computer.

When used on special paper, the pens record your every scribble with a built-in camera

they can also record audio at the same time and sync that audio with what you write

recently updated its lineup of pens for the cloud-based, mobile computing era

April 12

NASA is preparing a contingency spacewalk to deal with a broken backup computer component

in an update Saturday (April 12)

: a quick 2.5-hour run to swap out a failed backup computer that controls several systems

including robotics

t NASA doesn’t want to go ahead with it until spare spacesuit parts arrive, in the aftermath of a life-threatening suit leak that took place last summer.

Experiments with mice have revealed aspects of sleep and dreaming, such as how the experiences contribute to forming memories

researchers recorded brain activity in three adult male volunteers during the early stages of sleep

After the subjects had dozed off, they were repeatedly awakened and asked for detailed reports on what they had seen while sleeping

Most people believe they can multitask effectively, but a

study indicates that people who multitask the most – including talking on a cell phone while driving – are least capable of doing so.

data suggest the people talking on cell phones while driving are people who probably shouldn't. We showed that people who multitask the most are those who appear to be the least capable of multitasking effectively

During low-light conditions, drivers rely mainly on headlights to see the road but the same headlights reduce visibility when light is reflected off of precipitation back to the driver

Carnegie Mellon professor and his team

Computer science professor Srinivasa Narasimhan

FEBRUARY 13

Family Portrait Of The Planets

In 1990, the U.S. space probe Voyager I , while heading out to the edge of the Solar System, at 5:12pm PST began a four-hour series of photographs in a look backward which captured the Sun and six planets. An elongated large mozaic was later made by combining about 60 images. In this first “Family Portrait of the Planets”, the Sun appeared almost star-like and the planets were mere dots. Mercury was too close to the sun to photograph. Mars and Pluto, were too small to resolve. This first record of the Solar System from space may remain the only one for decades to follow. Voyager I had a unique lofty perspective, looking down on the plane in which the planets orbit. It had been steadily climbing since it passed Saturn in 1980, and reached an angle of 32 degrees high above the plane of the solar system

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.

Over the past two years

catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013

To learn new motor skills, the brain must be plastic: able to rapidly change the strengths of connections between neurons, forming new patterns that accomplish a particular task

if the brain were too plastic, previously learned skills would be lost too easily.

A new computational model developed by MIT neuroscientists explains how the brain maintains the balance between plasticity and stability

On February 28, controllers put the rover into "minimal activity safe mode," when they switched the machine's operations to a backup computer after detecting malfunctions in the primary computer's flash memory.

The statement said the rover exited safe mode on Saturday and its high gain antenna went back online on Sunday.