Lifeboat Foundation

It’s a game changer.

The first ever integrated nanoscale device which can be programmed with either photons or electrons has been developed by scientists in Harish Bhaskaran’s Advanced Nanoscale Engineering research group at the University of Oxford.

In collaboration with researchers at the universities of Münster and Exeter, scientists have created a first-of-a-kind electro–optical device which bridges the fields of optical and electronic computing. This provides an elegant solution to achieving faster and more energy efficient memories and processors.

Computing at the speed of light has been an enticing but elusive prospect, but with this development it’s now in tangible proximity. Using light to encode as well as transfer information enables these processes to occur at the ultimate speed limit—that of light. While as of recently, using light for certain processes has been experimentally demonstrated, a compact device to interface with the electronic architecture of traditional computers has been lacking. The incompatibility of electrical and light-based computing fundamentally stems from the different interaction volumes that electrons and photons operate in. Electrical chips need to be small to operate efficiently, whereas optical chips need to be large, as the wavelength of light is larger than that of electrons.

Lex Fridman had a great conversation with Dr. Dava Newman, a Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at MIT and affiliate faculty in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, on Space Exploration, Space Suits, and Life on Mars.

The coldest chemical reaction in the known universe took place in what appears to be a chaotic mess of lasers. The appearance deceives: Deep within that painstakingly organized chaos, in temperatures millions of times colder than interstellar space, Kang-Kuen Ni achieved a feat of precision. Forcing two ultracold molecules to meet and react, she broke and formed the coldest bonds in the history of molecular couplings.

“Probably in the next couple of years, we are the only lab that can do this,” said Ming-Guang Hu, a postdoctoral scholar in the Ni lab and first author on their paper published today in Science. Five years ago, Ni, the Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and a pioneer of ultracold chemistry, set out to build a new apparatus that could achieve the lowest temperature chemical reactions of any currently available technology. But they couldn’t be sure their intricate engineering would work.

Now, they not only performed the coldest reaction yet, they discovered their new apparatus can do something even they did not predict. In such intense cold—500 nanokelvin or just a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero—their molecules slowed to such glacial speeds, Ni and her team could see something no one has been able to see before: the moment when two molecules meet to form two new molecules. In essence, they captured a chemical reaction in its most critical and elusive act.

Uncovering trolls and malicious or spammy accounts on social media is increasingly difficult as the miscreants find more and more ways to camouflage themselves as seemingly legitimate. Writing in the International Journal of Intelligent Engineering Informatics, researchers in India have developed an algorithm based on ant-colony optimization that can effectively detect accounts that represent a threat to normal users.

Asha Kumari and Balkishan Department of Computer Science and Applications at Maharshi Dayanand University, in Rohtak, India, explain that the connections between twitter users are analogous to the pheromone chemical communication between ants and this can be modeled in an algorithm based on how ant colonies behave to reveal the strongest connections in the twitter network and so uncover the accounts that one might deem as threatening to legitimate users.

The team’s tests on their system were successful in terms of precision, recall, f-measure, true-positive rate, and false-positive rate based on 26 features examined by the system played against almost 41,500 user accounts attracted to honeypots. Moreover, they report that the approach is superior to existing techniques. The team adds that they hope to be able to improve the system still further by adding so-called machine learning into the algorithm so that it can be trained to better identify threatening accounts based on data from known threats and legitimate accounts.

The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural
https://www.creativeinnovationglobal.com.au

Ray Kurzweil is one of the world’s leading inventors, thinkers, and futurists, with a thirty-year track record of accurate predictions. Called “the restless genius” by The Wall Street Journal and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes magazine, he was selected as one of the top entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine, which described him as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison.” PBS selected him as one of the “sixteen revolutionaries who made America.”

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil (USA) at Ci2019 — The Future of Intelligence, Artificial and Natural” »

Germany’s prized industrial robotics and automation sector is expecting a drop in sales this year for the first time since the global financial crisis, an industry body said on Friday.

The Mechanical Engineering Industry Association (VDMA) is expecting sales to fall by five percent to 14.3 billion euros ($15.8 billion) this year.

This would be the first drop since the 32-percent plunge seen in 2009 in the wake of the crisis.

#AugmentedReality glasses might seem like a simple task, but the next generation of night-vision, automatic-identification and selective-hearing spectacles will require a lot of new tech. Learn all about it via @IEEE.Spectrum: https://bit.ly/32M9lAz.

Photo: Tekla PerrySha Rabii, Facebook’s head of silicon and technology engineering, speaks at ARM TechCon 2019.

This 16-year-old high school student from Iloilo went viral after discovering the properties of Aratiles fruit or Sarisa that can cure diabetes.

The young Filipina scientist was identified as Maria Isabel Layson, was one of the winners of the 2019 National Science and Technology Fair (NSTF), that was held last February.

She was also one of the 12 candidates sent to the International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona USA to represent the Philippines in one of the biggest pre-college science research competition in the world and was the first in her batch to receive Gokongwei Brothers Foundation Young Scientist Award.