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Category: entertainment – Page 56

Study identifies a universal property for efficient communication

Words categorize the semantic fields they refer to in ways that maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity. Recent studies have shown that human languages are optimally balanced between accuracy and complexity. For example, many languages have a word that denotes the color red, but no language has individual words to distinguish ten different shades of the color. These additional words would complicate the vocabulary and rarely would they be useful to achieve precise communication.

A study published on 23 March in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed how develop spontaneous systems to name colors. A study by Marco Baroni, ICREA research professor at the UPF Department of Translation and Language Sciences (DTCL), conducted with members of Facebook AI Research (France).

For this study, the researchers formed two artificial neural networks trained with two generic deep learning methods. As Baroni explains: “we made the networks play a color-naming game in which they had to communicate about color chips from a continuous color space. We did not limit the “language” they could use, however, when they learned to play the game successfully, we observed the color-naming terms these artificial neural networks had developed spontaneously.”

Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse

Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

So what’s “the metaverse,” anyway? The term was coined in 1992 when Neal Stephenson published his hit sci-fi novel Snow Crash, in which the protagonist moves between a virtual world and the real world fighting a computer virus. In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.

Director Neil Burger’s ‘Voyagers’ launches a colony ship to the stars

Writer-director Neil Burger is well known for his provocative cinematic projects, most notably 2006’s period-set magician movie “The Illusionist,” 2011’s psychological thriller “Limitless,” and a trio of “Divergent” films adapted from author Veronica Roth’s young adult sci-fi novels.

Now Burger has his eyes fixed on the stars with his new science fiction adventure flick, “Voyagers,” which revolves around the perils inside a generation spaceship carrying 30 home-grown candidates on a one-way mission to settle an exoplanet 86 years from Earth.

Elon Musk’s brain-chip company, Neuralink, released a video of a monkey playing video games with its mind

Elon Musk finally got to show off his monkey.

Neuralink, a company founded by Musk that is developing artificial-intelligence-powered microchips to go in people’s brains, released a video Thursday appearing to show a macaque using the tech to play video games, including “Pong.”

Musk has boasted about Neuralink’s tests on primates before, but this is the first time the company has put one on display. During a presentation in 2019, Musk said the company had enabled a monkey to “control a computer with its brain.”

Neuralink Co-Founder: “We’re Gonna Need a Better Term Than ‘Video Game‘”

With powerful engines, near-photorealistic graphics, and the ability to build incredible, immersive worlds, it’s hard to imagine what the next big technological advance in gaming might be.

Based on a recent tweet by Neuralink co-founder and President Max Hodak, the word might not even apply. In it, he hinted — vaguely, to be fair — that whatever forms of entertainment get programmed into neural implants and brain-computer interfaces will represent a paradigm shift that moves beyond the current terminology.

“We’re gonna need a better term than ‘video game’ once we start programming for more of the sensorium,” Hodak tweeted.

A design to improve the resilience and electrical performance thin metal film based electrodes

Flexible electrodes, electronic components that conduct electricity, are of key importance for the development of numerous wearable technologies, including smartwatches, fitness trackers and health monitoring devices. Ideally, electrodes inside wearable devices should retain their electrical conductance when they are stretched or deformed.

Many flexible electrodes developed so far are made of placed on elastic substrates. While some of these electrodes are flexible and well, sometimes, the metal are fractured, which can result in sudden electricity disconnection.

Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have recently introduced a new design that could enable the development of strain-resilient flexible electrodes that conduct electricity well, even when they are stretched or deformed. This design, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, involves the introduction of a thin, two-dimensional (2-D) interlayer, which reduces the risk of fractures and retains electrical connections of metal films.

World’s first space HOTEL to begin construction in Earth orbit in 2025

Work is due to start on the world’s first ‘space hotel’ in low Earth orbit in 2025 — and it will come equipped with restaurants, a cinema, spa and…

Developed by the Orbital Assembly Corporation (OAC), the Voyager Station could be operational as early as 2027, with the infrastructure built in orbit around the Earth.

The space station will be a large circle and rotate to generate artificial gravity that will be set at a similar level to the gravity found on the surface of the Moon.

Voyager Station’s hotel will include many of the features you might expect from a cruise ship, including themed restaurants, a health spa and a cinema.

‘Like a horror movie’: Caterpillar silences tomato’s cry for help, scientists find

“Scientists found that a caterpillar called the tomato fruit worm not only chomps on tomatoes and their leaves, but also deposits enzyme-laden saliva on the plant, interfering with its ability to cry for help. If it all sounds a bit improbable, starting with the concept of plants crying for help, scientists also scoffed at that idea when it was first proposed a few decades ago. But it has been shown time and time again that when under attack, plants can emit chemical distress signals, causing their peers to mount some sort of defense. A classic example is the smell of a freshly mown lawn, which prompts the release of protective compounds in nearby blades of grass that have yet to be cut. In some cases, plant distress signals can even summon help from other species. That’s what happens with the tomato. When caterpillars nibble on the plant’s leaves, the leaf pores release volatile chemicals that are detected by a type of parasite: a wasp that lays eggs inside caterpillars. (Not to overwork the horror-movie analogy, but as with the hapless astronauts in the “Aliens” franchise, it doesn’t end well for the caterpillar.)”

While there’s a famous horror-movie spoof about killer tomatoes, no one seems to have made one about caterpillars—the insect pests that eat the juicy red fruits of summer.