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Category: mapping – Page 3

Game-engine forests train drone AI to count trees with far less labeling

A drone swoops low over an alpine forest. It climbs suddenly to follow the contours of the sharply rising landscape. Pulses from its lidar—a laser mapping instrument—rapidly scan the trees below.

The forest, however, isn’t real. In fact, the entire landscape is a synthetic rendering created by University of Cambridge researchers to teach algorithms how to see trees.

The ability to recognize an individual tree in the forest canopy is essential for calculating how forests grow, how they respond to climate change and how much carbon they store. Until now, researchers developing forest vision systems would painstakingly trace the outlines of thousands of trees to provide the system with sufficient training data, a process that can take weeks.

Dream-Cubed Controllable Generative Modeling in Minecraft by Training on Billions of Cubes

When fresh data isn’t available, developers usually turn to “derived” data—either recycling the same text over multiple training rounds (multi-epoch repetition) or rewording it using AI (paraphrasing). To measure how well this works, the researchers introduced a concept called token effectiveness ($\eta$). Think of it as a value score: a completely fresh, original word gets a 1.0, while a repeated or reworded token might score lower depending on how useful it remains to the model.

We introduce, a new large-scale dataset and family of generative models for generating Minecraft worlds at block resolution. Our data comprises billions of high-quality and carefully-balanced cubes from procedurally generated Minecraft terrain and human-authored maps, which we use to study discrete and continuous 3D diffusion models for biome-conditioned chunk generation. When trained with our data, we show that both approaches can generate high-fidelity chunks of the game world, and that the discrete masked diffusion formulation gives us inpainting, outpaining, and user-defined block conditioned generation as a free byproduct of the training objective. This enables players and creators to mold the world around them by generating structures, terrain, and maps that are immediately editable and playable.

Why Minecraft?

Generative AI has made incredible progress in the fields of image, video, and text generation. Despite success in these modalities, the interactive 3D worlds of video games have received much less research attention. We aim to close this gap by releasing a dataset based on one of the most successful and popular video games, Minecraft.

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models

Together, these findings provide one of the clearest views yet of the brain’s microscopic “language circuitry.” Rather than language emerging from a single language center, it appears to arise from vast networks of specialized neurons working together across multiple scales—from individual cells, to local neural populations, to entire brain regions.

Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

Jaron Lanier: The Singularity Is A Religion for Geeks

Fifteen years ago, I sat down with the father of virtual reality, and he told me the Singularity was a religion for geeks.

I disagreed with him. To his face.

Jaron Lanier was no technophobe. He built the tech. He just refused to worship it. In 2011, that made him an outlier. Everyone in my orbit was mapping exponential curves and setting dates for digital immortality.

Now look at the culture around #AI.

We have prophets and prophecies, heretics and true believers, people who genuinely expect a machine god to arrive and solve death, meaning, and the economy on our behalf. Lanier saw the shape of that faith before most of us would admit it was a faith at all.

I still think he was wrong about parts of it. I also think he was early on the part that matters most: technology is the How. It was never going to answer the Why or the What. That is the work a religion does, and for a lot of brilliant people the #Singularity quietly became exactly that.

Continue reading “Jaron Lanier: The Singularity Is A Religion for Geeks” | >

Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!

Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Charlie Stross about a short story called “Lobsters.”

This spring, a thousand people queued outside Tencent’s Shenzhen headquarters to raise one.

June 2011, Singularity 1 on 1. Back then, “singularity” was a word most people filed under astrophysics, not #AI. Charlie’s 2001 story “Lobsters,” which grew into Accelerando, was one of the sharpest early maps of what happens when intelligence stops being exclusively biological. Uploaded minds. Post-scarcity economics. Legal personhood for software. An economy run by optimization processes no human fully follows.

He wrote it six years before the iPhone.

Now look at 2026. OpenClaw, the open source agent built by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, now at OpenAI, became the fastest-growing project in GitHub history. In China, installing it is called 养龙虾, “raising lobsters,” after the red logo. Shenzhen, Wuxi and Changshu rushed out subsidy packages. Retirees, schoolkids and office workers lined up for help. A grey market of house-call technicians appeared within days.

Any connection to Charlie’s story? None. The logo is a claw pun on Claude.

Continue reading “Charlie Stross: The World is Complicated. Elegant Narratives Explaining Everything Are Wrong!” | >

Single fission experiment maps excess gamma rays from more than a dozen unstable nuclei

In a single experiment, physicists have measured the “excess” emission of high-energy gamma rays from more than a dozen heavy, unstable atomic nuclei. Mapping the gamma-ray emissions of so many isotopes produced in nuclear fission marks an important step toward a better understanding of one of the key phenomena in modern nuclear physics: the fission process itself.

Why do excited heavy nuclei produced in fission appear to emit excessive amounts of particularly energetic gamma radiation? New clues to this long-standing question have emerged from an international experiment conducted at the GANIL accelerator facility in Caen, northern France. Here, a beryllium-9 target was bombarded with uranium-238 ions, producing unstable curium-247 nuclei that rapidly underwent fission into two lighter fragments.

By combining unique experimental techniques, researchers were able—for the first time within a single experiment—to collect data on high-energy gamma-ray emissions from more than a dozen heavy, unstable isotopes. The first results of the experiment, to which the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Krakow made a significant contribution, have just been published in Physics Letters B.

Neutron-based technique reveals uneven lithium flow in batteries

A neutron-based mapping technique has been used to track the movement of lithium ions in real time inside a functioning all-solid-state battery.

Researchers at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in France discovered unexpected structural complexities, which could inform the design of safer, more efficient solid-state batteries.

The operando neutron powder diffraction technique was used to peer inside the battery interface. Interestingly, the experiment revealed a chaotic structure within the electrode, showing that lithium doesn’t flow through the battery nearly as smoothly as previously thought.

The same sounds are mapped similarly in the human and mouse brain, study finds

While exploring the world around them, both humans and other animals continuously interpret information they pick up with their sight, hearing, touch and other senses. Neuroscience research suggests that the brain does not individually process every single sensory experience, but rather organizes information into mental models known as internal representations.

Internal representations can help recognize familiar patterns or relationships between different stimuli and experiences. While many past studies have explored the role of these perceptual “maps,” fewer have looked at how stimuli are represented in the brains of different species and how they influence learning and decision-making.

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz recently carried out experiments aimed at better understanding how humans and mice perceive, mentally represent and distinguish the same sounds. Their paper, published in Communications Psychology, suggests that sounds are organized similarly in the human and mouse brain, but also that auditory maps tend to remain surprisingly stable during learning and decision-making.

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