How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.
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The Great A.I. Awakening
Posted in robotics/AI
Babies made from two women and one man have been approved by the UK’s fertility regulator.
The historic and controversial move is to prevent children being born with deadly genetic diseases.
Doctors in Newcastle — who developed the advanced form of IVF — are expected to be the first to offer the procedure and have already appealed for donor eggs.
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Research subjects at the University of Minnesota fitted with a specialized noninvasive EEG brain cap were able to move a robotic arm in three dimensions just by imagining moving their own arms (credit: University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering)
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have achieved a “major breakthrough” that allows people to control a robotic arm in three dimensions, using only their minds. The research has the potential to help millions of people who are paralyzed or have neurodegenerative diseases.
The open-access study is published online today in Scientific Reports, a Nature research journal.
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Ooops.
SACRAMENTO, Dec. 14 (UPI) — The California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a warning of sorts to rideshare company Uber on Wednesday, apparently for wading too far into the waters of testing self-driving vehicles in San Francisco.
The department issued a statement Wednesday that said it “encourages the responsible exploration of self-driving cars.”
He stood a majestic 5-foot-5, weighed around 100 pounds and maybe had a harem. That’s what scientists figure from the footprints he left behind some 3.7 million year ago.
He’s evidently the tallest known member of the prehuman species best known for the fossil skeleton nicknamed “Lucy,” reaching a stature no other member of our family tree matched for another 1.5 million years, the researchers say.
The 13 footprints are impressions left in volcanic ash that later hardened into rock, excavated last year in northern Tanzania in Africa. Their comparatively large size, averaging a bit over 10 inches long (26 centimeters), suggest they were made by a male member of the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
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A crop spray which can boost farmer’s wheat yields by one fifth, without the need for genetic modification, has been developed by scientists at Oxford University.
Researchers have found a molecule which helps plants make the best use of the sugary fuel that they generate during photosynthesis. And with more fuel, the plants can produce bigger grains.
Other scientists in Britain have developed ways to genetically modify crops to increase yields, and the Department of Environment is currently deciding whether to allow a field trial for GM wheat in Hertfordshire.
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Researchers used X-ray videos (right) to capture and trace the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue, lips, and larynx — during a number of orofacial behaviors. (credit: Illustration by Tecumseh Fitch, University of Austria, and image courtesy of Asif Ghazanfar, Princeton Neuroscience Institute)
While they have a speech-ready vocal tract, primates can’t speak because they lack a speech-ready brain, contrary to widespread opinion that they are limited by anatomy, researchers at Princeton University and associates have reported Dec. 9 in the open-access journal Science Advances.
The researchers reached this conclusion by first recording X-ray videos showing the movements of the different parts of a macaque’s vocal anatomy — such as the tongue, lips and larynx. They then converted that data into a computer model that could predict and simulate a macaque’s vocal range.
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