By David McNally, ARL Public Affairs.
ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. (March 17, 2016) — The U.S. Army is moving ahead with research on potential new component-level technologies for future rotorcraft.
A team from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory completed the first-ever live-fire test of a rotor blade with individual blade control technology in mid-January.
Posted in virtual reality
(An alternate version of this article was originally published in the Boston Globe)
On December 2nd, 1942, a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi came back from lunch and watched as humanity created the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction inside a pile of bricks and wood underneath a football field at the University of Chicago. Known to history as Chicago Pile-1, it was celebrated in silence with a single bottle of Chianti, for those who were there understood exactly what it meant for humankind, without any need for words.
Now, something new has occurred that, again, quietly changed the world forever. Like a whispered word in a foreign language, it was quiet in that you may have heard it, but its full meaning may not have been comprehended. However, it’s vital we understand this new language, and what it’s increasingly telling us, for the ramifications are set to alter everything we take for granted about the way our globalized economy functions, and the ways in which we as humans exist within it.
F you haven’t experienced a flat tire then you are lucky, but for those of us who have we understand all too well the hassle of changing a flat tire and airing one back up. In this video we get introduced to the new innovative Michelin Airless Tires that are able to drive on every possible terrain!
Posted in robotics/AI
“There is no AI without robotics… This realization is often called the ‘embodiment problem’ and most researchers in AI now agree that intelligence and embodiment are tightly coupled issues. Every different body has a different form of intelligence, and you see that pretty clearly in the animal kingdom.”
Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence AlphaGo is a big advance but it will not get us to strong AI.
“In a letter written in 1871, the Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud uttered a phrase that announces the modern age: “‘Je’ est un autre” (“‘I’ is someone else”). Some 69 years later I entered the world as an identical twin, and Rimbaud’s claim has an uncanny truth for me, since I grew up being one of a pair. Even though our friends and family could easily tell us apart, most people could not, and I began life with a blurrier, more fluid sense of my contours than most other folks.”
Now, we’re hitting Terminator mode with this.
If you’re worried that artificial intelligence will take over the world now that computers are powerful enough to outsmart humans at incredibly complex games, then you’re not going to like the idea that someday computers will be able to simply build their own chips without any help from humans. That’s not the case just yet, but researchers did come up with a way to grow metal wires at a molecular level.
At the same time, this is a remarkable innovation that paves the way for a future where computers are able to create high-end chip solutions just as a plant would grow leaves, rather than having humans develop computer chips using complicated nanoengineering techniques.
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A few years ago, researchers from Germany and Japan were able to simulate one percent of human brain activity for a single second. It took the processing power of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to make that happen.
Hands down, the human brain is by far the most powerful, energy efficient computer ever created.
So what if we could harness the power of the human brain by using actual brain cells to power the next generation of computers?
As crazy as it sounds, that’s exactly what neuroscientist Osh Agabi is building. Koniku, Agabi’s startup, has developed a prototype 64-neuron silicon chip.
