Your brain is “Plastic” according to Professor Bliss the receipentant of the UK’s Brain Prize award.
Three British researchers win a one million-euro prize for their work on how memories are stored inside the brain.
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Round Up linked to cancer
Posted in biotech/medical, food, health, sustainability
Bad news if you use RoundUp.
Local councils across Australia that use the weed killer glyphosate on nature-strips and playgrounds are being warned that the chemical probably causes cancer.
An updated World Health Organisation (WHO) warning for the herbicide, often trade marked as Roundup, is also routinely used in household gardens and farms.
The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) recently upgraded its assessment of glyphosate from “possibly” to “probably carcinogenic to humans”, though the level of risk is the same as the IARC’s findings on red meat.
I see articles and reports like the following about military actually considering fully autonomous missals, drones with missals, etc. I have to ask myself what happened to the logical thinking.
A former Pentagon official is warning that autonomous weapons would likely be uncontrollable in real-world situations thanks to design failures, hacking, and external manipulation. The answer, he says, is to always keep humans “in the loop.”
The new report, titled “ Autonomous Weapons and Operational Risk,” was written by Paul Scharre, a director at the Center for a New American Security. Scharre used to work at the office of the Secretary of Defense where he helped the US military craft its policy on the use of unmanned and autonomous weapons. Once deployed, these future weapons would be capable of choosing and engaging targets of their own choosing, raising a host of legal, ethical, and moral questions. But as Scharre points out in the new report, “They also raise critically important considerations regarding safety and risk.”
As Scharre is careful to point out, there’s a difference between semi-autonomous and fully autonomous weapons. With semi-autonomous weapons, a human controller would stay “in the loop,” monitoring the activity of the weapon or weapons system. Should it begin to fail, the controller would just hit the kill switch. But with autonomous weapons, the damage that be could be inflicted before a human is capable of intervening is significantly greater. Scharre worries that these systems are prone to design failures, hacking, spoofing, and manipulation by the enemy.
UK is getting serious about Quantum especially in their universities; all £204 million worth.
Universities and Science minister Jo Johnson has announced two major investments in science and engineering research totaling £204 million.
Forty UK universities will share in £167 million that will support doctoral training over a two year period, while £37 million will be put into developing the graduate skills, specialist equipment and facilities that will put UK Quantum Technologies research at the forefront of the field.
The minister made the announcements during a visit to the University of Oxford where he met academics working in the Networked Quantum Information Technologies (NQIT) Quantum Technology Hub, which is led by Professor Ian Walmsley, one of four that form part of the £270 million UK National Quantum Technologies Programme.
This could be very very tricky for a number of reasons: 1) how will this work with people who develop laryngitis or some other illness disrupting their speech? 2) what happens if a person uses a recorded voice or voice changer? 3) what happens when a person’s voice does change as they get older or have a medical procedure done that permanently alters the voice? I could list more; however, I believe that researcher will realize that there will be a need for two forms of biometrics when it comes to the voice.
Software firm Nuance believes that in the near future, there will be an expectation from customers to interact with technology in a more human-like manner.
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The interesting piece in the articles that I have seen on robots taking jobs have only occurred in Asia and in certain situations in the UK. I believe that companies across the US see some of the existing hacking risks (especially since the US has the highest incidents of hackings among the other countries) that prevents companies from just replacing their employees with connected autonomous robots plus I am not sure that robotics is at the level of sophistication that most consumers want to spend a lot of money on at the moment.
Bottom line is that until hacking is drastically reduce (if not finally eliminated); that autonomous AI like connected robots and humanoids will find they will have a hard time being adopted by the US collective mass of the population.
In the future the global employment market will rely heavily on robots, artificial intelligence, and all sorts of automation.
In fact, technology is so crucial going forward, that in January, the World Economic Forum predicted that in less than five years more than five million human jobs will be replaced by automation, AI, and robots.
Just this week, a new report showed nearly a third of retails jobs in the UK could disappear by 2025, with many workers replaced by technology in some way or another.
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What will the world look like when we move beyond the keyboard and mouse? Interaction designer Sean Follmer is building a future with machines that bring information to life under your fingers as you work with it. In this talk, check out prototypes for a 3D shape-shifting table, a phone that turns into a wristband, a deformable game controller and more that may change the way we live and work.
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When The Verge began covering “drones” three years ago, we got a lot of grief about using that word: drone. These were just remote control toys, they couldn’t fly themselves! When drones got smart enough to navigate using GPS, and to follow people around, the naysayers pointed out they still couldn’t see anything. It could follow you, sure, but not while avoiding trees. At CES the last two years we finally saw drones that could sense and avoid real-world obstacles. But those were just tech demos, R&D projects which so far haven’t been made commercially available.
That all changes today with the introduction of DJI’s new drone, the Phantom 4. It’s the first consumer unit that can see the world around it and adjust accordingly, the next big step towards a truly autonomous aircraft. Try and drive it into a wall, the Phantom 4 will put on the brakes. If you ask it to fly from your position to a spot across a river, and there is a bridge in between, it will make a judgement call: increase speed to clear the obstacle or, if that isn’t possible, stop and hover in place, awaiting your next command.
The Phantom 4 accomplishes this feat with the help of five cameras: two on the front and two on the bottom, plus the main 4K camera that has always been onboard to capture video. The images captured by these cameras are run through computer vision software which constructs a 3D model of the world around it that the drone can intelligently navigate.
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Israel’s New SkyTram
Posted in transportation
