For the first time, researchers have used sound waves to 3D print an object from a distance—even with a wall in the way.
Innes, P.A., Goebl, A.M., Smith, C.C.R. et al. Gene expression and alternative splicing contribute to adaptive divergence of ecotypes. Heredity (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-023-00665-y.
The Oxford University professor posits the emergence of ‘a new species’ stemming from algorithms.
This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.
Participant:
Stephen Wolfram.
Moderator:
Brian Greene.
Multidisciplinary residential programmes and workshops help advance all the fields involved.
A living artificial intelligence hardware approach that uses the adaptive reservoir computation of biological neural networks in a brain organoid can perform tasks such as speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
Google is slowing down viewing for those with ad blockers.
Search giant says delays not specific to any browser – just those evading advert breaks.
A new analysis of the distribution of matter in the Universe continues to find a discrepancy in the clumpiness of dark matter in the late and early Universe, suggesting a fundamental error in the standard cosmological model.
Cosmologists study the Universe by making a vast range of observations using a variety of modern techniques. Each observation can reveal different details about the Universe’s composition over a certain period of its history. An astronomical survey—a map of a region of the sky—is a powerful way to scan a large swath of the Universe and the objects it contains. For example, a weak-lensing survey does that by obtaining sharp images of galaxies, which can then be used to map the distribution of the Universe’s matter throughout history. The Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) is one such weak-lensing survey, and it has the highest resolution and the deepest depth of all current weak-lensing surveys. Over the past six years, the HSC-SSP survey team has spent 330 nights scanning 3% of the entire spherical sky, capturing the light emitted by galaxies up to 10 billion years ago.
Producing fake sound reflections that simulate the presence or absence of an object could allow the military to hide assets underwater.
A hologram plate simulates the presence of a three-dimensional object by reflecting the appropriate light waves. Now researchers have demonstrated an equivalent behavior with sound by precisely mimicking the acoustic pattern scattered from an object [1]. The technique could be useful in military efforts to hide or disguise underwater objects, or it may be useful in modifying the reflected sounds of objects so that they are easier to identify by people with impaired vision.
The sound waves reflected from an object can be used to reconstruct its position and shape, an idea routinely exploited in sonar and ultrasound imaging. In principle, using similar concepts, a cleverly produced pattern of scattered waves streaming out of a small region could signify that an object is present when it is not. Several recent attempts to realize such “acoustic cloning” have been unsuccessful because of limitations in recording the precise pattern of waves an object reflects, a necessary preliminary step.
