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Blog – Page 1493

New 3D printing method produces commercial grade microlenses with smooth surfaces, which could advance optical device design.

Researchers in Canada have developed a new 3D printing method called blurred tomography that can rapidly produce microlenses with commercial-level optical quality. The new method may make it easier and faster to design and fabricate a variety of optical devices.

“We purposely added optical blurring to the beams of light used for this 3D printing method to manufacture precision optical components,” said Daniel Webber from the National Research Council of Canada. “This enables production of optically smooth surfaces.”

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“We employed this configuration for the first time to characterize the signal field emerging from a resonantly excited plasmonic sample,” says Francesca Calegari, lead scientist at DESY, physics Professor at Universität Hamburg and a spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter.”

The difference of the reconstructed pulse with plasmon interaction to the reference pulse allowed the scientists to trace the emergence of the plasmon and its fast decay which they confirmed by electrodynamic model calculations.

“Our approach can be used to characterize arbitrary plasmonic samples in and in the far-field,” adds CUI scientist Prof. Holger Lange. Additionally, the precise characterization of the laser field emerging from nanoplasmonic materials could constitute a new tool to optimize the design of phase-shaping devices for .

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at an astounding pace over the last few years. Some scientists are now looking towards the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI) – a form of AI that would not only surpass human intelligence but would not be bound by the learning speeds of humans.

But what if this milestone isn’t just a remarkable achievement? What if it also represents a formidable bottleneck in the development of all civilizations, one so challenging that it thwarts their long-term survival?

This idea is at the heart of a research paper I recently published in Acta Astronautica. Could AI be the universe’s “great filter” – a threshold so hard to overcome that it prevents most life from evolving into space-faring civilizations?

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Not ideal!

In January, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk announced that his brain-computer interface startup Neuralink had successfully implanted a wireless brain chip into a human subject for the first time.

Over the next couple of months, 29-year-old Noland Arbaugh was shown moving a cursor with his mind, playing Civilization VI and even a fast-paced round of Mario Kart.

But as the Wall Street Journal reports, there have been complications behind the scenes. After it reached out to Neuralink, the company conceded in a blog post that there have been issues with the implant.

Continue reading “Neuralink Admits That Implant’s Threads Have Retracted From First Patient’s Brain, Possibly Due to Air in Skull” | >