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The Army has sent at least one “robot dog” armed with an artificial intelligence-enabled gun turret to the Middle East for testing as a fresh counter-drone capability for U.S. service members, service officials confirmed.

Photos published to the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service last…

The Army was testing at least one armed quadrupedal unmanned ground vehicle at an installation in Saudi Arabia.

Continue reading “Army Testing Robot Dogs Armed with Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Rifles in Middle East” »

Now a team of engineers and scientists from Caltech and the Keck School of Medicine of USC has developed a headset-based device that can be used to noninvasively assess a patient’s stroke risk by monitoring changes in blood flow and volume while a participant holds their breath.

Researchers in the lab of Caltech’s Changhuei Yang, along with colleagues from the Keck School of Medicine of USC, have developed a laser-based device that can measure blood flow noninvasively and differentiate stroke risk based on current physiological conditions.

Neural networks have a remarkable ability to learn specific tasks, such as identifying handwritten digits. However, these models often experience “catastrophic forgetting” when taught additional tasks: They can successfully learn the new assignments, but “forget” how to complete the original. For many artificial neural networks, like those that guide self-driving cars, learning additional tasks thus requires being fully reprogrammed.

Biological brains, on the other hand, are remarkably flexible. Humans and animals can easily learn how to play a new game, for instance, without having to re-learn how to walk and talk.

Inspired by the flexibility of human and animal brains, Caltech researchers have now developed a new type of algorithm that enables neural networks to be continuously updated with new data that they are able to learn from without having to start from scratch. The algorithm, called a functionally invariant path (FIP) algorithm, has wide-ranging applications from improving recommendations on online stores to fine-tuning self-driving cars.

Three patients are in “safe, deep remission” after receiving a CRISPR-Cas9-modified cell therapy for autoimmune disease treatment, according to a new published study in Cell.

New Stanford-led research unveils a hidden factor that could change our understanding of how oceans mitigate climate change. The study, published Oct. 11 in Science, reveals never-before seen mucus “parachutes” produced by microscopic marine organisms that significantly slow their sinking, putting the brakes on a process crucial for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Experiments on Google’s 67-qubit Sycamore processor showed operations entering a new “weak noise phase” in which calculations were complex enough to outperform supercomputers, based on benchmark testing.

Mamma bears press pause on their early pregnancies, so that their cubs are born closer to a food filled spring. Researchers led by a team in Germany have now found this same pregnancy pause button exists in human cells too.

“Although we have lost the ability to naturally enter dormancy, these experiments suggest that we have nevertheless retained this inner ability and could eventually unleash it,” says molecular geneticist Nicolas Rivron from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA).

“Triggering a dormant state during an IVF procedure could provide a larger time window to assess embryo health and to synchronize it with the mother for better implantation inside the uterus.”

How can afforestation/reforestation (AR) help reduce climate change and help achieve the goal of the Paris Agreement calling for a maximum 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels? This is what a recent study published in Nature Communications hopes to address as a team of researchers from Germany investigated how AR could contribute to meeting this goal. This study holds the potential to help researchers, climate scientists, legislators, and the public better understand the steps that can be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change, for both the short and long term.

In simple terms, afforestation/reforestation (AR) is planting trees in areas that have experienced deforestation (tree removal) or areas where trees never existed. For the study, the researchers used Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) to simulate how AR could contribute to the Paris Agreement goals by conducting more than 1,200 scenarios. In the end, the researchers found that AR contributions to climate change makes its biggest impact in 2052, along with decreasing average global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Finally, AR could also reduce the amount of time before average global temperatures exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius by 13 years.

“These results show that global AR can in fact make an important contribution to mitigating climate change, when applied at the large sale,” said Dr. Yiannis Moustakis, who is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilians Universität München and lead author of the study. “But it is not a panacea and must be viewed in a more comprehensive framework that takes socioeconomic trade-offs equally into account. Planting a forest could create jobs, revenue, and promote ecosystem services, but it could also deprive people’s livelihood, exacerbate poverty, financially or physically displace people, and disturb local food networks.”

If you haven’t seen them before, this is Zipline, the world’s leader in last mile delivery drones.

And their whole system is fascinating.

Zipline places docking stations all over a city…businesses can also install them inside, outside, or on the roof of their building.