The Human Brain Project wraps up in September after a decade. It had notable achievements and a troubled past.
Top technology stories: US government launches new AI cybersecurity challenge; China outlines new rules for facial recognition technology; How to make AI more energy efficient.
A research team co-led by a physicist from City University of Hong Kong accurately measured the change in a nucleic acid induced by salt, temperature change and stretching force.
In this video, YouTuber Integza invents a bladeless jet engine using a Dyson fan. In fact, the fan he uses is so bladeless that it actually looks like a lamp.
Researchers have discovered that graphene.
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.
Whole-body manipulation is a strength of humans but a weakness of robots. The robot interprets each possible contact point between the box and the carrier’s fingers, arms, or torso as a separate contact event. This task becomes difficult to prepare for as soon as one considers the billions of possible contact events. Now, MIT researchers can streamline this technique, called contact-rich manipulation planning. An artificial intelligence approach called smoothing is used to reduce the number of judgments needed to find a good manipulation plan for the robot from the vast number of contact occurrences.
New developments in RL have demonstrated amazing results in manipulating through contact-rich dynamics, something that was previously challenging to achieve using model-based techniques. While these techniques were effective, it has yet to be known why they succeeded while model-based approaches failed. The overarching objective is to grasp and make sense of these factors from a model-based vantage point. Based on these understandings, scientists work to merge RL’s empirical success with the models’ generalizability and efficacy.
The hybrid nature of contact dynamics presents the greatest challenge to planning through touch from a model-based perspective. Since the ensuing dynamics are non-smooth, the Taylor approximation is no longer valid locally, and the linear model built using the gradient quickly breaks down. Since both iterative gradient-based optimization and sampling-based planning use local distance metrics, the local model’s invalidity poses serious difficulties for both. In response to these problems, numerous publications have attempted to take contact modes into account by either listing them or providing examples of them. These planners, who have a model-based understanding of the dynamic modes, often switch between continuous-state planning in the current contact mode and a discrete search for the next mode, leading to trajectories with a few-mode shifts here and there.
2023 Cryonics Institute AGM
Posted in cryonics, life extension
YOU’RE INVITED! — OPEN TO CI MEMBERS, NON-MEMBERS AND THE GENERAL PUBLIC2023 Cryonics Institute Annual General MeetingSUNDAY — SEPT 10, 2023AGM Location: Infinity Hall & Sidebar 16,650 E 14 Mile RoadFraser, MI 48026phone: 586–879-6157website: infinityhallsidebar.com2023 AGM DetailsSunday, September 10, 2023Event start time: 3:00 pm Eastern TimeEvent end time: 6:30 pmFacility ToursTours of the Main and new […].
Using natural quantum interactions allows faster, more robust computation for Grover’s algorithm and many others.
Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists have developed a groundbreaking quantum computing.
Performing computation using quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement.
The discovery overturns more than a century of physics orthodoxy by identifying a new form of energy that can be extracted from ambient heat using graphene.
Graphene is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a single layer of atoms in a two-dimensional hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes of carbon, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes, and fullerenes. In proportion to its thickness, it is about 100 times stronger than the strongest steel.
Vaccinations against tetanus and diphtheria, pneumococcus, and herpes zoster (HZ)- better known as shingles, are linked to a reduced risk of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The corresponding study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Viral, bacterial, and fungal infections increase the risk of neuroinflammation, which may cause or exacerbate neurodegeneration and dementia. Vaccines may thus reduce neurodegeneration and dementia risk by reducing the risk of infection. Previous research, for example, shows that people who receive at least one influenza vaccine are 40% less likely than unvaccinated peers to develop AD.
Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends older adults receive vaccines against tetanus, diphtheria and herpes zoster, and pneumococcus. The researchers behind the current study thus sought to see how these common vaccines may affect AD risk.