Get information on the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) performs various activities related to aerospace as an organization, from basic research in the aerospace field to development and utilization.
High-speed drone racing has just had a shocking “Deep Blue” moment, as an autonomous AI designed by University of Zurich researchers repeatedly forced three world champion-level pilots to eat its dust, showing uncanny precision in dynamic flight.
If you’ve ever watched a high-level drone race from the FPV perspective, you’ll know how much skill, speed, precision and dynamic control it takes. Like watching Formula One from the driver’s perspective, or on-board footage from the Isle of Man TT, it’s hard to imagine how a human brain can make calculations that quickly and respond to changing situations in real time. It’s incredibly impressive.
When Deep Blue stamped silicon’s dominance on the world of chess, and AlphaGo established AI’s dominance in the game of Go, these were strategic situations, in which a computer’s ability to analyze millions of past games and millions of potential moves and strategies gave them the edge.
Scientists discovered that the harmful “forever chemicals” known as PFAS were present in paper and bamboo drinking straws.
Less than a year into the AI boom and startups are already grappling with what may become an industry reckoning.
Take Jasper, a buzzy AI startup that raised $125 million for a valuation of $1.5 billion last year — before laying off staff with a gloomy note from its CEO this summer.
Now, in a provocative new story, the Wall Street Journal fleshes out where the cracks are starting to form. Basically, monetizing AI is hard, user interest is leveling off or declining, and running the hardware behind these products is often very expensive — meaning that while the tech does sometimes offer a substantial “wow” factor, its path to a stable business model is looking rockier than ever.
The abilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems are advancing at an astounding rate, nearing or bettering what humans can do in simulations and test environments.
Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns around AI and those of autonomous drones for a minute, we can marvel at this latest feat: an AI-controlled drone system that beat three professional drone pilots in a series of head-to-head races, winning more often than not.
Swift is the name of the autonomous system, which outmaneuvered the world-champion human pilots in 15 of the 25 races, on a track full of sweeping turns and screeching pivots designed by a professional drone-racing pilot.
On Thursday, NASA released the first data maps from its new instrument launched to space earlier this year, which now is successfully transmitting information about major air pollutants over North America.
Posted in neuroscience
Amanda Gefter writes about how our body twitches during REM sleep affect our dreams, and the scientific theories about why we dream.
Scientists believe they have found an explanation for an “impossible” blast of energy that hit Earth.
Last year, scientists reported that they had seen evidence that gamma-ray bursts could come out of mergers between neutron stars and another compact object, in the form of a neutron star or black hole. That was previously thought not to be possible.
Scientists had initially thought that the 50-second blast came when a massive star collapsed, but further work looking at the afterglow of the emission showed that it was in fact a “kilonova”, which happens when neutron stars merge with other compact objects. Previously, it was thought that only a supernova could make a long gamma-ray burst of that kind.
We don’t come across papers that attempt to redefine reality very often.
Vitaly Vanchurin, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth, makes the particularly startling claim that we are living inside a vast neural network that controls everything around us in a paper that was recently uploaded to arXiv.
