Lifeboat Foundation

An instrument designed to detect seismic activity on Mars has just revealed an incredibly cool new ability, detecting faint tremors from meteorites impacting the red planet.

By combining data collected from the NASA’s Mars InSight lander with information from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter researchers have successfully linked those ground-shaking booms with freshly formed craters.

Not only does this help us understand the impact processes that continue to shape Martian geology, it demonstrates how collecting seismic data can reveal information beyond expected mission parameters. This may help inform future exploration of other worlds.

With the advent of generative image AI, a new discipline is emerging: prompt engineering. Search engines like Krea provide inspiration.

Prompts are the short text descriptions that an image AI like DALL-E 2, Midjourney or Stable Diffusion uses to generate an image.

Often it is difficult to put the idea you have in mind into fitting words. Moreover, the AI may execute instructions differently than you want it to. And there are plenty of modifiers, for example for image cropping or style, that can lead to very different results for the otherwise same prompt.

ERNIE-ViLG, the new text-to-image AI developed by Baidu can generate images that show Chinese objects and celebrities more accurately than existing AIs. But a built-in censorship mechanism will filter out politically sensitive words.

A 7.6-magnitude earthquake shook the Pacific coast of central Mexico Monday, killing at least one person, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Advancing the frontiers of machine learning.

Scientific publishers such as the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and Taylor & Francis have begun attempting to detect fraud in academic paper submissions with an AI image-checking program called Proofig, reports The Register. Proofig, a product of an Israeli firm of the same name, aims to help use “artificial intelligence, computer vision and image processing to review image integrity in scientific publications,” according to the company’s website.

During a trial that ran from January 2021 to May 2022, AACR used Proofig to screen 1,367 papers accepted for publication, according to The Register. Of those, 208 papers required author contact to clear up issues such as mistaken duplications, and four papers were withdrawn.

In particular, many journals need help detecting image duplication fraud in Western blots, which are a specific style of protein-detection imagery consisting of line segments of various widths. Subtle differences in a blot’s appearance can translate to dramatically different conclusions about test results, and many cases of academic fraud have seen unscrupulous researchers duplicate, crop, stretch, and rotate Western blots to make it appear like they have more (or different) data than they really do. Detecting duplicate images can be tedious work for human eyes, which is why some firms like Proofig and ImageTwin, a German firm, are attempting to automate the process.

Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and hummers — all have electric equivalents. Governments, including the one running the United States, are improving infrastructure, offering tax incentives, and enacting policies aimed at getting more electric vehicles on the road. And modern-day industrial icons like Elon Musk, who obviously has a vested interest in the electric car’s success, constantly promote the concept. Musk recently published a tweet that likened internal combustion engines to the steam engine — an archaic method of producing mechanical power.

Parting the veil of mystery on quantum superposition using waves. Professor Phil Moriarty takes us through it.

Phil’s blogpost on the subject: https://muircheartblog.wpcomstaging.com/2021/10/26/superposi…erstition/

Continue reading “Superposition in Quantum Computers — Computerphile” »

The probe launched weeks after its sibling craft, Voyager 2. Since its launch, it got a close encounter with an intriguing moon and entered interstellar space.