No person or animal was injured by the falling objects, but it’s scary to think about how these pieces could have fallen in more populated areas. Yet, astrophysicist Dr. Brad Tucker says incidents…
Automated detection and manual moderation of online abuse and threats to internet users are limited in their ability to adapt to complex threats at scale.
A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.
FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.
Continue reading “In the Age of AI (full documentary) | FRONTLINE” »
From the smallest bacterium to the greatest galaxy, death looms on the horizon; even if, in cosmic terms, the time scales are too large for us to truly comprehend. Eventually, even the Universe itself should come to an end – when the last light winks out, and the cold, dense lumps of dead stars are all that remain.
That is, at least, how it is under current cosmological models. What if our Universe doesn’t die a cold death, but collapses, reinflates, and collapses again, over and over, like a giant cosmic lung?
It’s not exactly a widely accepted theory, but for some cosmologists, our Universe could be just one in a long series of births, deaths and rebirths that is without beginning or end – not a Big Bang, but a Big Bounce.
When Carnegie Mellon University doctoral candidates I-Hsuan Kao and Ryan Muzzio started working together a switch flicked on. Then off.
Working in the Department of Physics’ Lab for Investigating Quantum Materials, Interfaces and Devices (LIQUID) Group, Kao, Muzzio and other research partners were able to show proof of concept that running an electrical current through a novel two-dimensional material could control the magnetic state of a neighboring magnetic material without the need of applying an external magnetic field.
The groundbreaking work, which was published in Nature Materials in June and has a related patent pending, has potential applications for data storage in consumer products such as digital cameras, smartphones and laptops.
Could let computers work at warp speed, save energy, and even make trains fly. Scientists have used DNA to overcome a nearly insurmountable obstacle to engineering materials that will revolutionize electronics. Published in the journal Science on July 28, the work was performed by researchers at th.
A team of researchers from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China and Nanyang Technological University and the Agency for Science Technology and Research in Singapore developed an artificial neuron that is able to communicate using the neurotransmitter dopamine. They published their creation and expected uses for it in the journal Nature Electronics.
In 2017, Stanford University researchers presented a new device that mimics the brain’s efficient and low-energy neural learning process. It was an artificial version of a synapse—the gap across which neurotransmitters travel to communicate between neurons—made from organic materials. In 2019, the researchers assembled nine of their artificial synapses together in an array, showing that they could be simultaneously programmed to mimic the parallel operation of the brain.
Now, in a paper published June 15 in Nature Materials, they have tested the first biohybrid version of their artificial synapse and demonstrated that it can communicate with living cells. Future technologies stemming from this device could function by responding directly to chemical signals from the brain. The research was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology—IIT) in Italy and at Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands).
“This paper really highlights the unique strength of the materials that we use in being able to interact with living matter,” said Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford and co-senior author of the paper. “The cells are happy sitting on the soft polymer. But the compatibility goes deeper: These materials work with the same molecules neurons use naturally.”
US laser tank SHOCKED russians /
The American robots are here and they’re better than the Russian military in many ways. Video after video, we’ve seen Russian tanks roasting from Ukrainian fire — events that, in theory, wouldn’t happen if the Russian military had the robotic tanks that the US now has. These robotic tanks could change modern warfare as we know it and reduce casualty rates to the lowest in history, particularly the laser-guided-weapon-wielding M113 tank and every tank born of the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle program — as those have been in the news lately for all the right reasons.
Skyrmions are ultra-stable atomic objects first discovered in real materials in 2009, which have more recently also been found also to exist at room temperatures. These unique objects have a number of desirable properties, including a substantially small threshold voltage, nanoscale sizes and easy electrical manipulation.
While these properties could be advantageous for the creation of a wide range of electronics, developing functional all–electrical devices using skyrmions has so far proved to be very challenging. One possible application for skyrmions is in neuromorphic computing, which entails the creation of artificial structures that resemble those observed in the human brain.
With this in mind, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have recently investigated the possibility of using skyrmions to replicate mechanisms observed in the human brain. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, shows that these ultra-stable atomic structures can be used to mimic some behaviors of biological synapses, which are junctions between neurons through which nerve impulses are passed on to different parts of the human brain.
The second law of thermodynamics explains why some events in nature can never run in reverse, despite the fact that they do not violate other laws of physics. For example, you can crack an egg, yet that cracked egg will never spontaneously put itself back together. Interestingly, if an egg were to uncrack itself, it would not violate the conservation of energy, which states that the total energy content of a system must always remain the same. Obviously eggs don’t randomly put themselves back together, and many other events usually only move in one direction. The second law of thermodynamics explains why this occurs through the concept of entropy. Entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder. If your room is messy, you can say it has high entropy. If your room is tidy, it has low entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of entropy in a closed system will always increase. Thus, the total amount of disorder in the universe will always increase. Although some processes do go from a high entropy state to a low entropy state, interactions with the environment will always result in a net increase of entropy. For example, a living organism is fairly organized, and so it would have low entropy. However, the way that organism interacts with its environment will increase the total amount of entropy. The second law explains why some events, such as uncracking an egg, can never occur because the total amount of entropy must always be increasing. Entropy also explains how heat moves from warm objects to cold objects. When you leave your coffee out for too long, it inevitably gets colder. That’s because heat can only move from hot to cold, and never in reverse. This occurs because entropy must always increase.
The concept of entropy, and the fact that most things in the universe only occur in one direction, has interesting implications for the flow of time. Time is a poorly understood aspect of our universe. Even the smartest scientists have a hard time providing a good definition for what time actually is. We humans generally perceive time as the passage of events. The past is composed of events that once occurred, the present is events that are occurring, and the future is events that have yet to occur. However, why does time seem to only flow in one direction? As far as scientists know, there are no laws of physics that state time must always move forward. Time obviously only runs in one direction, a concept called the arrow of time. The second law of thermodynamics may actually provide a reason for why there seems to be an arrow of time. Since entropy and disorder must always increase as a whole in the cosmos, events will only occur in one direction, and never in reverse.
