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For the first time, researchers have created a metasurface lens that uses a piezoelectric thin film to change focal length when a small voltage is applied. Because it is extremely compact and lightweight, the new lens could be useful for portable medical diagnostic instruments, drone-based 3D mapping and other applications where miniaturization can open new possibilities.

“This type of low-power, ultra-compact varifocal lens could be used in a wide range of sensor and imaging technologies where system size, weight and cost are important,” said research project leader Christopher Dirdal from SINTEF Smart Sensors and Microsystems in Norway. “In addition, introducing precision tunability to metasurfaces opens up completely new ways to manipulate light.”

Dirdal and colleagues describe the new technology in the journal Optics Letters. To change , a voltage is applied over lead zirconate titanate (PZT) membranes causing them to deform. This, in turn, shifts the distance between two metasurface lenses.

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The most valuable science prizes courtesy of Yuri Milner et al; check it out and poss apply?

Knowledge is humanity’s greatest asset. It defines our nature, and it will shape our future. The body of knowledge is assembled over centuries.

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AI may be “slightly conscious”

The Chief Scientist and Co-Founder of OpenAI, one of the leading research labs for artificial intelligence, has suggested that the latest generation of neural networks are large enough to be “slightly conscious”.

Ilya Sutskever has made several major contributions to the field of deep learning. This includes beta testing of GPT-3 prior to its release. In a 2020 paper, he and his team concluded that the language model, featuring 175 billion parameters, “can generate samples of news articles which human evaluators have difficulty distinguishing from articles written by humans.”

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Objective Collapse Theories offer a explanation of quantum mechanics that is at once brand new and based in classical mechanics. In the world of quantum mechanics, it’s no big deal for particles to be in multiple different states at the same time, or to teleport between locations, or to influence each other faster than light. But somehow, none of this strangeness makes its way to the familiar scale of human beings — even though our world is made entirely of quantum-weird building blocks. The explanations of this transition range from the mystical influence of the conscious mind to the grandiose proposition of multiple realities. But Objective Collapse Theories feels as down to earth as the classical world that we’re trying to explain. Let’s see if it makes any sense.

Continue reading “Is The Wave Function The Building Block of Reality?” | >

A revolutionary pacemaker that re-establishes the heart’s naturally irregular beat is set to be trialed in New Zealand heart patients this year, following successful animal trials.

“Currently, all pacemakers pace the heart metronomically, which means a very steady, even pace. But when you record heart rate in a healthy individual, you see it is constantly on the move,” says Professor Julian Paton, a lead researcher and director of Manaaki Manawa, the Centre for Heart Research at the University of Auckland.

Manaaki Manawa has led the research and the results have just been published in the leading journal Basic Research in Cardiology.

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A team of researchers from Japan’s RIKEN Guardian Robot Project has created an android child called Nikola capable of successfully displaying six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust.

While the android child is definitely not at the Ex Machina level, the project, led by Wataru Sato from RIKEN, is significant since it’s the first time the quality of these six android-expressed emotions has been examined and validated.

How does it work?

The humanoid robot is equipped with 29 pneumatic actuators that control the movements of artificial muscles within its face. It also uses six extra actuators to move its head and eyeballs, making it even more life-like.

Continue reading “Scientists develop an ‘android child’ that can convey six facial expressions” | >