A robotic artist powered by AI algorithms has created realistic self-portraits that question the limits of artificial intelligence and what it means to be human.
Today we discuss Mars surface conditions with the villain from a 90s Kid’s movie. I also get mad (but not in a technical way). Apologies for this one.
The next one will be on Space Guns and Jules Verne which is more fitting for the channel.
Last month, the United States Air Force successfully test flew an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called Skyborg, operating on an autonomous hardware/software suite, for the very first time.
The military aims for this UAV to fuel collaboration among manned and unmanned aircraft. For its first test run, the Skyborg suite flew aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 Mako air vehicle in the first step of what’s known as the Autonomous Attritable Aircraft Experimentation Campaign.
By and large, the US Air Force Research Laboratory seeks a UAV solution that can carry out all of the functions of a manned aerial vehicle but also with the option of manned operation.
Wines and table grapes exist thanks to a genetic exchange so rare that it’s only happened twice in nature in the last 6 million years. And since the domestication of the grapevine 8000 years ago, breeding has continued to be a gamble.
When today’s growers cultivate new varieties – trying to produce better-tasting and more disease-resistant grapes – it takes two to four years for breeders to learn whether they have the genetic ingredients for the perfect flower.
Females set fruit, but produce sterile pollen. Males have stamens for pollen, but lack fruit. The perfect flower, however, carries both sex genes and can self-pollinate. These hermaphroditic varieties generally yield bigger and better-tasting berry clusters, and they’re the ones researchers use for additional cross-breeding.
Scientists at UC Santa Cruz led a team of researchers from 30 institutions across North America in analyzing data from 3212 camera traps to show how human disturbance could be shifting the makeup of mammal communities.
The new study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, builds upon the team’s prior work observing how wildlife in the Santa Cruz Mountains respond to human disturbance. Local observations, for example, have shown that species like pumas and bobcats are less likely to be active in areas where humans are present, while deer and wood rats become bolder and more active. But it’s difficult to generalize findings like these across larger geographic areas because human-wildlife interactions are often regionally unique.
So, to get a continent-wide sense for which species of mammals might be best equipped to live alongside humans, the team combined their local camera trap data with that of researchers throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. This allowed them to track 24 species across 61 regionally diverse camera trap projects to see which larger trends emerged.
New battery cells developed by Australia’s Graphene Manufacturing Group and the University of Queensland are said to charge up to 70 times faster than lithium-ion cells and have triple the battery life.
With machine learning, astrophysicists can now simulate vast, complex universes in a fraction of the time it takes with conventional methods.
Researchers have, for the first time, decoded the neural signals associated with writing letters, then displayed typed versions of these letters in real time. They hope their invention could one day help people with paralysis communicate.
Computer science researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) program that can detect sarcasm in social media.
Zinc-air batteries (ZABs) are among the most promising next-generation battery technologies due to their many advantageous characteristics. Most notably, these batteries have unique half-open structures, a significant theoretical energy density (1086 and 1370 Wh kg−1 when including and excluding oxygen, respectively), flexible electrodes and an inherently aqueous electrolyte. Moreover, in contrast with other materials used in batteries, Zinc (Zn) is less harmful for the environment and more abundant.
Researchers at Hanyang University in South Korea recently designed a new type of zinc-air pouch cell that can outperform other commercially available battery technologies. These pouch cells, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, use (101)-facet copper phosphosulfide [CPS(101)] as a cathode, anti-freezing chitosan-biocellulosics as super-ionic conductor electrolytes, and patterned Zn as the anode.
“Previous ZABs employing liquid (6 M KOH) electrolytes failed because of the sluggish kinetics for the oxygen reduction and evolution reactions (ORR/OER) and irreversibility of Zn accompanying the parasitic reactions over wide temperatures,” Jung-Ho Lee, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “This feature inspired us to develop solid-state electrolytes, such as functionalized biocellulose, capable of transferring OH- ions effectively without parasitic reactions.”
