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Oct 26, 2020

No Implants Needed For Precise Control Deep Into The Brain

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics, neuroscience

“This is kind of a nice bookend to 16 years of research,” says Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Stanford University. “It took years and years for us to sort out how to make it work.”

“The result is described this month in the journal Nature Biotechnology.”

“Optogenetics involves genetically engineering animal brains to express light-sensitive proteins—called opsins—in the membranes of neurons.”

Continue reading “No Implants Needed For Precise Control Deep Into The Brain” »

Oct 26, 2020

Elon Musk extends thanks to FSD beta testers for giving valuable real-world data

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI, transportation

Elon Musk has extended his thanks to Tesla owners who received the company’s limited Full Self-Driving beta last week. The information Tesla is gathering from early access FSD beta testers will be invaluable as the company’s AI team continues to enhance and refine the EV automaker’s autonomous driving software.

The founder of Tesla Owners Club Vancouver Islands James Locke asked Elon Musk about his view on the content early access FSD testers were sharing. “Yes, very helpful,” said the Tesla CEO. “Thanks to all beta testers.”

Last week, Musk announced that Tesla plans to roll out the FSD beta to the general public later this year. Tesla will need all the information it can get to make sure that the full release of the Full Self-Driving beta goes smoothly.

Oct 26, 2020

Israeli, American scientists reach breakthrough in brain research

Posted by in categories: innovation, neuroscience

While it may not immediately sound like a dramatic feat, it could open up completely new possibilities in the field of neurological research.

“This is a problem that everyone dreams of solving,” Dr. Sinefeld said, referring to the difficulty in successfully examining thick brain tissue, especially through adult fish scales.

Dr. David Sinefeld (Credit: Jerusalem College of Technology)
Dr. David Sinefeld (Credit: Jerusalem College of Technology)

Oct 26, 2020

Why the sky is no limit for RAF’s space ambitions

Posted by in categories: climatology, finance, military, space

Like its key allies, the UK is increasingly reliant on space-based assets for daily life in ordinary civil society and for the perfornance of its military forces. So, the Royal Air Force’s operating domain now extends from the ground to far beyond the atmosphere.

In a lockdown summer of downbeat aviation news, it is perhaps fitting that a highlight was a model aeroplane in a windtunnel. In turbulent times for aerospace, that aircraft is even named after a storm. But in showing some detail of the external shape of the Tempest future fighter, BAE Systems has also emphasised the UK’s determination to ride out the technological, financial and geopolitical hurricanes which are set to shape the national defence challenges of the next few decades.

Those late August images from BAE’s Warton, Lancashire test facility reveal an external profile designed for stealth at Mach 2, to carry a wide range of payloads and to cope with the internal heat from enough onboard electric power to anticipate exotic technologies like laser directed-energy weapons.

Oct 26, 2020

Samsung, Stanford make a 10,000PPI display that could lead to ‘flawless’ VR

Posted by in categories: electronics, virtual reality

Samsung and Stanford have developed a 10,000PPI OLED screen that could lead to completely seamless VR displays.

Oct 26, 2020

Researchers suggest AI can learn common sense from animals

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

AI practitioners can draw lessons from scientists working with animals to train reinforcement learning agents, a recent paper found.

Oct 26, 2020

Rare, 2-headed snake discovered by Florida house cat

Posted by in category: futurism

A rare, two-headed racer snake turned up in Florida, after being caught by a curious house cat.

Oct 26, 2020

Say goodbye to the beloved banana

Posted by in categories: food, genetics

This doesn’t sound good. 🙁


Those bananas you love are Cavendish bananas, and they’re probably about to go extinct.

Oct 26, 2020

Are drone deliveries the answer for supply chains in Africa?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, drones

Article from CNN. I didn’t expect drones would have so much impact all over the world.

It’s good to see that it’s helping people in Africa.


Drones have been transforming logistics in parts of Africa, especially for the delivery of medical products.

Continue reading “Are drone deliveries the answer for supply chains in Africa?” »

Oct 26, 2020

Google AI Introduces Performer: A Generalized Attention Framework based on the Transformer architecture

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI

Transformer model, a deep learning framework, has achieved state-of-the-art results across diverse domains, including natural language, conversation, images, and even music. The core block of any Transformer architecture is the attention module, which computes similarity scores for all pairs of positions in an input sequence. Since it requires quadratic computation time and quadratic memory size of the storing matrix, with the increase in the input sequence’s length, its efficiency decreases.

Thus, for long-range attention, one of the most common methods is sparse attention. It reduces the complexity by computing selective similarity scores from the sequence, based on various methods. There are still certain limitations like unavailability of efficient sparse-matrix multiplication operations on all accelerators, lack of theoretical guarantees, insufficiency to address the full range of problems, etc.