As NASA returns to the Moon via the Artemis program, in an enhanced, sustainable way; the agency has selected five U.S. small businesses to receive a total of nearly $20 million to accelerate the development of novel lunar capabilities.
Pollution creates particulate matter (tiny floating particles) and aerosols that can be harmful to our health. With missions like the Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA), public health officials can start to map this particulate matter around the world, understand its effect on diseases, and know where the most risk is. In this month’s talk, we’ll chat with the instrument operations systems engineer for MAIA and discuss how vital positions like hers are for mission success and for making sure important data gets back to us on Earth.
Speaker: janelle wellons, instrument operations systems engineer, NASA/JPL
Host: brian white, public services office, NASA/JPL
Co-host: jocelyn argueta, public outreach specialist, NASA/JPL
Britain’s young teens will be vaccinated — but with a single dose.
London: Britain’s chief medical officers have said that vaccinating young teenagers against COVID-19 is justified when their mental health and education are taken into account.
Minors aged between 12 and 15 in England will be offered just a single dose of Pfizer or Moderna beginning next week, with more research ordered into whether a second dose should be given, as is currently administered to those aged 16 and above.
The decision by the CMOs brings the UK partly into line with countries like Australia, the United States, Israel and many European nations including France, which are already offering the jab to minors.
The Third Revolution in Warfare
Posted in military, robotics/AI
First there was gunpowder. Then nuclear weapons. Next: artificially intelligent weapons.
LOD, Israel — An Israeli defense contractor on Monday unveiled a remote-controlled armed robot it says can patrol battle zones, track infiltrators and open fire. The unmanned vehicle is the latest addition to the world of drone technology, which is rapidly reshaping the modern battlefield.
Proponents say such semi-autonomous machines allow armies to protect their soldiers, while critics fear this marks another dangerous step toward robots making life-or-death decisions.
The four-wheel-drive robot presented Monday was developed by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries’ “REX MKII.”
Automation will drag on at the normal pace. 2025 i think will be the key year, where Human Level hands could turn up on the humanoid robots, and an early phase of Human Level AI turns up; if those 2 things happen automation of jobs will really start to move fast.
Ask for a roast beef sandwich at an Arby’s drive-thru east of Los Angeles and you may be talking to Tori — an artificially intelligent voice assistant that will take your order and send it to the line cooks.
“It doesn’t call sick,” says Amir Siddiqi, whose family installed the AI voice at its Arby’s franchise this year in Ontario, California. “It doesn’t get corona. And the reliability of it is great.”
The pandemic didn’t just threaten Americans’ health when it slammed the U.S. in 2020 — it may also have posed a long-term threat to many of their jobs. Faced with worker shortages and higher labor costs, companies are starting to automate service sector jobs that economists once considered safe, assuming that machines couldn’t easily provide the human contact they believed customers would demand.
The results showed that calves performed at a similar level to children when learning to potty-train, and did better than very young children.
If you can potty-train a child, you can potty-train a cow. At least, that was the theory a group of researchers in Germany decided to test, in a bid to find a solution to the environmental damage caused by livestock waste.
“It’s usually assumed that cattle are not capable of controlling defecation or urination,” said Jan Langbein, co-author of a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
Farmed cattle produce roughly 66–88 pounds of feces and 8 gallons of urine each day and are free to relieve themselves where they please. However, the spread of their waste into the soil can have negative effects on the environment.
The active manipulation of sound waves replaces physical with virtual media to create acoustic invisibility and illusions.
Designing neuromorphic hardware for cryoelectronics is an important area of research as the field of computing paradigms beyond complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) progresses. Superconductivity and metal−insulator transitions are two of the most celebrated emergent, collective properties found in quantum materials such as strongly correlated oxides. Here, we present simulations of artificial neural networks that can be designed by combining superconducting devices (e.g. Josephson junctions) with Mott metal−insulator transition−based tunable resistor devices. Our simulations show that 1) neurons and synapses can be seamlessly created, 2) their functions can be tuned via learning, and 3) controlling disorder by incorporating light ions enables exponential multiplicity of states. The results open up directions for incorporating emergent behavior seen in condensed matter into hardware design for artificial intelligence.
Neuromorphic computing—which aims to mimic the collective and emergent behavior of the brain’s neurons, synapses, axons, and dendrites—offers an intriguing, potentially disruptive solution to society’s ever-growing computational needs. Although much progress has been made in designing circuit elements that mimic the behavior of neurons and synapses, challenges remain in designing networks of elements that feature a collective response behavior. We present simulations of networks of circuits and devices based on superconducting and Mott-insulating oxides that display a multiplicity of emergent states that depend on the spatial configuration of the network. Our proposed network designs are based on experimentally known ways of tuning the properties of these oxides using light ions. We show how neuronal and synaptic behavior can be achieved with arrays of superconducting Josephson junction loops, all within the same device.