Sony says it’ll keep the camera steady, even when it’s windy.
Sony has announced its first drone, which is designed for video professionals. It can fly many of Sony’s mirrorless cameras, reportedly stay steady in wind, and costs $9000 without the gimbal.
A detailed concept for a lunar habitat, created by one of the world’s leading architectural firms with ESA technical support, is currently on show at the Biennale in Venice. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, originator of many of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, worked with ESA on a semi-inflatable habitat design which could be part of a long-term vision for an international Moon settlement.
The resulting design is on show at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. While the theme of the overall exhibition is ‘How will we live together?’, the SOM installation is called ‘Life Beyond Earth’, peering beyond our post-COVID-19 planet to show how human life can be sustained in the hostile space environment.
Quantum computing began in the early 1980s. It operates on principles of quantum physics rather than the limitations of circuits and electricity which is why it is capable of processing highly complex mathematical problems so efficiently. Quantum computing could one day achieve things that classical computing simply cannot. The evolution of quantum computers has been slow, but things are accelerating, thanks to the efforts of academic institutions such as Oxford, MIT, and the University of Waterloo, as well as companies like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Honeywell.
IBM has held a leadership role in this innovation push and has named optimization as the most likely application for consumers and organizations alike.
Honeywell expects to release what it calls the “world’s most powerful quantum computer” for applications like fraud detection, optimization for trading strategies, security, machine learning, and chemistry and materials science.
IBM has released a toolkit designed to help developers measure uncertainty in an AI and machine learning model.
Interactive Brokers — seen as the e-broker with some of the most sophisticated clientele — is slated to start trading cryptocurrencies on its platform in the coming months.
“Customers certainly are asking for [crypto trading] and we expect to be ready to offer it to them by the end of the summer,” Interactive Brokers Chairman and CEO Thomas Peterffy said Wednesday at the Piper Sandler Global Exchange & FinTech Conference.
Investors, both retail and institutional, have poured into bitcoin and other digital assets in 2021. Bitcoin’s price has soared to above $34000 from the $9000 in June of 2020. The price of bitcoin has experienced wild volatility recently due to headlines on a China crackdown, Elon Musk and investors taking excessive risk.
In their decades-long chase to create artificial intelligence, computer scientists have designed and developed all kinds of complicated mechanisms and technologies to replicate vision, language, reasoning, motor skills, and other abilities associated with intelligent life. While these efforts have resulted in AI systems that can efficiently solve specific problems in limited environments, they fall short of developing the kind of general intelligence seen in humans and animals.
In a new paper submitted to the peer-reviewed Artificial Intelligence journal, scientists at U.K.-based AI lab DeepMind argue that intelligence and its associated abilities will emerge not from formulating and solving complicated problems but by sticking to a simple but powerful principle: reward maximization.
Titled “Reward is Enough,” the paper, which is still in pre-proof as of this writing, draws inspiration from studying the evolution of natural intelligence as well as drawing lessons from recent achievements in artificial intelligence. The authors suggest that reward maximization and trial-and-error experience are enough to develop behavior that exhibits the kind of abilities associated with intelligence. And from this, they conclude that reinforcement learning, a branch of AI that is based on reward maximization, can lead to the development of artificial general intelligence.
Circa 2020 o,.o.
Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic properties, dialing them from insulating, through semiconducting, all the way to highly conductive, or metallic. This can be induced dynamically and reversed at will, with no degradation of the diamond material.
The research, though still at an early proof-of-concept stage, may open up a wide array of potential applications, including new kinds of broadband solar cells, highly efficient LEDs and power electronics, and new optical devices or quantum sensors, the researchers say.
Their findings, which are based on simulations, calculations, and previous experimental results, are reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is by MIT Professor Ju Li and graduate student Zhe Shi; Principal Research Scientist Ming Dao; Professor Subra Suresh, who is president of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore as well as former dean of engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor Emeritus at MIT; and Evgenii Tsymbalov and Alexander Shapeev at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Moscow.
In a major scientific leap, University of Queensland researchers have created a quantum microscope that can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.
This paves the way for applications in biotechnology, and could extend far beyond this into areas ranging from navigation to medical imaging.
The microscope is powered by the science of quantum entanglement, an effect Einstein described as “spooky interactions at a distance.”
Summary: Higher sugar diets during childhood increase the risk for obesity, cognitive impairments, and attention deficits as adults, a new study reports.
Source: Queensland University of Technology.
Children who consume too much sugar could be at greater risk of becoming obese, hyperactive, and cognitively impaired, as adults, according to the results of a new study of mice led by QUT and published by Frontiers in Neuroscience.
