Weird now, but i do think most people will want humanoid robots faking emotions, to some degree, and on the far end people who will want them to try and mimic people exactly.
Columbia Engineering researchers use AI to teach robots to make appropriate reactive human facial expressions, an ability that could build trust between humans and their robotic co-workers and care-givers. (See video below.)
While our facial expressions play a huge role in building trust, most robots still sport the blank and static visage of a professional poker player.
When scientists first announced that they had read all of a person’s DNA 20 years ago, they were still missing some bits. Now, with the benefit of far better methods for reading DNA, it has finally been possible to read the whole thing from end to end.
Two decades after the first drafts of the human genome were published, new sequencing technologies mean it is finally complete – and could show us more than ever.
Summary: Disruptions in how the body converts cholesterol into bile acids may play a key role in the development of dementia.
Source: PLOS
The blood-brain barrier is impermeable to cholesterol, yet high blood cholesterol is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia. However, the underlying mechanisms mediating this relationship are poorly understood.
Falling drops usually make a splash, but these drops do the twist. Researchers have created surfaces that can make droplets spin and whirl at more than 7300 revolutions per minute when they rebound.
To make the water droplets spin, researchers first had to make sure they didn’t wet the surface they fell on—otherwise, they’d just splash. The researchers did this by coating alumina plates with a fluorinated nonstick coating, similar to those found in nonstick cooking pans. Next, they masked some regions of the surface and shone ultraviolet (UV) light on the entire plate. The regions exposed to the UV became highly “wettable,” meaning water touching those regions spread out immediately rather than bouncing back up. The team created several designs of the wettable regions, including one with spiral arms radiating out from a center, much like a pinwheel.
As the droplet bounds up from the patterned surface, the portions encountering the wettable spirals stick to the surface, whereas the parts of the droplet in contact with the water-repelling surface rebound immediately. This creates a set of unbalanced forces, pulling on the droplet more in some parts than in others, twisting it, the team reports today in.
Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research and guide research funding allocations.
An artificial intelligence system trained on almost 40 years of the scientific literature correctly identified 19 out of 20 research papers that have had the greatest scientific impact on biotechnology – and has selected 50 recent papers it predicts will be among the ‘top 5%’ of biotechnology papers in the future.1
Scientists say the system could be used to find ‘hidden gems’ of research overlooked by other methods, and even to guide decisions on funding allocations so that it will be most likely to target promising research.
But it’s sparked outrage among some members of the scientific community, who claim it will entrench existing biases.
Scientists have taken a step towards the creation of powerful devices that harness magnetic charge by creating the first ever three-dimensional replica of a material known as a spin-ice.
Spin ice materials are extremely unusual as they possess so-called defects which behave as the single pole of a magnet.
These single pole magnets, also known as magnetic monopoles, do not exist in nature; when every magnetic material is cut into two it will always create a new magnet with a north and south pole.
