Lifeboat Foundation

Let’s go behind the scenes. 🎬

Starting on July 15, a new video miniseries explores the intricate world of Hubble Space Telescope operations. What does it take to keep such a complex machine working for more than 30 years? In three episodes, “Hubble – Eye in the Sky” takes a never-before-seen look at how this groundbreaking space telescope operates.

#NASA #Hubble #EyeintheSky #video #documentary #new #astronomy #space #science #trailer

Google today announced that it has signed up Verizon as the newest customer of its Google Cloud Contact Center AI service, which aims to bring natural language recognition to the often inscrutable phone menus that many companies still use today (disclaimer: TechCrunch is part of the Verizon Media Group). For Google, that’s a major win, but it’s also a chance for the Google Cloud team to highlight some of the work it has done in this area. It’s also worth noting that the Contact Center AI product is a good example of Google Cloud’s strategy of packaging up many of its disparate technologies into products that solve specific problems.

“A big part of our approach is that machine learning has enormous power but it’s hard for people,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement. “Instead of telling people, ‘well, here’s our natural language processing tools, here is speech recognition, here is text-to-speech and speech-to-text — and why don’t you just write a big neural network of your own to process all that?’ Very few companies can do that well. We thought that we can take the collection of these things and bring that as a solution to people to solve a business problem. And it’s much easier for them when we do that and […] that it’s a big part of our strategy to take our expertise in machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and build domain-specific solutions for a number of customers.”

The company first announced Contact Center AI at its Cloud Next conference two years ago and it became generally available last November. The promise here is that it will allow businesses to build smarter contact center solutions that rely on speech recognition to provide customers with personalized support while it also allows human agents to focus on more complex issues. A lot of this is driven by Google Cloud’s Dialogflow tool for building conversational experiences across multiple channels.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a robotic gripper with the dexterity to handle thin objects like ropes and cables, the university announced. The technology could one day be used by robots to perform household tasks such as folding clothes, or for more technical purposes like wire shaping.

Humans can find it challenging to manipulate thin flexible objects, and doing so can be “nearly impossible” for robots, MIT spokeswoman Rachel Gordon said in an email. The standard approach had been for robots to use “a series of slow and incremental deformations,” plus mechanical fixtures, to handle these objects.

SpaceX has test-fired a Falcon 9 rocket for South Korea’s first military satellite launch on July 14.

As cells develop, changes in how our genes interact determines their fate. Differences in these genetic interactions can make our cells robust to infection from viruses or make it possible for our immune cells to kill cancerous ones.

Understanding how these gene associations work across the development of human tissue and organs is important for the creation of medical treatments for complex diseases as broad as cancer, developmental disorders, or heart disease.

A new technology called single-cell RNA-sequencing has made it possible to study the behavior of genes in human and mammal cells at an unprecedented resolution and promises to accelerate scientific and medical discoveries.

SPOCK looks into the future — and sees which distant worlds will survive.

July 13, 2020—Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Montana State University report today that they have found that placing sufficient strain in a 2-D material—tungsten diselenide (WSe2)—creates localized states that can yield single-photon emitters. Using sophisticated optical microscopy techniques developed at Columbia over the past three years, the team was able to directly image these states for the first time, revealing that even at room temperature they are highly tunable and act as quantum dots, tightly confined pieces of semiconductors that emit light.

“Our discovery is very exciting, because it means we can now position a single-photon emitter wherever we want, and tune its properties, such as the color of the emitted photon, simply by bending or straining the material at a specific location,” says James Schuck, associate professor of mechanical engineering, who co-led the study published today by Nature Nanotechnology. “Knowing just where and how to tune the single-photon emitter is essential to creating quantum optical circuitry for use in quantum computers, or even in so-called ‘quantum’ simulators that mimic physical phenomena far too complex to model with today’s computers.”

Developing quantum technologies such as quantum computers and quantum sensors is a rapidly developing field of research as researchers figure out how to use the unique properties of quantum physics to create devices that can be much more efficient, faster, and more sensitive than existing technologies. For instance, quantum information—think encrypted messages—would be much more secure.

I think so.

Will augs like in the video game Deus Ex ever be possible? Why or why not? If one day they are, what are the implications? We have a long way to go, and the more we try to control our system, the less we will have available to us in the future.

Continue reading “Are Robotic Human Augmentations Possible?” »

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), a recently-discovered visitor from distant parts of our Solar System, is putting on a spectacular nighttime display.