While getting shots or blood work isn’t anyone’s idea of fun, roughly 10 to 20 percent of American adults suffer from trypanophobia, the extreme fear of hypodermic needles and injections. This phobia can prevent people from partaking in routine medical exams, receiving life-saving vaccines or even properly managing their blood-glucose levels (should they suffer from diabetes). However, a pair of novel injection systems offers the promise of putting those critical medicines into our bodies without ever breaking the skin.
In a preprint paper, Microsoft researchers describe a machine learning system that reasons out the correct actions to take directly from camera images. It’s trained via simulation and learns to independently navigate environments and conditions in the real world, including unseen situations, which makes it a fit for robots deployed in search and rescue missions. Someday, it could help those robots more quickly identify people in need of help.
“We wanted to push current technology to get closer to a human’s ability to interpret environmental cues, adapt to difficult conditions and operate autonomously,” wrote the researchers in a blog post published this week. “We were interested in exploring the question of what it would take to build autonomous systems that achieve similar performance levels.”
In a multiyear effort involving three national laboratories from across the United States, researchers have successfully built and tested a powerful new magnet based on an advanced superconducting material. The eight-ton device—about as long as a semi-truck trailer—set a record for the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet and raises the standard for magnets operating in high-energy particle colliders.
The Department of Energy’s Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed, built and tested the new magnet, one of 16 they will provide for operation in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Europe. The 16 magnets, along with another eight produced by CERN, serve as “optics” for charged particles: They will focus beams of protons into a tiny, infinitesimal spot as they approach collision inside two different particle detectors.
Stellar streams are long, thin filaments of stars orbiting galaxies, produced by the stretching action of tidal forces. For astronomers, observation of these structures could be crucial to test various galaxy formation models.
Located most likely some 420 light-years away in the Milky Way’s disk, Pisces–Eridanus (or Psc–Eri for short) is a cylindrically shaped stream of almost 1,400 identified stars distributed across about 2,300 light-years. Due to its relative proximity and population size, it is perceived as an excellent laboratory to study star formation and test theories of chemical and dynamical evolution of stellar systems.
Intel Corp. is releasing an experimental research system for neuromorphic computing, a cutting-edge method that simulates the way human brains work to perform computations faster, using significantly less energy.
The system, called Pohoiki Springs, will be made available this month over the cloud to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community, which includes academic researchers, government labs and about a dozen companies such as Accenture PLC and Airbus SE.
Analysis: there have been reports of recent incursions of Russian bombers like the Tupolev TU–95 in airspace controlled by Ireland
There have been a number of recent incursions into Irish controlled airspace by the Russian air force. Most recently Tupolev TU–95, the so called “Bear” strategic bomber aircraft, triggered UK Royal Air Force fighter jets to scramble in order to confront the Russian aircraft. Reliable sources indicate that there is an agreement between the UK and Ireland permitting the Royal Air Force to enter Irish airspace if deemed necessary, though the specific nature of this arrangement is not clear.
I hadn’t seen anything about this thing in about 5+ years, and it was pretty bad back then. Now they have it singing, although i’d like to just see it talking or trying to hold a conversation. Anyhow, the Mouth of your future humanoid robot:
The Prayer is presented in the show “Neurons, Simulated Intelligence”, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, curated by Frédéric Migayrou and Camille Lenglois from 26 February — 26 April 2020. The Prayer is an art-installation that tries to explore the supernatural through artificial intelligence with a long-term experimental set up. A robot — installation operates a talking mouth, that is part of a computer system, creating and voicing prayers, that are generated in every very moment by the self-learning system itself, exploring ‘the divine’ the supernatural or ‘the noumenal’ as the mystery of ‘the unknown’, using deep learning. How would a divine epiphany appear to an artificial intelligence? The focus of the project could maybe shed light on the difference between humans and AI machines in the debate about mind and matter and allows a speculative stance on the future of humans in the age of AI technology and AGI ambitions. Above an anticipation of AI Singing with AI generated texts, since singing is a major religious practice.
The mission of healthy life extension, or healthy longevity promotion, raises a broad variety of questions and tasks, relating to science and technology, individual and communal ethics, and public policy, especially health and science policy. Despite the wide variety, the related questions may be classified into three groups. The first group of questions concerns the feasibility of the accomplishment of life extension. Is it theoretically and technologically possible? What are our grounds for optimism? What are the means to ensure that the life extension will be healthy life extension? The second group concerns the desirability of the accomplishment of life extension for the individual and the society, provided it will become some day possible through scientific intervention.
How will then life extension affect the perception of personhood? How will it affect the availability of resources for the population? Yet, the third and final group can be termed normative. What actions should we take? Assuming that life extension is scientifically possible and socially desirable, and that its implications are either demonstrably positive or, in case of a negative forecast, they are amenable – what practical implications should these determinations have for public policy, in particular health policy and research policy, in a democratic society? Should we pursue the goal of life extension? If yes, then how? How can we make it an individual and social priority? Given the rapid population aging and the increasing incidence and burden of age-related diseases, on the pessimistic side, and the rapid development of medical technologies, on the optimistic side, these become vital questions of social responsibility. And indeed, these questions are often asked by almost any person thinking about the possibility of human life extension, its meaning for oneself, for the people in one’s close circle, for the entire global community. Many of these questions are rather standard, and the answers to them are also often quite standard. Below some of those frequently asked questions and frequently given answers are given, with specific reference to the possibility and desirability of healthy human life extension, and the normative actions that can be undertaken, by the individual and the society, to achieve this goal.
