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Aug 21, 2019

Conspiracy theories are dangerous—here’s how to crush them

Posted by in category: futurism

GONE ARE the days when conspiracy-mongers had to find shards of evidence and contort it to convince people. Now, just their malevolence is needed. If a concocted scenario can’t be proved, then perhaps it can’t be disproved either. That is toxic for a stable society and politics. So how did we get here, and how do we get out?

Nancy L. Rosenblum of Harvard University and Russell Muirhead of Dartmouth College are the authors of “A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy” (Princeton, 2019). Though conspiracy theories have always existed, they note that today something is different and dangerous: “Conspiracy without the theory.”

Aug 21, 2019

YouTube is deleting videos of robots fighting because of ‘animal cruelty’

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI

We need to have higher ethics for robotic beings because if the superintelligence in digital form becomes reality we will need to have better ethics around robot rights. We could have literally a terminator situation but we could make a the vision possibly we do not need to have them be slaves to use but rightful citizens.


Each notice cited the same section of these guidelines, which states: “Content that displays the deliberate infliction of animal suffering or the forcing of animals to fight is not allowed on YouTube.”

It goes on to state: “Examples include, but are not limited to, dog fighting and cock fighting.”

Continue reading “YouTube is deleting videos of robots fighting because of ‘animal cruelty’” »

Aug 21, 2019

Cambridge Quantum Random Key Generation and Encryption

Posted by in categories: computing, encryption, quantum physics, security

Cambridge Quantum Computing has a demo of its quantum key security generation at Ironbridgeapi.com.

Aug 21, 2019

Blood test to predict how likely you are to die within 5 to 10 years

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A provocative new study is suggesting a blood test tracking 14 different biomarkers can predict a person’s risk of dying within the next 10 years better than any conventional models. The research is still a long way off being broadly deployed in clinical environments and the test may be of most use in human drug trials as a surrogate endpoint for mortality.

Aug 21, 2019

Optic nerve stimulation to aid the blind

Posted by in category: neuroscience

© 2019 EPFL / Alain Herzog. OpticSELINE electrode array for intraneural stimulation of the optic nerve, developed in the Translational Neural Engineering Lab, and used in preliminary studies.

Aug 21, 2019

Astrophysical shock phenomena reproduced in the laboratory

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics, space travel

Vast interstellar events where clouds of charged matter hurtle into each other and spew out high-energy particles have now been reproduced in the lab with high fidelity. The work, by MIT researchers and an international team of colleagues, should help resolve longstanding disputes over exactly what takes place in these gigantic shocks.

Many of the largest-scale events, such as the expanding bubble of matter hurtling outward from a supernova, involve a phenomenon called collisionless . In these interactions, the clouds of gas or plasma are so rarefied that most of the particles involved actually miss each other, but they nevertheless interact electromagnetically or in other ways to produces visible shock waves and filaments. These high-energy events have so far been difficult to reproduce under laboratory conditions that mirror those in an astrophysical setting, leading to disagreements among physicists as to the mechanisms at work in these astrophysical phenomena.

Now, the researchers have succeeded in reproducing critical conditions of these collisionless shocks in the laboratory, allowing for detailed study of the processes taking place within these giant cosmic smashups. The new findings are described in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, five others at MIT, and 14 others around the world.

Aug 21, 2019

Tiny wasp takes aim at emerald ash borer beetles

Posted by in category: futurism

WASHINGTON — Several hundred million ash trees around the nation have fallen victim to a beetle known as the emerald ash borer. Thousands of doomed trees once stood tall in the D.C. area, according to bug guy Mike Raupp, an entomologist at the University of Maryland.

“This is a devastating pest,” said Raupp.

Local governments are fighting back against what Raupp says is a tsunami of the beetles, which chew their way into the tree and feed on what’s underneath the bark.

Aug 21, 2019

New models for handwriting recognition in online Latin and Arabic scripts

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Researchers at the University of Sfax, in Tunisia, have recently developed a new method to recognize handwritten characters and symbols in online scripts. Their technique, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, has already achieved remarkable performance on texts written in both the Latin and Arabic alphabet.

In recent years, researchers have created -based architectures that can tackle a variety of tasks, including image classification, , processing (NLP), and many more. Handwriting recognition systems are computer tools that are specifically designed to recognize characters and other hand-written symbols in a similar way to humans.

In their early years of life, in fact, human beings innately develop the ability to understand different types of handwriting by identifying specific characters both individually and when grouped together. Over the past decade or so, many studies have tried to replicate this ability in , as this would ultimately enable more advanced and automatic analyses of handwritten texts.

Aug 21, 2019

Physicists create world’s smallest engine

Posted by in categories: energy, physics, transportation

Theoretical physicists at Trinity College Dublin are among an international collaboration that has built the world’s smallest engine—which, as a single calcium ion, is approximately ten billion times smaller than a car engine.

Work performed by Professor John Goold’s QuSys group in Trinity’s School of Physics describes the science behind this tiny motor. The research, published today in international journal Physical Review Letters, explains how random fluctuations affect the operation of microscopic machines. In the future, such devices could be incorporated into other technologies in order to recycle and thus improve .

The engine itself—a single calcium ion—is electrically charged, which makes it easy to trap using electric fields. The working substance of the engine is the ion’s “intrinsic spin” (its angular momentum). This spin is used to convert heat absorbed from laser beams into oscillations, or vibrations, of the trapped ion.

Aug 21, 2019

Scientists find a way to create long-life, fast-charging batteries

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, physics, transportation

A group of researchers led by Skoltech Professor Pavel Troshin studied coordination polymers, a class of compounds with scarcely explored applications in metal-ion batteries, and demonstrated their possible future use in energy storage devices with a high charging/discharging rate and stability. The results of their study were published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

The charging/discharging rate is one of the key characteristics of lithium-ion batteries. Most modern commercial batteries need at least an hour to get fully charged, which certainly limits the scope of their application, in particular, for electric vehicles. The trouble with active materials, such as the most popular anode material, graphite, is that their capacity decays significantly, as their charging rate increases. To retain the battery capacity at high charging rates, the active electrode materials must have high electronic and ionic conductivity, which is the case with the newly-discovered coordination polymers that are derived from and salts of , such as nickel or copper. Although these compounds hold a great promise, their application in lithium-ion batteries remains virtually unexplored.

A recent study undertaken by a group of scientists from Skoltech and the Institute for Problems of Chemical Physics of RAS led by Professor P. Troshin in collaboration with the University of Cologne (Germany) and the Ural Federal University, focused on tetraaminobenzene-based linear polymers of nickel and copper. Although the linear polymers exhibited much lower initial electronic conductivity as compared to their two-dimensional counterparts, it transpired that they can be used as anode materials that get charged/discharged in less than a minute, because their conductivity increases dramatically after the first discharge due to lithium doping.