Putin’s robo-nauts prepare for lift-off: Fedor as he gets ready to board the International Space Station crew next week…
Icknamed Fedor, the anthropomorphous machine — which is remarkably agile — was seen undergoing a battery of stress-tests at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, last month.
How much would it cost to build a city on Mars? According to Elon Musk over the weekend, it could be the most expensive construction project in human history — and cost up to an eighth of the value of the entire global economy.
The SpaceX CEO’s vision includes not only sending the first humans to Mars, but to use that mission as a starting point to build a permanent settlement. Assuming all goes to plan, Musk believes that a self-sustaining city could take shape as early as 2050.
What happens after that point is anyone’s guess. Inverse has spoken to experts from a number of fields, who have flagged a series of issues those first inhabitants will need to address. They could mutate and develop new physical attributes, they could find the city’s confines stifling and develop a national identity, and they could develop a new, ground-up economy.
Two trends that are dominating the technology industry are the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But for industrial automation, these two technologies are much more than the buzzwords or trending topics. The convergence of AI and IoT will redefine the future of industrial automation. It is set to lead the Industry 4.0 revolution.
IoT and AI are two independent technologies that have a significant impact on multiple industry verticals. While IoT is the digital nervous system, AI becomes the brain that makes decisions which control the overall system. The lethal combination of AI and IoT brings us AIoT — Artificial Intelligence of Things — that delivers intelligent and connected systems that are capable of self-correcting and self-healing themselves.
To appreciate the promise of AIoT, we need to look at the evolution of connected systems.
The company will soon start employing a second net-equipped boat during orbital launches, in an attempt to snag both halves of its rockets’ payload fairings before they splash down in the ocean, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk confirmed via Twitter on Friday (Aug. 9).
Blockchain startup BitFury launched an artificial intelligence (AI) unit, Reuters reports on Aug. 13.
“Data is the new oil”
Bitfury chief executive officer and co-founder Valery Vavilov reportedly said that the company’s dive into AI is motivated by the need to analyze and extract information from great quantities of data. He reportedly noted that data is becoming the new oil and stated:
Algorithms meant to spot hate speech online are far more likely to label tweets “offensive” if they were posted by people who identify as African-American.
AI systems meant to spot abusive online content are far more likely to label tweets “offensive” if they were posted by people who identify as African-American.
The news: Researchers built two AI systems and tested them on a pair of data sets of more than 100,000 tweets that had been annotated by humans with labels like “offensive,” “none,” or “hate speech.” One of the algorithms incorrectly flagged 46% of inoffensive tweets by African-American authors as offensive. Tests on bigger data sets, including one composed of 5.4 million tweets, found that posts by African-American authors were 1.5 times more likely to be labeled as offensive. When the researchers then tested Google’s Perspective, an AI tool that the company lets anyone use to moderate online discussions, they found similar racial biases.
A hard balance to strike: Mass shootings perpetrated by white supremacists in the US and New Zealand have led to growing calls from politicians for social-media platforms to do more to weed out hate speech. These studies underline just how complicated a task that is. Whether language is offensive can depend on who’s saying it, and who’s hearing it. For example, a black person using the “N word” is very different from a white person using it. But AI systems do not, and currently cannot, understand that nuance.
I understand how a prism works and how a single raindrop can scatter white light into a rainbow, but it seems to me that in normal atmospheric conditions, we should not be able to see rainbows.
When multiple raindrops are side-by-side, their emitted spectra will overlap. An observer at X will see light re-mixed from various originating raindrops. The volume of rain producing a rainbow typically has an angular diameter at least as wide as the rainbow itself, does it not?
The art of matchmaking has traditionally been the province of grandmas and best friends, parents, and even—sometimes—complete strangers. Recently they’ve been replaced by swipes and algorithms in an effort to automate the search for love. But Kevin Teman wants to take things one step further.
The Denver-based founder of a startup called AIMM has built an app that matches prospective partners using just what they say to a British-accented AI. Users talk to the female-sounding software to complete a profile: pick out your dream home, declare whether you consider yourself a “cat person,” and describe how you would surprise a potential partner.
At first glance, that doesn’t seem too different from the usual swiping-texting-dating formula of modern online romance. But AIMM, whose name is an acronym for “artificially intelligent matchmaker,” comes with a twist: the AI coaches users through a first phone call, gives advice for the first date, and even provides feedback afterwards. Call it Cyrano de Bergerac for the smartphone era.
Amid unrelenting chaos and violence, scientists and doctors in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been running a clinical trial of new drugs to try to combat a year-long Ebola outbreak. On Monday, the trial’s cosponsors at the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health announced that two of the experimental treatments appear to dramatically boost survival rates.
While an experimental vaccine previously had been shown to shield people from catching Ebola, the news marks a first for people who already have been infected. “From now on, we will no longer say that Ebola is incurable,” said Jean-Jacques Muyembe, director general of the Institut National de Recherche Biomedicale in the DRC, which has overseen the trial’s operations on the ground.
Starting last November, patients in four treatment centers in the country’s east, where the outbreak is at its worst, were randomly assigned to receive one of four investigational therapies—either an antiviral drug called remdesivir or one of three drugs that use monoclonal antibodies. Scientists concocted these big, Y-shaped proteins to recognize the specific shapes of invading bacteria and viruses and then recruit immune cells to attack those pathogens. One of these, a drug called ZMapp, is currently considered the standard of care during Ebola outbreaks. It had been tested and used during the devastating Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014, and the goal was to see if those other drugs could outperform it. But preliminary data from the first 681 patients (out of a planned 725) showed such strong results that the trial has now been stopped.
Terraforming Mars has three major parts
1. Raising the temperature 2. Building the atmosphere 3. Building up a magnetosphere or creating some form of solar and cosmic radiation protection.
There is a new study which indicates that domed cities and colonies of various sizes could have the right temperature for liquid water with a 2–3 centimeter dome of silica aerogel without additional heating. They would heat up under the dome by 50 degrees kelvin without any heaters. Just the greenhouse effect would heat the area under the dome.
