In OpenAI’s ‘Neural MMO,’ artificially intelligent agents compete to survive, and learn new skills along the way.
Read more
Circa 2018
Scientists have attributed the flying behaviour of these wingless arthropods to ‘ballooning’, where spiders can be carried thousands of miles by releasing trails of silk that propel them up and out on the wind.
However, the fact that ballooning has been observed when there is no wind to speak of, when skies are overcast and even in rainy conditions, raises the question: how do spiders take off with low levels of aerodynamic drag?
Biologists from the University of Bristol believe they have found the answer.
Read more
Perceiving an object only visually (e.g. on a screen) or only by touching it, can sometimes limit what we are able to infer about it. Human beings, however, have the innate ability to integrate visual and tactile stimuli, leveraging whatever sensory data is available to complete their daily tasks.
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have recently proposed a new framework to generate cross-modal sensory data, which could help to replicate both visual and tactile information in situations in which one of the two is not directly accessible. Their framework could, for instance, allow people to perceive objects on a screen (e.g. clothing items on e-commerce sites) both visually and tactually.
“In our daily experience, we can cognitively create a visualization of an object based on a tactile response, or a tactile response from viewing a surface’s texture,” Dr. Shan Luo, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “This perceptual phenomenon, called synesthesia, in which the stimulation of one sense causes an involuntary reaction in one or more of the other senses, can be employed to make up an inaccessible sense. For instance, when one grasps an object, our vision will be obstructed by the hand, but a touch response will be generated to ‘see’ the corresponding features.”
Read more
A team of researchers led by Dr. Nazmul Karim and Prof Sir Kostya Novoselov at The University of Manchester have developed a method to produce scalable graphene-based yarn.
Multi-functional wearable e-textiles have been a focus of much attention due to their great potential for healthcare, sportswear, fitness and aerospace applications.
Graphene has been considered a potentially good material for these types of applications due to its high conductivity, and flexibility. Every atom in graphene is exposed to its environment allowing it to sense changes in its surroundings, making it an ideal material for sensors.
Read more
Fluorocarbon based life? Could be possible. Wonder where this will go.
Chemists have now reported a facile method for the replacement of hydrogen with fluorine in important drug molecules. This new discovery enables the fine-tuning of existing (and potential new) pharmaceuticals to endow them with improved pharmacological properties.
Read more
The force is strong not only in Star Wars lore but also as a fundamental property in physics. For example, scientists can put two uncharged metal plates close together in a vacuum, and “voila!” —-they will attract each other like Luke Skywalker and his trusted lightsaber.
In 1948, Dutch theoretical physicist Hendrick Casimir first predicted an attractive force responsible for this effect—later dubbed the Casimir effect. A half-century later, in 1996, the Casimir force was experimentally measured for the first time by Steve Lamoreaux at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
But just like the light and dark side of the force in Star Wars, scientists have wondered, can there be an equal yet opposite kind of Casimir force?
Read more
Circa 2013
Enlarge | +
Artist’s representation of the “habitable zone,” the range of orbits where liquid water is permitted on the surface of a planet. The authors find that 22% of Sun-like stars harbor a planet between one and two times the size of Earth in the habitable zone. (Credit: UC Berkeley)
One in five stars in our galaxy like the Sun have planets about the size of Earth and a surface temperature conducive to life, astronomers at UC Berkeley and University of Hawaii, Manoa now estimate.