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— NASA (@NASA) January 3, 2017
Wednesday, January 4, 2017
Tweet For Today
The Case For Why We All Need A Vacation
Financial Times: The case for rest
Is there an optimum amount of vacation and idea-incubating time?
At four in the morning, snug in a cottage nestled on a hillside deep in tiger country, I nudge my partner: “You’re snoring really loudly!” I say. “That’s not me,” he says equally sleepily, and I doze off before jerking wide-awake when I realise what he’s said.
Behind our cottage, high up on the crest of the hill, a leopard saws into the night. It’s New Year’s Day. I listen to the big cat for a while, alert but deeply content. When I go back to sleep, my dreams are filled with forests, trails and all the large and small creatures that belong to the jungle.
We come back home not just refreshed but rebooted by our short holiday in Gwehri, above an Indian national park. My mind feels on fire; all of last year’s tiredness is blown away like clouds driven by the high mountain winds.
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CSN Editor: Sighhh .... I need a vacation.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
The Growing Role Of China In Developing Artificial Intelligence
Wu Haishan, a senior Baidu data scientist, at the Baidu Technology Park in Beijing, China. Baidu is widely seen as being at the forefront of AI in Asia. Photo: Bloomberg
South China Morning Post: The Machines are Coming: China's role in the future of artificial intelligence
After a year of breakthroughs, experts believe they are on the brink of revolutionising our daily lives through artificial intelligence – and Asia can play a leading role in this brave new world
Try typing “the machines” into Google and chances are that one of the top results the artificial intelligence-powered search engine will return is the phrase: “The Machines are Coming”.
After a 2016 filled with high-profile advances in artificial intelligence (AI), leading technologists say this could be a breakout year in the development of intelligent machines that emulate humans.
Asia, until now lagging Silicon Valley in AI, will play a bigger role as the field cements itself at the pinnacle of the technology world in 2017, the experts say.
AI – technically, a computing field that involves the analysis of large troves of data to predict outcomes and patterns – is as old as modern computers but its esoteric nature means it has long endured caricatures of its actual potential – think for example, the 1960s space age cartoon The Jetsons, which featured a sentient robot maid and automated flying cars (both of which we are still waiting for, even 50 years on).
Read more ....
CNS Editor: Silicon Valley has always lead the way in developing AI platforms .... but it looks Asia wants to catch-up.
SpaceX Completes Rocket Explosion Investigation. Will Resume Rocket Launches Starting January 8
Space.com: SpaceX Completes Rocket Explosion Investigation, Aims for Jan. 8 Launch
WASHINGTON — SpaceX plans to resume Falcon 9 launches on Jan. 8 after completing the investigation into the pad explosion that destroyed another Falcon 9 four months ago.
In a statement posted on the SpaceX website Jan. 2, the company said the explosion was caused by the failure of one of three helium tanks, known as composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs), inside the liquid oxygen tank in the rocket’s second stage. The company had previously indicated that a COPV failure was a leading cause of the accident.
Each COPV is made of an aluminum liner surrounded by a carbon composite overwrap. Other COPVs recovered from the Falcon 9 showed buckling of their liners, although what caused the buckling isn't stated.
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More News On SpaceX Completing Its Rocket Explosion Investigation And Announcing That It Will Resume Rocket Launches Starting January 8
SpaceX finds failure cause, announces January 8 as target for flight resumption -- Phys.org
SpaceX eyes Jan. 8 return to satellite launches after finishing explosion investigation -- L.A. Times
SpaceX Launches Set to Resume in January -- WSJ
SpaceX announces cause of launchpad failure, plans for January 8 return to flight -- Extreme Tech
SpaceX Announces Cause of Falcon 9 Explosion, Sets New Launch Date -- Popular Mechanics
Instead Of Humans Will Robots Be The Ones Who Hire And Fire You In The Future?
US-based Bridgewater Associates is reportedly developing artificial intelligence
Daily Mail: Robots that hire and fire staff could soon be employed by the world's largest hedge fund in bid to improve efficiency
* US-based Bridgewater Associates is reportedly developing artificial intelligence
* The firm wants to use robots to hire and fire so emotions don't get in the way
* Billionaire founder Ray Dalio appointed Systemised Intelligence Lab for the job
Robots could soon be hiring and firing staff at the world’s largest hedge fund under secret plans drawn up to improve efficiency.
A team of engineers at US-based Bridgewater Associates is reportedly developing artificial intelligence which can run the firm without emotions getting in the way.
Billionaire founder Ray Dalio is seeking to create a new business model where most employees are programmers and decisions are made by a computer.
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WNU Editor: So much for hiring someone based on a "gut feeling".
Scientists Identify The Processes That Makes Memories Permanent
Daily Mail: How memories become permanent: Scientists identify process that controls 'rhythmic' brain waves for the first time
* Sharp wave ripples play a key role in strengthening memories
* But the mechanism that forms their shape and rhythm had not been identified
* Now, a team of researchers have found they are formed by synaptic inhibition
* They also believe it 'could be main factor in memory consolidation'
In order to remember a skill or experience, the memory needs to be strengthened through a process called memory consolidation.
Although it is known that brain waves play a key role in this process, the mechanism that forms their shape and rhythm had not yet been determined – until now.
Researchers have discovered that one of the brain waves needed for consolidating memories is dominated by synaptic inhibition, which they believe 'could be a main factor in memory consolidation'.
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WNU Editor: I like their summary (at the bottom of this Daily Mail Post) on how to boost your memory.
The Largest Digital Sky Survey Has Been Released By Astronomers
(Click on Image to Enlarge)
This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawai’i by the Pan-STARRS1 Observatory is the result of half a million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of 4 years. The shape comes from making a map of the celestial sphere, like a map of the Earth, but leaving out the southern quarter. The disk of the Milky Way looks like a yellow arc, and the dust lanes show up as reddish brown filaments. The background is made up of billions of faint stars and galaxies. If printed at full resolution, the image would be 1.5 miles long, and you would have to get close and squint to see the detail.
SCiTechDaily: Astronomers Release the Largest Digital Sky Survey
The Pan-STARRS project is publicly releasing the world’s largest digital sky survey from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).
“The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” said Dr. Ken Chambers, Director of the Pan-STARRS Observatories. “Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the solar system to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.”
“With this release we anticipate that scientists – as well as students and even casual users – around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS,” Chambers added.
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WNU Editor: Cool.
A Look At Eight Futuristic Foods
We ate some weird shit in 2016. A person born in the year 1000 AD definitely wouldn’t comprehend a Dorito. He certainly wouldn’t understand why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and if you showed him a Twinkie, he’d probably burn you at the stake. But the way things are headed, our food is bound to get a lot weirder.
Scientific research doesn’t just bring us more convenient and cheaper food options, but the hope of overcoming sustainability issues, too. The meat industry plays a huge role in climate change—around 10 percent of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions came from the agriculture sector in 2014, with almost a third of that climate-warming carbon attributed to methane from cattle, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, Earth’s population is growing fast, and many are fretting about how to feed the 9 billion people who will be inhabiting the planet in 2050.
Read more ....
CSN Editor: Bugs? Algae?
The Best Gadgets Coming in 2017
Here are the likely standouts among the smartphones, VR headsets, and smart watches hitting the market this year.
Smartphone geeks have a lot to look forward to in 2017. Phones dominate our list of the six most significant gadgets we expect to see this year.
Apple iPhone 8
To mark the iPhone’s 10th anniversary this year, Apple is expected to overhaul the phone’s design. One model could swap its liquid-crystal LCD display for one made of OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) that will wrap around the gadget’s edges. OLED displays are thinner, lighter, and more flexible than LCDs. Samsung’s Galaxy Edge phones sport a similar design and have been called gimmicky; Apple appears to be trying to make the feature more useful by enabling the phone to react when you touch any of its sides instead of just one.
Read more ....
When Is The Best Time To Drink Coffee?
There’s nothing quite like the smell of a freshly ground coffee in the morning.
The waft of hot milk in a cappuccino, the bitter after taste of a double espresso and the sweetness of a caffe mocha. Nothing can beat that, right?
But drinking a coffee in the morning to wake up and give yourself a caffeine boost is all a myth, suggests research gathered by Ph.D candidate Steven Miller at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda.
And ordering that cup of coffee first thing could even lead to an increased tolerance of caffeine, dulling the effects long term.
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CSN Editor: After 9:00 AM is when I have my one cup of coffee.
Monday, January 2, 2017
The Earth Has Experienced Five Mass Extinctions
(Click on Image to Enlarge)
Biologists suspect we’re living through the sixth major mass extinction. Earth has witnessed five, when more than 75% of species disappeared. Palaeontologists spot them when species go missing from the global fossil record, including the iconic specimens shown here. “We don’t always know what caused them but most had something to do with rapid climate change”, says Melbourne Museum palaeontologist Rolf Schmidt.
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WNU Editor: Bottom line .... 5 major extinction events.
It Took Six Months For Dinosaur Eggs To Hatch
A hatchling Protoceratops andrewsi fossil from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Credit M. Ellison/American Museum of Natural History
New York Times: Some Dinosaur Eggs Took Six Months or More to Hatch
For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they’re still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs.
All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet. They were closely related to other living reptiles like crocodiles, and new findings about how long their eggs took to hatch bring that point home.
Scientists reported on Monday that by using a new technique on exceedingly rare fossils of unhatched dinosaur embryos, they determined that those embryos took twice as long to hatch as bird eggs of a similar size. The embryo of a large duck-billed dinosaur took at least six months to hatch, and the eggs of larger dinosaurs may have taken even longer.
Read more ....
More News On How Long Did It Take Dinosaur Eggs To Hatch
No wonder the dinosaurs died out: They were vulnerable for the SIX MONTHS it took them to get out of their eggs when they were born -- Daily Mail
We Finally Know How Long It Took for Dinosaur Eggs to Hatch -- Seeker
Did Dinosaur Eggs Lead To Their Doom? -- Discover Magazine
Dinosaur 'Baby Teeth' Reveal That Dino Eggs Hatched Slowly -- NPR
Dinosaur eggs: Slow hatching eggs made dinosaurs go extinct when asteroid struck -- International Business Times
The United Nations Has Decided To Take On Killer Robots In 2017
YouTube
Seeker: U.N. Vote Puts 'Killer Robots' on the Agenda in 2017
International pressure mounts for a preemptive ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems.
Good news, fellow humans: The United Nations has decided to take on killer robots.
At the international Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, 123 participating nations voted to initiate official discussions on the danger of lethal autonomous weapons systems. That's the emerging designation for so-called "killer robots" — weapons controlled by artificial intelligence that can target and strike without human intervention.
The agreement is the latest development in a growing movement calling for an preemptive ban on weaponized A.I. and deadly autonomous weapons. Last year, a coalition of more than 1,000 scientists and industry leaders, including Elon Musk and representatives of Google and Microsoft, signed an official letter to the United Nations demanding action.
Read more ....
CSN Editor: Too late .... the genie is already out of the box.
These Sixteen Inventors Were Killed By Their Own Inventions
Max Valier in a rocket car, circa April 1930. Public Domain / Wikipedia
The Independent: Sixteen inventors who were killed by their own inventions
Inventions push mankind forward scientifically and economically.
Unsurprisingly, it is the inventor who is often the early tester of those inventions. And some of those inventions pose deadly risks.
We compiled a short list of brilliant engineers, scientists, and old-fashioned daredevils who fell victim to their own ideas.
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CSN Editor: Ouch.
More Details On CBS Star Trek Discovery Have Been Released
Next Big Future: CBS Star Trek Discovery likely set in Four Year Klingon War in Prime Timeline and Cast is revealed
Star Trek: Discovery is an upcoming American television series created by Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman for CBS All Access. It is the first series developed specifically for that service, and the first Star Trek series since Star Trek: Enterprise concluded in 2005. Set roughly a decade before the events of the original Star Trek series, separate from the timeline of the concurrent feature films, Discovery explores a previously mentioned event from the history of Star Trek while following the crew of the USS Discovery. Gretchen J. Berg and Aaron Harberts serve as showrunners on the series, with producing support from Akiva Goldsman.
Star Trek: Discovery is set to premiere on CBS in May 2017, before moving to All Access. The first season will consist of 13 episodes
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CSN Editor: I am definitely looking forward to this.
86 Burglars Were Asked How They Broke Into Homes
What burglars said were the biggest deterrents, what didn't stop them and how you can protect your home.
Do you ever wonder whether your home security system or “Beware of Dog” sign actually keeps burglars away?
We did too. So KGW's investigative team sent letters to 86 inmates currently serving time for burglary in the Oregon Department of Corrections. The inmates were asked to respond anonymously to 17 questions detailing how they broke in, when the crime occurred and what they were looking for.
What we learned could help you keep your home safe from burglaries.
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CSN Editor: The GF has a Rottweiler. The best deterrent that I ever saw.
The World's Top 10 Lightning Hotspots Revealed
The lightning hotspots are shown on this map. In the top ten, the the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) took five places with Kabare Territory in the country's east near Lake Tanganyika taking second spot with 205 strikes. South America took a further two places
Daily Mail: Africa and South America are the most electric places on Earth: The world's top 10 lightning hotspots revealed
* Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, has he highest rate of lightning strikes
* A single square kilometre on the lake gets more than 230 times a year
* Africa and South America dominate the list with areas around Central America, the Caribbean and Asia featuring heavily outside of the top 20 places
When a storm comes we all know not to stand by a tree or in the middle of a golf course.
And now you can add to that list being on a boat in the middle of a South American lake which is the most lightning-struck place on Earth.
A single square kilometre of Lake Maracaibo, in Venezuela, has been found to have the highest rate of lightning strikes in the world getting strikes more than 230 times a year.
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CSN Editor: And I thought North America was the #1 place for lightning strikes.
The Year 2016 In Archaeology
This 11,000-year-old pendant from Star Carr is the earliest example of Mesolithic art in Britain
BBC: The year 2016 in archaeology
2016 had its fair share of exciting discoveries in the world of archaeology. Together, they reveal the human characteristics that unite us all and expose the impacts that past peoples continue to have on life today. Here's a selection of the most inspiring findings of the year.
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WNU Editor: The story on how long cats have been domesticated is what interested me.
Sunday, January 1, 2017
Nikolai Tesla's Inventions Continue To Fascinate
Popular Mechanics: This Handmade Tesla Gun Is Shockingly Cool
Just be careful where you point that thing.
Nikolai Tesla has been pretty popular in his afterlife. After dying the defeated foe of Thomas Edison, his name has stuck out to geeks as someone who consistently thought differently about the world, who refused the status quo. But perhaps most importantly, he lives on in inventions like this Tesla gun, built by the folks at Smarter Every Day.
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CSN Editor: The above video is a must see for Tesla fans.
Has Google’s AI Translation Tool Invented Its Own Internal Language?
Tech Crunch: Google’s AI translation tool seems to have invented its own secret internal language
All right, don’t panic, but computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now. Well, that’s kind of an oversimplification, and the last part is just plain untrue. But there is a fascinating and existentially challenging development that Google’s AI researchers recently happened across.
You may remember that back in September, Google announced that its Neural Machine Translation system had gone live. It uses deep learning to produce better, more natural translations between languages. Cool!
Read more ....
CSN Editor: It makes you wonder if machines can operate at a far more smarter level than what we have taken for granted.
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