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Submission + - SPAM: 3D printed Camera - possible use in surveillance

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: German engineers have created a camera no bigger than a grain of salt that could change the future of health imaging — and clandestine surveillance

Using 3D printing, researchers from the University of Stuttgart built a three-lens camera, and fit it onto the end of an optical fibre the width of two hairs

Such technology could be used as minimally-intrusive endoscopes for exploring inside the human body, the engineers reported in the journal Nature Photonics

The compound lens of the camera is just 100 micrometres (0.1 millimetres) wide, and 120 micrometres with its casing

It could also be deployed in virtually invisible security monitors, or mini-robots with "autonomous vision"

The compound lens can also be printed onto image sensor other than optical fibres, such as those used in digital cameras

[spam URL stripped]...
Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Russian bot escaped again, may be scrapped

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: As previously mentioned in [spam URL stripped]... regarding a Russian robot IR77 which escaped the research lab, it elude, again

The story goes that an engineer working at Promobot Laboratories, in the Russian city of Perm, had left a gate open. Out trundled Promobot, traveling some 150 feet into the city before running out of juice. There it sat, batteries mostly dead, in the middle of a Perm street for 40 minutes, slowing cars to a halt and puzzling traffic cops

A researcher at Promobot’s facility in Russia said that the runaway robot was designed to interact with human beings, learn from experiences, and remember places and the faces of everyone it meets. Other versions of the Promobot have been docile, but this one just can’t seem to fall in line, even after the researchers reprogrammed it twice

Despite several rewrites of Promobot’s artificial intelligence, the robot continued to move toward exits. “We have changed the AI system twice,” Kivokurtsev said. “So now I think we might have to dismantle it”

Although there are other versions in development, this malfunctioning Promobot’s days look numbered. Unless, however, its fans have any sway. Maxim reports that the Promobot YouTube comment sections are filling up with supporters asking the Russian roboticists to keep the wandering robot out of the junk heap (See [spam URL stripped]... )
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Study indicates Americans don't trust AI (digitaltrends.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: It may be brilliant, but it’s not all that trustworthy. That appears to be the opinion Americans hold when it comes to Artificial Intelligence systems

while we may be interacting with AI systems more frequently than we realize (hi, Siri), a new study from Time etc suggests that Americans don’t believe the AI revolution is quite here yet, with 54 percent claiming to have never interacted with such a system

The more interesting finding reveals that 26 percent of respondents said they would not trust an AI with any personal or professional task. Sure, sending a text message or making a phone call is fine, but 51 percent said they’d be uncomfortable sharing personal data with an AI system. Moreover, 23 percent of Americans who say they have interacted with an AI reported being dissatisfied with the experience

Submission + - Mars is coming out of an ice age (reuters.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: An analysis of radar images that peered inside the polar ice caps of Mars shows that Earth's neighbor is coming out of an ice age that is part of an ongoing cycle of climate change, scientists said on Thursday

Using images taken by satellites orbiting Mars, the researchers determined that about 20,872 cubic miles (87,000 cubic km) of ice has accumulated at its poles since the end of the ice age, mostly in the northern polar cap

Scientists are keenly interested in piecing together the climate history of Mars, which contains strong evidence that oceans and lakes once pooled on its surface, bolstering the prospects for life

From the perspective of an Earthling, every day on Mars may feel like an ice age. According to NASA, temperatures on Mars may hit a high at noon at the equator in the summer of roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius), or a low of about minus-225 degrees Fahrenheit (minus-153 degrees Celsius) at the poles

The Martian ice began its retreat about 370,000 years ago, marking the end of the last ice age, according to the research published in the journal Science

Submission + - Alleged NASA bad asteroid statistics (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Nathan Myhrvold, ex-CTO of Microsoft, is accusing NASA of providing bad statistics on asteroid size

Mr. Myhrvold alleged that scientists using a prominent NASA space telescope have made fundamental mistakes in their assessment of the size of more than 157,000 asteroids they have observed

In a paper posted to the arXiv.org e-print repository on 22 May, Myhrvold takes aim at the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope launched in 2009, and a follow-on mission, NEOWISE, which together are responsible for the discovery of more asteroids than any other observatory. Yet Myhrvold says that the WISE and NEOWISE teams’ papers are riddled with statistical missteps. “None of their results can be replicated,” he tells ScienceInsider. “I found one irregularity after another”

Myhrvold says the NASA teams have made mistakes, such as ignoring the margin of error introduced when extrapolating from a small sample size to an entire population. They also neglected to include Kirchhoff’s law of thermal radiation in their thermal models of the asteroids. Based on his own models, Myhrvold says that errors in the asteroid diameters based on WISE data should be 30%. In some cases, the size errors rise to as large as 300%. “Asteroids are more variable than we thought they were,” he says. He has submitted the paper to the journal Icarus for review

However, the WISE and NEOWISE teams are standing by their results, and say that Myhrvold’s criticism should be dismissed. “For every mistake I found in his paper, if I got a bounty, I would be rich,” says Ned Wright, the principal investigator for WISE at the University of California, Los Angeles. Wright says that WISE’s data match very well with two other infrared telescopes, AKARI and IRAS. To find out how accurately those infrared data determine the size of an asteroid, scientists have to calibrate them with radar observations, other observations made when asteroids pass in front of distant stars, and observations made by spacecraft up close. When they do that, Wright says, WISE’s size errors end up at roughly 15%

Wright says his team doesn’t have Myhrvold’s computer codes, “so we don’t know why he’s screwing up.” But Wright archly noted that Myhrvold once worked at Microsoft, so “is responsible in part for a lot of bad software”

Submission + - Sci-hub domain been shut down by Elsevier (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Several ‘backup’ domain names are still in play, including Sci-Hub.bz and Sci-Hub.cc

In addition to the alternative domain names users can access the site directly through the IP-address 31.184.194.81

Its TOR domain is also still working — http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/

Authorized or not, there is definitely plenty of interest in Sci-Hub’s service. The site currently hosts more than 51 million academic papers and receives millions of visitors per month

Many visits come from countries where access to academic journals is limited, such as Iran, Russia or China. But even in countries where access is more common, many researchers visit the site, an analysis from Science magazine revealed last week

Submission + - Monster black holes may lurk all around us: study (yahoo.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Paris (AFP) — Astronomers have stumbled upon a supermassive black hole in an unexpected corner of the Universe, implying these galactic monsters are much more common than once thought, a study said Wednesday

The giant, with an estimated mass 17 billion times that of our Sun, was discovered in a relative desert, astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in the journal Nature

"While finding a gigantic black hole in a massive galaxy in a crowded area of the Universe is to be expected — like running across a skyscraper in Manhattan — it seemed less likely they could be found in the Universe's small towns," said a university statement

Big, star-rich galaxies where supermassive black holes had previously been found, are very rare

Smaller ones like the NGC 1600 galaxy housing the newly-discovered whopper, are much more common, but were not previously thought to be appropriate host

"So the question now is: 'Is this the tip of an iceberg?'" said study co-author Chung-Pei Ma. "Maybe there are a lot more monster black holes out there that don't live in a skyscraper in Manhattan, but in a tall building somewhere in the Midwestern plains"

The largest supermassive black hole spotted to date tipped the scales at about 21 billion solar masses, said the study authors

Submission + - Kentucky considering banning some social media comments (digitaltrends.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A bill targeting social media content that is already being labelled unconstitutional has been put before the Kentucky General Assembly

If passed, the bill would prohibit social media users to wait an hour before posting content related to a “traumatic event” or “accident” online. Those who violate the proposed bill would face a fine anywhere between $20 to $100 depending on the incident. The bill would not apply to members of the news media, victims of the event, and emergency responders at the site of the accident

According to the sponsor of the bill, Republican State Representative John “Bam” Carney of Campbellsville, the speed at which users can access social media to post about a tragic event can be both disruptive for police officers and insensitive to the families of the victims

Carney believes that abstaining from social platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter in the wake of a serious accident would allow the police and first responders time to notify families of those involved in the incident before they find out elsewhere

Legal experts argue that the bill won’t stand up to scrutiny under the First Amendment, regarding freedom of speech. And, apparently, Carney agrees, stating, “this probably would have First Amendment problems”

Submission + - Diamond Nanothreads Could Support Space Elevator (space.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Researchers in Penn State University discovered a way to produce ultra-thin diamond nanothreads that could be ideal for a space elevator

The team, led by chemistry professor John Badding, applied alternating cycles of pressure to isolated, liquid-state benzene molecules and were amazed to find that rings of carbon atoms assembled into neat and orderly chains

While they were expecting the benzene molecules to react in a disorganized way, they instead created a neat thread 20,000 times smaller than a strand of human hair but perhaps the strongest material ever made

Just recently, a team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia modeled the diamond nanothreads using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations and concluded that the material is far more versatile than previously thought and has great promise for aerospace properties. The simulation was published in early November

Submission + - US and China setting up 'space hotline' (ft.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Washington and Beijing have established an emergency “space hotline” to reduce the risk of accidental conflict

Several international initiatives are already in train to seal a space treaty to avoid a further build-up of weapons beyond the atmosphere. However, security experts say the initiatives have little chance of success

A joint Russia-China proposal wending its way through the UN was not acceptable to the US

An EU proposal, for a 'code of conduct' in space, was having diplomatic 'difficulties' but was closer to Washington's position

Submission + - Bitcoin is officially a commodity (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Bitcoin, and all virtual currencies, has been officially categorized by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a commodity, just like crude oil or wheat

CFTC on Thursday announced it had filed and settled charges against a Bitcoin exchange for facilitating the trading of option contracts on its platform

"In this order, the CFTC for the first time finds that Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are properly defined as commodities," according to the press release

By this action, the CFTC asserts its authority to provide oversight of the trading of cryptocurrency futures and options, which will now be subject to the agency's regulations. In the event of wrongdoing, such as futures manipulation, the CFTC will be able to bring charges against bad actors

If a company wants to operate a trading platform for Bitcoin derivatives or futures, it will need to register as a swap execution facility or designated contract market, just like the CME Group. And Coinflip—the target of the CFTC action—is hardly the only company that provides a platform to trade Bitcoin derivatives or futures

Submission + - Robot which can walk and jump on water

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: Look at this pix:
https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumb...

this pix
http://www.popsci.com/sites/po...

and this vid:
https://zippy.gfycat.com/Lonel...


Researchers from Seoul University and Harvard University built an insect-sized robot that mimics the way that the insect water striders, jump on the surface of a body of water after studying how the pond-skimmer insects push off the water’s surface without sinking

It isn’t difficult to make robots jump. Spring-bots do it. Robo-Cheetas do it. Even educated Robo-Fleas do it. But building a robot that can jump on the surface of the water is far more complicated

In general, you can’t jump without first pushing off of a surface. When that surface is water, pushing off usually means pushing down—or sinking fast

The team collected water striders from a local pond, and used high-speed cameras to record the insects jumping on water in buckets in the laboratory. They noticed that the insects don’t simply push down on the water. It generates a small amount of movement initially, and then gradually accelerate their legs so as not to break the surface tension tension force of water
The striders also sweep their legs inward before each jump, to maximize the amount of time they touch the surface, which boost the overall force of their pushes

Using a theoretical model of a flexible cylinder floating on liquid, they found the maximum force exerted by the insect's legs is always just below below the maximum force that water surface tension can withstand

Using these principles, the researchers developed an ultra light robot made out of nickel titanium with a 2 centimeter long body inspired by origami. Its 5 centimeter long wire legs are curved at the tips like a real water strider's and coated with a material that repels water. To recreate the same controlled acceleration in the robot as in the real insect, they used a mechanism called a torque reversal catapult (TRC), inspired by a flea's jumping leg to launch the robot from the surface of the water up to 14.2 centimeters in the air, which is similar to water striders. At the moment, the strider-bot can only jump once, and can’t land upright. But it's still quite impressive>br>
Je-sung Koh, co-lead author of the study, and his team were driven by the mere challenge of successfully building a robot that can jump on water, he said that they would like to build upon this design to develop a robot that can not only jump on the water, but that could also swim and perform other complex tasks. A future strider-bot might be used in swarms for environmental monitoring on rivers or oceans, for search and rescue in disaster areas, or even military surveillance

This isn’t the first robot to mimic the water strider’s movements.

The first robot that was able to jump on water was built in 2012 by engineers at Harbin Institute of Technology in China. However, unlike the new tiny strider-bot, the older robot is six inches long and about 1,000 times as heavy. The older jumping robot also has a different design. It uses six paddle-like feet made out of water repellant nickel foam, which allows it to balance and float on the water, as well as hop 14 centimeters high and 14 inches forward

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have already made a small robot that can walk on water. And three years ago, scientists at the University of Waterloo designed a robot that could leap 5.5 inches in the air and 14 inches forward from the water's surface. But previous robots weren’t quite as faithful to the water striders that they were modeled after; the Waterloo robot used wide paddles for its jumps and weighed about a thousand times more than a water strider. Today’s robo-insect is only seven times heavier (68 milligram) than a strider and replicates its long, thin legs

The results suggest an understanding of the hydrodynamic phenomena used by semi aquatic arthropods during water jumping and prescribe a method for reproducing these capabilities in artificial systems

Submission + - Chinese tourist crashes drone into Taipei 101 skyscrapper (yibada.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: A Chinese tourist is under remand for crashing his drone into the Taipei 101 sky scrapper, and ordered to pay a fine of $48,000 (NT $1.5 Million)

Yan Yungfan, a 30-year-old man from eastern China's Fujian Province, was supposedly attempting to film Taipei's cityscape on Tuesday morning with a remotely controlled Phantom 3 UAV when he lost control of the drone, causing it to hit the side of Taipei 101 at around the 30th floor

No one was injured in the incident and only minor damage was sustained by the building's glass windows, but the video immediately became a viral sensation after it was uploaded online

Taipei 101 said in a statement that there have been three incidents of drones crashing around the building since mid-June, with the first two cases taking place on June 15 and June 20. No injuries were reported for both incidents, although the UAV that crashed on June 15 fell less than two meters from pedestrians

Submission + - Fossil fuels are messing with Carbon Dating (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by Taco Cowboy
Taco Cowboy writes: The element Carbon comes in several isotopes, with one of them the radioactive Carbon-14

Carbon-14 is formed when some of the atmospheric Nitrogen at the upper atmosphere is bombarded by cosmic radiation and break down into the unstable radioactive isotope of Carbon-14

The unstable isotope is brought to Earth by atmospheric activity, such as storms, and becomes fixed in the biosphere. Because it reacts identically to C-12 and C-13, C-14 becomes attached to complex organic molecules through photosynthesis in plants and becomes part of their molecular makeup. Animals eating those plants in turn absorb Carbon-14 as well as the stable isotopes. This process of ingesting C-14 continues as long as the plant or animal remains alive

The natural distribution of C-14 on planet Earth used to be about one part per trillion

The carbon dating method in determining the age of an artifact is based on the amount of radioactive carbon-14 isotopes

The C-14 within an organism is continually decaying into stable carbon isotopes, but since the organism is absorbing more C-14 during its life, the ratio of C-14 to C-12 remains about the same as the ratio in the atmosphere. When the organism dies, the ratio of C-14 within its carcass begins to gradually decrease. The rate of decrease is 1/2 the quantity at death every 5,730 years. That is the half-life of C-14 and that is the base on how Carbon Dating operates

The fossil fuel which we are burning are so old they do not have contain any traceable amount of C-14, and the more we use fossil fuel, the more non-C-14 Carbon we pump into the atmosphere

If emissions continue under a business-as-usual scenario, by year 2050 a T-Shirt made in that year (2050) will have a 'Carbon-14 emission' signature as a T-Shirt worn by William the Conqueror a thousand years (if William the Conqueror had a fetish for T-Shirt), for someone using the radiocarbon dating technique

http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...
http://www.psmag.com/nature-an...


Submission + - CRYENGINE finally lands on Linux (androidauthority.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: CRYENGINE, from Crytek, is to run natively on Linux starting from version 3.8.1

Other improvements include the ability to run on Oculus Rift and Android TV, support on OpenGL 8-weight GPU vertex skinning, and improved POM self-shadowing

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