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Feb 7, 2017

‘SideArm’ System from DARPA can Launch and Recover Aerial Drones Travelling at Speed in Midair

Posted by in category: drones

Impressive.


SideArm can be shipped inside a standard 20-foot shipping container for easy transport by truck, ship, rail, Lockheed C-130 Hercules transport aircraft and Boeing CH-47 Chinook heavy-lift helicopter. The small system is designed to operate in truck-mounted, ship-mounted, and standalone/fixed-site facilities. A crew of only two to four people can set-up or stow the system in minutes.

SideArm owes its small size to combining its launch and capture equipment into a single rail that folds for transport.

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Feb 7, 2017

What role does electromagnetic signaling have in biological systems

Posted by in categories: biological, neuroscience, quantum physics

Sounds definitely like DARPA could be looking at a more seamless BMI type technology and yes, Quantum Bio and telepathy is involved.


For decades scientists have wondered whether electromagnetic waves might play a role in intra- and inter-cell signaling. Researchers have suggested since the 1960s, for example, that terahertz frequencies emanate from cell membranes, but they’ve lacked the technology and tools to conduct reproducible experiments that could prove whether electromagnetic waves constitute purposeful signals for biological function-or if they’re merely background noise.

With recent advances in technology and modeling, experiments may now be possible to test signaling hypotheses. DARPA’s RadioBio program, announced this week, seeks to establish if purposeful electromagnetic wave signaling between biological cells exists-and if evidence supports that it does, to determine what information is being transferred.

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Feb 7, 2017

Worried About Being Replaced By A Robot? Avoid Working These Jobs

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

Some middle-income jobs have 97% chance of being replaced, study finds.

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Feb 7, 2017

For the First Time Scientists Have Observed a Quantum Phase Transition

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

In Brief

  • Scientists were able to rig up a system in which they could view a “photon-blockade breakdown” where the system switched from opaque to transparent.
  • This discovery has implications in both the development of advanced computer memory systems and better quantum simulations in the future.

For the first time, physicists have experimentally observed a first-order phase transition occur in a quantum system – verifying years of theoretical predictions.

Phase transitions are something that we see on a daily basis when our ice melts into water, or steam evaporates from a boiling kettle. While these transitions are easy for us to observe, phase transitions also happen on the very tiny, quantum-scale, where they play an important role in physics. But, up until now, no one had ever witnessed one experimentally.

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Feb 7, 2017

Injection could permanently lower cholesterol

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biotech/medical, genetics

Some people have mutations that greatly lower their cholesterol. Tests in mice suggest gene editing could give the rest of us the same protection.

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Feb 7, 2017

Scientists Are Developing Flu Shots for Dogs, Which Will Help Protect Us Too

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

In severe cases, a dog can develop pneumonia and even die.

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Feb 7, 2017

Sorry, Einstein — physicists just reinforced the reality of quantum weirdness in the Universe

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

One of the strangest phenomena you’re likely to come across in all of science is quantum entanglement — where two particles interact in such a way that they become deeply linked, and essentially ‘share’ an existence, even if they’re light-years apart.

Einstein famously couldn’t get on board with this idea, and ultimately decided that it was just too weird to be true. But a new experiment has just made the strongest case yet for the reality of quantum entanglement, so it looks like our Universe is just as bizarre as we suspected.

“The real estate left over for the skeptics of quantum mechanics has shrunk considerably,” one of the team, David Kaiser from MIT, told Jennifer Chu at Phys.org.

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Feb 7, 2017

New Study Raises Questions About The Anti-Aging Benefits Of Blood Transfusions

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

New study raises questions over using young blood transfusions as a therapy for aging.


There has been a lot of interest in the potential for transfusions of young blood to rejuvenate the old. However a recent study raises some intriguing questions.

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Feb 7, 2017

Japanese AI Writes a Novel, Nearly Wins Literary Award

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

I had thought my job was safe from automation—a computer couldn’t possibly replicate the complex creativity of human language in writing or piece together a coherent story. I may have been wrong. Authors beware, because an AI-written novel just made it past the first round of screening for a national literary prize in Japan.

The novel this program co-authored is titled, The Day A Computer Writes A Novel. It was entered into a writing contest for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The contest has been open to non-human applicants in years prior, however, this was the first year the award committee received submissions from an AI. Out of the 1,450 submissions, 11 were at least partially written by a program.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel to give you an idea as to what human contestants were up against:

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Feb 7, 2017

The Real Threat Is Machine Incompetence, Not Intelligence

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, robotics/AI


Forget super-AI. Crappy AI is more likely to be our downfall, argues researcher.

The past couple of years have been a real cringe-y time to be an AI researcher. Just imagine a whole bunch of famous technologists and top-serious science authorities all suddenly taking aim at your field of research as a clear and present threat to the very survival of the species. All you want to do is predict appropriate emoji use based on textual analyses and here’s Elon Musk saying this thing he doesn’t really seem to know much about is the actual apocalypse.

It’s not that computer scientists haven’t argued against AI hype, but an academic you’ve never heard of (all of them?) pitching the headline “AI is hard” is at a disadvantage to the famous person whose job description largely centers around making big public pronouncements. This month that academic is Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who argues in the Communications of the ACM that there is a real AI threat, but it’s not human-like machine intelligence gone amok. Quite the opposite: the danger is instead shitty AI. Incompetent, bumbling machines.

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