Vandi Verma has been working on Mars time since 2008. Here are five critical life lessons she has learned along the road.
CAPTCHAs are those little tests of skill that websites use to make sure you’re human and not a bot. Sometimes they ask you to re-enter some blurry text displayed on screen, other times they show you nine images and want you to click on the images that include, say, a boat. There are a bunch of different varieties of CAPTCHA out there, but they all share at least one characteristic: they suck. But what if we lived in a world where CAPTCHAs didn’t suck? Developer Miquel Camps Orteza is presumably the only developer to ask themselves that question, and through doing so, has created an imp-shooting CAPTCHA that actually feels fun to solve. It’s called DOOM CAPTCHA, and it involves shooting three Doom imps within a short (almost too short) period of time. Weirdly, the imp exists in the Wolfenstein universe, but that inconsistency doesn’t matter because no matter where they are, shooting imps is fun.
Shoot imps to prove you’re human.
An american source on this. Russia is way ahead of the USA on these, they were testing these in Syria, and there is no “WE CANT ARM ROBOTS!!” debate over there, they just go ahead and do it.
“In the context of increasing tensions with the United States, China and Russia have clearly made an agreement to expand their technological cooperation, with artificial intelligence playing a key role in their plans for the future,” a new CNA report finds.
Microsoft unveiled new tools for automatically generating computer code and formulas on Tuesday morning, in a new adaptation of the GPT-3 natural-language technology more commonly known for replicating human language.
Deepmind, Co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis discusses how we can avoid bias being built into AI systems and what’s next for DeepMind, including the future of protein folding, at WIRED Live 2020.
“If we build it right, AI systems could be less biased than we are.”
A new study contradicts the origin story of the Milky Way, suggesting that it evolved gradually over time rather than being formed by a giant collision.
## MATHEMATICS • MAY 24, 2021
# *Noise is commonly discarded, but identifying patterns in noise can be very useful.*
*Generalize the Hearst exponent by adding more coefficients in order to get a more complete description of the changing data. This makes it possible to find patterns in the data that are usually considered noise and were previously impossible to analyze.*
Continue reading “Scientists recognize intruders in noise” »
## SCIENCE ADVANCES • MAY 24, 2021 # *by Vienna University of Technology*
In everyday life, phase transitions usually have to do with temperature changes--for example, when an ice cube gets warmer and melts. But there are also different kinds of phase transitions, depending on other parameters such as magnetic field. In order to understand the quantum properties of materials, phase transitions are particularly interesting when they occur directly at the absolute zero point of temperature. These transitions are called "quantum phase transitions" or a "quantum critical points."
Such a quantum critical point has now been discovered by an Austrian-American research team in a novel material, and in an unusually pristine form. The properties of this material are now being further investigated.
Various insect species serve as valuable model systems for investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms by which a brain controls sophisticated behaviors. In particular, the nervous system of Drosophila melanogaster has been extensively studied, yet experiments aimed at determining the number of neurons in the Drosophila brain are surprisingly lacking. Using isotropic fractionator coupled with immunohistochemistry, we counted the total number of neuronal and non-neuronal cells in the whole brain, central brain, and optic lobe of Drosophila melanogaster. For comparison, we also counted neuronal populations in three divergent mosquito species: Aedes aegypti, Anopheles coluzzii and Culex quinquefasciatus. The average number of neurons in a whole adult brain was determined to be 199380 ±3400 cells in D. melanogaster, 217910 ±6180 cells in Ae. aegypti, 223020 ± 4650 cells in An. coluzzii and 225911±7220 cells in C. quinquefasciatus. The mean neuronal cell count in the central brain vs. optic lobes for D. melanogaster (101140 ±3650 vs. 107270 ± 2720), Ae. aegypti (109140 ± 3550 vs. 112000 ± 4280), An. coluzzii (105130 ± 3670 vs. 107140 ± 3090), and C. quinquefasciatus (108530 ±7990 vs. 110670 ± 3950) was also estimated. Each insect brain was comprised of 89% ± 2% neurons out of its total cell population. Isotropic fractionation analyses did not identify obvious sexual dimorphism in the neuronal and non-neuronal cell population of these insects. Our study provides experimental evidence for the total number of neurons in Drosophila and mosquito brains.
Citation: Raji JI, Potter CJ (2021) The number of neurons in Drosophila and mosquito brains. PLoS ONE 16: e0250381. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.
Editor: Matthieu Louis, University of California Santa Barbara, UNITED STATES.
A brain–computer interface enables rapid communication through neural decoding of attempted handwriting movements in a person with paralysis.
