Big news! This 3D printer is our first step towards manufactured human organs. For perspective, the device can print a 100-cm blood vessel in two minutes.
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Facebook is now tackling a problem that has evaded computer scientists for decades: how to build software that can beat humans at Go, the 2,500-year-old strategy board game, according to a report today from Wired. Because of Go’s structure — you place black or white stones at the intersection of lines on a 19-by-19 grid — the game has more possible permutations than chess, despite its simple ruleset. The number of possible arrangements makes it difficult to design systems that can look far enough into the future to adequately assess a good play in the way humans can.
“We’re pretty sure the best [human] players end up looking at visual patterns, looking at the visuals of the board to help them understand what are good and bad configurations in an intuitive way,” Facebook chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said. “So, we’ve taken some of the basics of game-playing AI and attached a visual system to it, so that we’re using the patterns on the board—a visual recognition] system—to tune the possible moves the system can make.”
The project is part of Facebook’s broader efforts in so-called deep learning. That subfield of artificial intelligence is founded on the idea that replicating the way the human brain works can unlock statistical and probabilistic capabilities far beyond the capacity of modern-day computers. Facebook wants to advance its deep learning techniques for wide-ranging uses within its social network. For instance, Facebook is building a version of its website for the visually impaired that will use natural language processing to take audio input from users — “what object is the person in the photo holding?” — analyze it, and respond with relevant information. Facebook’s virtual assistant, M, will also come to rely on this type of technology to analyze and learn from users’ requests and respond in a way only humans could.
Armed with unguarded ambition and the vision to push boundaries beyond the unthinkable, Jetman Dubai and Emirates A380 take to the skies of Dubai for an exceptional formation flight.
A carefully choreographed aerial showcase, conducted over the Palm Jumeirah and Dubai skyline, involving the world’s largest passenger aircraft and the experienced Jetman Dubai pilots Yves Rossy and Vince Reffet.
The auto industry is in the fast lane toward more futuristic amenities. Continue reading →
A carbon-based paper folds itself up and walks away — a feat that could potentially lead to artificial muscles for robots.
Satellites are shrinking, and so is the cost to build them and shoot them up into orbit.
Cubesats, which weigh 1.33 kilograms or less, have become popular for researchers with grants and federal agencies like NASA. But their price, while lower than clunky old-school satellites, has remained out of reach for those who can’t pay a mortgage’s worth of money and don’t know how to hitch a ride on a rocket. Enter picosats and femtosats, Cubesats’s smaller, cheaper siblings—and the companies that will help you send them to space.
While Mars doesn’t have much in the way of Earth-like weather, it does evidently share one kind of weird meteorology: acid fog.
If “The Stellarator” sounds like an energy source of comic book legend to you, you’re not that far off. It’s the largest nuclear fusion reactor in the world, and it’s set to turn on later this month.
Housed at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator looks more like a psychotic giant’s art project than the future of energy. Especially when you compare it with the reactor’s symmetrical, donut-shaped cousin, the tokamak. But stellarators and tokamaks work according to similar principles: In both cases, coiled superconductors are used to create a powerful magnetic cage, which serves to contain a gas as it’s heated to the ungodly temperatures needed for hydrogen atoms to fuse.
Continue reading “World’s Largest Fusion Reactor is About to Switch On” »
