Scientists Develop World’s Lightest Metal, 100x Lighter than Styrofoam
“This, we assure you, is a real photograph. Researchers at the University of California Irvine have developed a material that is as strong as metal but 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. The material is constructed from a micro-lattice of nickel phosphorous tubes that is 99.9% air. The tubes are hollow and have walls 1,000 times thinner than a human hair yet have the strength of metal with the added benefit of being ultra resistant to strain. Researchers believe this new metal could be used to make light weight batteries that could eventually bring down the weight, and increase the efficiency, of green vehicles and use less material in the process.”
Read more at Inhabitat (Thanks Sally)
Monkey Mind Control
Scientists believe they are a step closer to enabling paralyzed people to walk and use artificial arms after an experiment in which monkeys moved and sensed objects using only their minds.
The monkeys were able to operate a virtual arm to search for objects through brain activity that was picked up by implants — a so-called brain-machine interface.
In a leap forward from previous studies, the primates were also able to experience the sense of touch — a crucial element of any solution for paralyzed people because it enables them to judge the strength used to grasp and control objects.
“This was one of the most difficult steps and the fact that we achieved it opens the door to the dream of a person being able to walk again,” Miguel Nicolelis, a Brazilian neuroscientist who took part in the study carried out by a team at Duke University in North Carolina.
The results suggest it would be possible to create a kind of robotic “exoskeleton” that people could use to feel and sense objects, he said.
“The success we’ve had with primates makes us believe that humans could perform the same tasks much more easily in the future,” Nicolelis said.
The study was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
You can continue reading this article here
Source: Reuters
Face Substitution
“This is a technical demo for face substitution technique. The application works in real time and it’s developed using the opensource framework for creative coding openFrameworks: openFrameworks.cc
The face tracking library returns a mesh that matches the contour of the eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features. That way the mesh obtained from a photo is matched to the face in the video.
Via Vimeo link 1 and Vimeo link 2 (Thanks Wendy)
Mind-reading car could drive you round the bend
“One of the world’s largest motor manufacturers is working with scientists based in Switzerland to design a car that can read its driver’s mind and predict his or her next move.
The collaboration, between Nissan and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), is intended to balance the necessities of road safety with demands for personal transport.
Scientists at the EPFL have already developed brain-machine interface (BMI) systems that allow wheelchair users to manoeuvre their chairs by thought transference. Their next step will be finding a way to incorporate that technology into the way motorists interact with their cars.
If the endeavour proves successful, the vehicles of the future may be able to prepare themselves for a left or right turn – choosing the correct speed and positioning – by gauging that their drivers are thinking about making such a turn.
However, although BMI technology is well established, the levels of human concentration needed to make it work are extremely high, so the research team is working on systems that will use statistical analysis to predict a driver’s next move and to “evaluate a driver’s cognitive state relevant to the driving environment”.
By measuring brain activity, monitoring patterns of eye movement and scanning the environment around the car, the team thinks the car will be able to predict what a driver is planning to do and help him or her complete the manoeuvre safely.”
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks Laurence)
Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare
“A few million virtual monkeys are close to re-creating the complete works of Shakespeare by randomly mashing keys on virtual typewriters.
A running total of how well they are doing shows that the re-creation is 99.990% complete.
The first single work to be completed was the poem A Lover’s Complaint.
Set up by US programmer Jesse Anderson the project co-ordinates the virtual monkeys sitting on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing system via a home PC.
Mr Anderson said he started the project as a way to get to know the Hadoop programming tool better and to put Amazon’s web services to the test.
It is also a practical test of the thought experiment that wonders whether an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters would be able to produce Shakespeare’s works by accident.
Mr Anderson’s virtual monkeys are small computer programs uploaded to Amazon servers. These coded apes regularly pump out random sequences of text.
Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard.
To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet.
Mr Anderson’s monkeys are generating random nine-character strings to try to produce all these strings and thereby find those that appear in Shakespeare’s works.
Mr Anderson kicked off the project on 21 August using Amazon’s cloud computers. Each day of virtual monkey keyboard mashing processing cost $19.20 (£12.40).”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks Tammy)
Mind-Reading Tech Reconstructs Videos From Brain Images
“A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video–essentially pulling experiences directly from someone’s brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology.
This is the first taste we’ve gotten of what the study actually produces. Here’s a video of the reconstruction in action:
The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, “obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.”"
Read more at Pop Sci (Thanks Dan)
Turn orange peel into plastic? It’s not as crazy as it sounds
“British scientists are pioneering a novel way of recycling that turns orange peel into plastic.
The technique relies on high-powered microwaves that can degrade the tough cellulose molecules of plant matter so that they release volatile gases that can be collected and distilled into a liquid product.
These valuable biodegradable chemicals can then be used in water purifiers, cleaning agents and plastics. Researchers behind the process say it is 90 per cent efficient and works not just on orange peel but almost any plant-based waste such as straw or coffee grounds.
James Clark, professor of green chemistry at the University of York, said he is building a small demonstrator facility to show the novel recycling scheme can be scaled up in order to suit industrial applications.
“It will be able to cope with tens of kilograms an hour. We believe it is the right scale to prove to people that this is a viable technology,” Professor Clark said.
“You dice the peel and put it into a microwave field. You then focus the microwaves as you would with a domestic microwave oven but at higher power,” he said.
“The microwaves activate the cellulose and that triggers the release of chemicals or further chemical reactions inside the orange peel,” he told the British Science Festival at Bradford University.
Volatile chemicals are released in the process, including d-limonene, which is responsible for the distinctive smell of citrus fruit and is used in cosmetics, the cleaning industry and as a biological insecticide.
“As you produce the volatiles you strip them off continuously. It’s a continuous process. You feed the peel into a microwave zone and have a pipe that takes off the volatile fractions as they are produced,” he said
“The unique feature of our microwave is that we work at deliberately low temperatures. We never go above 200C. You can take the limonene off or you can turn limonene into other chemicals,” he said. “It works really well with waste paper. It can take a big range of bio-waste material.”"
Read more at The Independent
Take the visual Turing test
“The Turing test is the most famous benchmark of artificial intelligence, but it is flawed. Now an addition that gauges a machine’s visual skills has been proposed.
Devised by 20th-century mathematician Alan Turing, the test pits the conversational abilities of chatbots against humans. To pass, judges must be tricked into believing that a bot is human, based only on a typed exchange. But many researchers believe the test is sorely in need of an upgrade.
“It has served its purpose. Now we need Turing Test 2.0,” says Aladdin Ayesh, who organised a symposium entitled Towards a Comprehensive Intelligence Test at the AI and Simulated Biology conference in York, UK, in April.
That’s why Michael Barclay and Antony Galton at the University of Exeter, UK, and colleagues have created a test that asks machines to mimic some of our visual abilities.
Click below to continue to New Scientists interactive feature to try the test yourself.”
Eyes in the Skies
The Police Department in Ogden, Utah, will be the first metropolitan police force in the world to use a crime-fighting blimp.
The $14,000, helium-filled ‘HB50 Hyperblimp’ measures 54ft in length airship can stay airborne for seven hours at a time with a top speed of 40mph. It packs a radar transponder and two CCTV cameras.
Ogden Mayor Matthew Godfrey said:
“We believe it will be a deterrent to crime when it is out and about and will help us solve crimes more quickly when they do occur.”
Commenting on the blimp’s military-grade specs and crime-fighting prowess, Godfrey confidently asserts:
”The blimp is long but narrow and moves quickly and quietly, meaning it should be fairly undetectable.”
It will only be allowed to be operated by police officers, with pilot’s licenses, from the patrol parking lot at the Ogden Public Safety Building.
They hope to launch the cruise missile-shaped aircraft in time for Christmas.
Source: Small World News Service
Concentrate On The Telly
How often have you lost track of the remote and been forced to face the unwelcome prospect of having to get up out of your seat to change the channel?
Well, Chinese consumer electronics firm Haier are making moves to eliminate that problem with the unveiling of the Haier Cloud Smart TV that you can control with the power of your very own mind.
No really, that’s what it does. By integrating NeuroSky brainwave reader technology into an attractively cumbersome headset, the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is all systems go!
The mind-reading telly is due to go on sale in October. We’re not sure where or how much for, but we doubt that you’d be interested in buying one anyway. You’d probably be much happier just to have a go with one in a shop and leave it at that, wouldn’t you?
Source: Akihabara News
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