Here we go again; push to give computers the same human rights in the US like other US citizens enjoy. It truly begs the question “when have we gone too far?”
Technically Incorrect: An Oxford University professor says artificial intelligence may reach the stage where computers have consciousness and therefore should be treated as living beings.
Perhaps it’s serendipitous, then, that the machines have finally arrived. Truly smart, truly impressive robots and machine learning algorithms that may help usher in a new Green Revolution to keep humans fed on an increasingly mercurial planet. Think satellites that automatically detect drought patterns, tractors that eyeball plants and kill the sick ones, and an AI-powered smartphone app that can tell a farmer what disease has crippled their crop.
Forget scarecrows. The future of agriculture is in the hands of the machines.
A Digital Green Thumb
Continue reading “The Future of Humanity’s Food Supply Is in the Hands of AI” »
A computer has cracked the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem — but is it really maths? http://bit.ly/1sAVMB8
Could Yale physicists finally give Schrödinger’s cat a second box to play in proving the superposition of states.
Yale physicists have given Schrödinger’s famous cat a second box to play in, and the result may help further the quest for reliable quantum computing.
Schrödinger’s cat is a well-known paradox that applies the concept of superposition in quantum physics to objects encountered in everyday life. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. Quantum physics suggests that the cat is both alive and dead (a superposition of states), until someone opens the box and, in doing so, changes the quantum state.
Non-diffracting Bessel vortex beams exhibit diverse propagation regimes in glass that can be observed with a novel imaging strategy.
High-power femtosecond pulses have become a key tool in processing of transparent materials (e.g., glass and sapphire) for the present and the next generation of consumer electronics.1 Associated major industrial challenges include high-quality and high-speed cutting of screen glass for smartphones, camera windows, or drilling of through-vias (vertical interconnect access) in interposers for the circuitry of 3D electronic chips. Ultrafast laser pulses (on picosecond or femtosecond timescales) allow for structuring transparent materials with high levels of accuracy. When the laser pulses propagate into the transparent dielectrics, they usually undergo high distortions.2 These distortions arise because of the nonlinear Kerr self-focusing effect and because of the interaction of the pulse with the plasma, which the pulses generate in the material. The propagation is therefore highly nonlinear and prevents uniform energy deposition along the beam propagation.
Continue reading “High-power, diffraction-free femtosecond vortex for laser materials processing” »
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed the first flexible wearable device capable of monitoring both biochemical and electric signals in the human body. The Chem-Phys patch records electrocardiogram (EKG) heart signals and tracks levels of lactate, a biochemical that is a marker of physical effort, in real time. The device can be worn on the chest and communicates wirelessly with a smartphone, smart watch or laptop. It could have a wide range of applications, from athletes monitoring their workouts to physicians monitoring patients with heart disease.
Nanoengineers and electrical engineers at the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors worked together to build the device, which includes a flexible suite of sensors and a small electronic board. The device also can transmit the data from biochemical and electrical signals via Bluetooth.
Nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang and electrical engineering professor Patrick Mercier at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering led the project, with Wang’s team working on the patch’s sensors and chemistry, while Mercier’s team worked on the electronics and data transmission. They describe the Chem-Phys patch in the May 23 issue of Nature Communications.
