Phys.org February 20, 2019 Where our atmosphere merges into outer space, there is a cloud of hydrogen atoms called the geocorona. An international team of researchers (Russia, France, Finland) found that the measurements made in 1996, 1997 and 1998 showed geocorona extends at least up to 100 Earth Radii encompassing the orbit of the Moon. The extra source of hydrogen is not significant enough to facilitate space exploration. These particles do not pose any threat for space travelers on future crewed missions orbiting the moon. But the Earth’s geocorona could interfere with future astronomical observations performed in the vicinity of […]
Chilling New Research Shows How Dire a Smallpox Bioterror Attack Could Actually Get
Science Alert February 21, 2019 To investigate what this kind of hypothetical threat might look, an international team of researchers (Australia, Fiji, USA- USINDOPACOM, Emory University, New Zealand, UK, Western Samoa, Tonga, industry) recently led a complex international simulation of such an attack, called Exercise Mataika to simulate a worst-case, large scale bioterrorist attack. The aim was to determine the duration and magnitude of the epidemic under different scenarios and scenarios where the current stockpile of vaccine is adequate. In a worst-case scenario, at the peak of the epidemic worldwide, it showed that only 50 percent of smallpox cases are […]
Causal disentanglement is the next frontier in AI
Phys.org February 20, 2019 Complex behaviour emerges from interactions between objects produced by different generating mechanisms. Researchers in Sweden introduce a universal, unsupervised and parameter-free model-oriented approach, based on the seminal concept and the first principles of algorithmic probability, to decompose an observation into its most likely algorithmic generative models. They demonstrated its ability to deconvolve interacting mechanisms regardless of whether the resultant objects are bit strings, space–time evolution diagrams, images or networks. Although this is mostly a conceptual contribution and an algorithmic framework, they have provided numerical evidence evaluating the ability of the methods to extract models from data […]
Big data is being reshaped thanks to 100-year-old ideas about geometry
The Conversation February 20, 2019 Scientists in Switzerland recently produced the first-ever digital 3D brain cell atlas, a complete mapping of the brain of a mouse. While this is a colossal achievement, the great challenge now lies in learning to decipher the atlas. In more and more realms of science, researchers are finding themselves with more data than they can effectively make sense of. The response of modern mathematicians to meet the mathematical challenges of big data is still unfolding – and topology, a theory bound only by the imagination of its practitioners, is bound to help shape the future…read […]
Best of arXiv.org for AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning – January 2019
Inside Big Data February 20, 2019 The articles are academic research papers, typically geared toward graduate students, post docs, and seasoned professionals. Articles are listed in no particular with a brief overview – Hard-Exploration Problems , Deep Neural Network Approximation for Custom Hardware: Where We’ve Been, Where We’re Going , Generating Textual Adversarial Examples for Deep Learning Models: A Survey , Revisiting Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning , Self-Driving Cars: A Survey read more.
Top 10 Science and Technology Inventions for the Week of February 22, 2019
01. Exotic spiraling electrons discovered by physicists 02. The first walking robot that moves without GPS 03. A polariton filter turns ordinary laser light into quantum light 04. Researchers discover anti-laser masquerading as perfect absorber 05. Sound waves let quantum systems ‘talk’ to one another 06. Watch a harpoon successfully spear a piece of space junk 07. Engineered metasurfaces reflect waves in unusual directions 08. Across the spectrum: Researchers find way to stabilize color of light in next-gen material 09. Protecting the Nation from Emerging and Pandemic Infectious Diseases and CBRN Threats 10. International research collaboration computes climate past, present, […]
Watch a harpoon successfully spear a piece of space junk
MIT Technology Review February 15, 2019 Right now there are more than 7,600 tons of space junk floating around our planet. Researchers in the UK created a satellite called the RemoveDEBRIS which fired a harpoon at 20 meters a second at a separate satellite panel that it was holding at the end of a boom. The harpoon succeeded in stabbing and capturing the item. Last year the team also “accurately fired a giant net” https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612174/satellite-uses-giant-net-to-trap-spinning-bit-of-space-junk/ at a satellite to capture it and tested out a lidar- and camera-based system for identifying space junk. The final test by RemoveDEBRIS in March […]
Sound waves let quantum systems ‘talk’ to one another
Phys.org February 18, 2019 Transferring information between different types of technology, such as quantum memories and quantum processors has been a persistent challenge. To couple the sound waves with the spins of electrons in the material an international team of researchers (University of Chicago, UC Santa Barbara, Argonne National Laboratory, Japan) built a system with curved electrodes to concentrate the sound waves, like using a magnifying lens to focus a point of light. Using the synchrotron they observed inside the material as the sound waves moved through it. The research reveals the importance of shear strain for future device engineering […]
Russia Is Preparing to Disconnect The Entire Country From The Internet
Science Alert February 14, 2019 Russia is making plans to cut off its internet from the rest of the world, with a giant ‘unplugging’ experiment that will affect over 100 million Russian internet users, to see if an isolated Russian internet can function ‘offline’ in the event of a cyberattack that forcibly disconnects it from foreign servers. Under the draft legislation, Russian internet providers must execute technical measures in their networks to counter potential threats from foreign aggressors – in effect, insulating the Russian internet from the rest of the web, and ensuring all traffic is carried on the country’s […]
Researchers discover anti-laser masquerading as perfect absorber
Phys.org February 15, 2019 Researchers at Duke University constructed zirconia ceramic surface dimpled with cylinders like the face of a Lego brick. After computationally modeling the device’s properties by altering the cylinders’ size and spacing, the researchers realized that they had actually created a more fundamental kind of coherent perfect absorber (CPA) which can absorb both aligned and misaligned waves. Unlike typical CPAs the new material has three variables the cylinders’ radius, height and periodicity. This gives a lot of flexibility for tailoring the CPA model and put them in the frequency spectrum where needed…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE