Month: September 2018

  • Tread Lightly: This AI Can Identify You by Monitoring Your Footsteps

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    ELEMENTARY

    Teachers take attendance, students reply “here.” Some things never change. But what if that process got a tech upgrade? What if AI could tell which students were there based on the way they walked into the classroom?

    Automating classroom attendance is just way we could use a new artificial intelligence that can identify a person simply by analyzing their footsteps. This unusual system is the work of researchers at Indian Institute of Technology, who published their study on the preprint server arXiv on Monday.

    UNDER FOOT

    The team needed a lot of data on footsteps to create their system. To collect it, they used a geophone, a device that converts ground movement into electrical signals. They asked eight volunteers to each walk barefooted in a circle with a geophone at the center, coming as close to the device as 1 meter (3.2 feet) and as far as 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) from it.

    The researchers gathered about an hour of walking data for each individual. That added up to 46,489 footsteps, which they believe is the largest footstep database ever collected. Then they used the data to train an algorithm to differentiate between the steps of different participants by evaluating the time between steps, their length, and their rhythm.

    In the end, the AI could identify a person with 92 percent accuracy after recording just seven consecutive footsteps. The researchers believe their system could eventually replace other biometric identification systems, such as fingerprint or retina scanners, as it is easily camouflaged and doesn’t require the cooperation of the person it’s analyzing.

    WALK IT OFF

    As for applications beyond the classroom, the researchers note that high-security areas, such as military bases, could use the system to detect anyone who isn’t in an approved footstep database. It could also prove useful in the smart homes of the future; for example, the AI could tell your home’s audio system to start playing a different radio station depending on the family member that walks into a room.

    Of course, there are still kinks to work out — as it stands, the system can’t identify more than one person at a time, so it’d be useless in crowds. However, the researchers are already working to improve their device, so it might not be long before your footstep is all you need to prove your identity.

    READ MORE: Researchers Train AI to Identify People From Their Footsteps [VentureBeat]

    More on biometrics: A Top Manufacturer Is Taking a Chance on in-Display Fingerprint Sensors

    https://futurism.com/?p=138477&post_type=post

    References: VentureBeat

  • Astronomers Discover a New Source of Spectacular Radio Jets

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    by Kristin Houser.  September 26, 2018    Hard Science

    JET SETTER

    In a ranking of cool space phenomenon, radio jets have to take a spot near the top. They’re near-light-speed blasts of material from black holes or neutron stars, which are known as “stellar corpses” because they are the remnants of stars left after they’ve gone supernova, and they’re downright spectacular.

    Scientists thought the only neutron stars that could expel radio jets were those with very weak magnetic fields. But a new discovery has punched a big hole in that understanding.

    They just figured out that a jet-spewing neutron star called Swift J0243.6+6124 has got a really, really strong magnetic field, according to a paper published Wednesday in Nature.

    THE FORCE IS STRONG

    The University of Amsterdam-led research team discovered the phenomenon using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio telescope and NASA’s Swift space telescope.

    “The magnetic field of the neutron star we studied is about 10 trillion times stronger than that of our own Sun, so for the first time ever, we have observed a jet coming from a neutron star with a very strong magnetic field,” lead researchers Jakob van den Eijnden said in a press release. “The discovery reveals a whole new class of jet-producing sources for us to study.”

    ENERGY IN, ENERGY OUT

    As co-author James Miller-Jones added, radio jets play a major role in the transfer of gravitational energy from black holes and neutron stars back into the surrounding environment, so anything that expands our understanding of the phenomenon subsequently improves our understanding of the universe as a whole.

    And now, thanks to this study, we can start hunting down radio jets in places we never thought to look.

    READ MORENeutron Star Jets Shoot Down Theory [EurekAlert]

    More on radio jets: Researchers Discover “Bizarre” Black Holes That Are All Aligned

    References: EurekAlert

    https://futurism.com/?p=138388&post_type=post

  • Mind-reading devices can now access your thoughts and dreams using AI

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    We can now decode dreams and recreate images of faces people have seen, and everyone from Facebook to Elon Musk wants a piece of this mind reading reality

    By Timothy Revell

    I FEEL like a cross between an Olympic swimmer and a cyborg. On my head is a bathing-cap-like hat dotted with electrodes, and a cable dangles behind me.

    David Ibanez and Marta Castellano, from the neuroscience company Starlab, look at me from across a table at their headquarters in Barcelona. As the sun beams in through two giant windows illuminating the plain white room where we sit, I am trying to hide my nerves, but wonder whether that is even possible while wearing a device like this. These may be humble surroundings, but Ibanez and Castellano are about to try to read my mind.

    For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to decipher what people are thinking from their brain activity. Now, thanks to an explosion in artificial intelligence, we can decipher patterns in brain scans that once just looked like meaningless squiggles.

    “Nobody dreamed that you could get to the content of thought like we’ve been able to in the past 10 years. It was considered science fiction,” says Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Researchers have already peered into the brain to recreate films people have watched and decoded dreams.

    Now the world’s biggest players in AI are racing to develop their own mind-reading capabilities. Last year, Facebook announced plans for a device to allow people to type using their thoughts. Microsoft, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Tesla’s Elon Musk all have their own projects under way. This is no longer just a case of seeing parts of the brain light up on a screen, it is the first step towards the ultimate superpower. I had to give it a try.

    Click here for the complete article from NewScientist:

  • Lost letter

    A letter written by Galileo in 1613 has turned up in a misdated library catalogue in London, revealing that he toned down his argument against the church’s geocentric doctrine. The letter was thought to be hopelessly lost, but a postdoctoral science historian found it in the Royal Society’s library while searching for something else.

    Writing to his friend Benedetto Castelli, Galileo set out for the first time his argument that Copernicus’s heliocentric model was not incompatible with the Bible. But the letter is strewn with amendments, thought to be in Galileo’s hand, softening the wording before he asked Castelli to send it to the Vatican. 

    NewScientist
  • A Pair of Japanese Robots (Hopefully) Just Landed on an Asteroid

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    by Kristin Houser    September 21, 2018    Off World

    ASTEROID LANDING

    Move over, Bruce Willis — a pair of robots are the latest to attempt a landing on an asteroid millions of miles from Earth. But unlike Willis, these bots aren’t there to blow it up. No, the bots, each of which weighs 1.1 kilogram (2.4 pounds), is there to study the kilometer-wide space rock.

    Whether they’ll succeed, though, is a real nail-biter. We won’t know until Saturday, when the bots go online, whether they survived the landing.

    “We are very much hopeful,” said Yuichi Tsuda, a project manager at Japan’s space agency, according to Phys.org. “We don’t have confirmation yet, but we are very, very hopeful.”

    BOUNCE BOTS

    In December 2014, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency launched Hayabusa2, a refrigerator-sized spacecraft destined for Ryugu, a lumpy asteroid roughly 289 million kilometers (180 million miles) from Earth. Hayabusa2 reached Ryugu in June; on Friday, it tossed a pair of small exploratory robots toward the asteroid.

    If they land successfully, the robots will use their solar-powered motors to bounce around the asteroid’s surface, remaining airborne for periods as long as 15 minutes thanks to Ryugu’s weak gravity. From a vantage point up to 15 meters (49 feet) above the surface, the bots will record information such as surface temperature and photos of the asteroid, then beam it back to Earth.

    HOME AGAIN

    The mission could help us better understand how our solar system formed, since Ryugu and asteroids like it haven’t changed much over the past 4.5 billion years.

    It could also provide valuable information for future asteroid mining efforts. After all, Ryugu is worth an estimated $95 billion, so there’s a huge financial incentive to figuring out how best to harvest those potential profits.

    Hayabusa2 will hang around Ryugu until the end of 2019 to complete several other experiments. By 2021 it will return to Earth with samples in tow — and hopefully new insights into our past and future along with it.

    READ MORE: Japan Space Robots to Probe Asteroid 170 Million Miles From Earth [Bloomberg]

  • 10 mysteries of the universe: How did it all begin?

    tenthings1-800x533A faint afterglow in the sky tells of a universe that exploded into being 13.8 billion years ago. But we haven't got the full story of the big bang nailed yet

    NASA/WMAP Science Team

    Mystery: How did it all begin?  By Joshua Howgego

    WHEN the curtain came up on the universe, the lights stayed down for a moment. For about the first 380,000 years, a mere instant on the cosmic stage, charged particles buffeted light around the early universe as if in an opaque fog, and not a glimmer escaped. Then things cooled enough for atoms to form, scattering ceased – and light was liberated.

    Remarkably, we can still see that light. We know from observations of galactic motions that space has been expanding since the cosmic beginning, and that this light has expanded and cooled with it. Now it suffuses all of space, a bath of low-frequency microwaves with a temperature of 2.7 kelvin.

    Read more: 10 mysteries of the universe

    From dark matter and energy to our own enigmatic existence, here’s our pick of the greatest cosmic conundrums – told through the bizarre objects embodying them

    Since its discovery in 1964, we have made incredibly precise maps of this cosmic microwave background all across the sky. The best, the Planck satellite’s four-year scan completed in 2014, caused some head-scratching. The big bang afterglow seemed to cast doubt on whether the bang was so big at all.

    The problem has to do with inflation, a theory devised by cosmologist Alan Guth and others in the 1980s to explain why stuff in the universe seems so uniformly distributed in all directions. In a plain-vanilla big bang, quantum fluctuations should have produced differences in the density of matter that grew as the universe expanded. Guth explained cosmic sameyness by proposing the existence of an “inflaton” field that filled space-time at the big bang, forcing it apart at faster than light speed. This would mean everything we see originated from a tiny, uniform region of original space.

    Inflation quickly became gospel. But the more energy the inflaton field had, the more space-time would have been shaken by tiny gravitational waves at the beginning of time. And yet we see no traces of gravitational wave effects in the Planck map.

    It is not impossible to square this with inflation, but it is difficult, says Anna Ijjas, a cosmologist at Columbia University in New York. “What we learned from the Planck is that the simplest models are out,” she says.

    That leaves inflationary theory out of sorts. “We can try to fix it, or we can find something better,” says Ijjas. The Planck map is prodding her and others, including one of inflation’s key architects, Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, towards a different view of the start. It wasn’t a bang, they say, but a bounce.

    Models describing “cyclic” universes that expand, contract and then expand again have been around for a while, and recently other circumstantial evidence has built up in support of them (see “10 mysteries of the universe: What came before the big bang?“). Their attraction is that although they squeeze the universe down very small, it would never have been at the tiny sizes where the most poorly understood quantum effects come into play. The uniformity arises naturally from the squeeze.

    The right answer is still anyone’s guess, but Ijjas says she expects to be able to make predictions based on bouncing models within a couple of years, and compare them with observations of the cosmic microwave background. The start of the cosmos may have been dark, but we may soon see it in a new light.

    This article appeared in print under the headline “Object: Cosmic microwave background”

  • Why a rake on the moon messed up our theories of life on Earth

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    Astronaut Harrison Schmitt collected samples with a rake during the Apollo 17 mission NASA

    By Leah Crane

    Not all moon rocks are created equal. Minuscule glass beads brought back from the moon by Apollo astronauts seemed to show that there were far more objects smashing into the moon in the last 500 million years than the rest of the moon’s history. Now it turns out they just didn’t look deep enough, which could spell trouble for some theories about the rise of life on Earth.

    When a rock crashes into the moon or a planet, it vaporises parts of the surface and sends up a spray of debris. As the bits of melted dust and rock fly through the air, some of them cool into tiny beads called impact glass spherules, which can be used to tell when the impact happened.

    When researchers begun to analyse and date the glass bits in samples from NASA’s Apollo missions, they found an odd pattern. There were as many beads from the last 500 million years as from the entire four billion years before that – far more recent glass than they expected.

    Model mission

    Now, David Minton at Purdue University in Indiana and his colleagues have built the most detailed computer model ever of how these spherules are produced.

    They simulated 500,000 landing sites of the kind visited by the Apollo astronauts. When they kept the impact rate the same for the last three billion years, they found glass bead samples taken from the top 10 centimetres of these sites would skew younger, while deeper samples would have a more even number of old and young beads.

    That means that the rate of impacts on the moon likely has not changed much in the last three billion years – it is just that our samples are biased because of new beads from more recent impacts burying the older ones.

    In other words, the Apollo astronauts weren’t digging deep enough to get a true picture of the moon’s history. “They had this little rake tool, and they would rake up a few centimetres,” says Minton. “We’d have to sample a column of a metre or more to see the true impact rate.”

    The history of impacts on the moon has an important bearing on our understanding of Earth’s past. That’s because impacts on Earth tend to be erased by geological activity, which the moon lacks. “The moon preserves its record far better than the Earth does,” says Paul Renne at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.

    The time period abound 500 million years ago, when it appeared the moon experienced more impacts, was a particularly important time for life on Earth. There was a dramatic increase and diversification of complex life called the Cambrian explosion, and we are not entirely sure what caused it.

    Some researchers have suggested that the apparent increase in meteorite impacts may have had something to do with it. “If there was this increase in impacts around the same time, it would support the idea that life was stimulated or seeded by organic molecules from elsewhere in the solar system,” says Renne. But if this supposed increase turns out to be a mistake, we will have to look for alternative explanations, he says.

    Journal reference: Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2018GL077254

  • Hubble Captures Wide-Field View of Galaxy Cluster Abell 370

    image_6407-Abell-370Abell 370, a massive galaxy cluster located in the constellation Cetus, approximately 4 billion light-years away, is the first target of the BUFFALO survey, which aims to search for some of the first galaxies in the Universe. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Koekemoer / M. Jauzac / C. Steinhardt / BUFFALO Team.

    The immense mass of giant galaxy clusters like Abell 370, mainly composed of the mysterious dark matter, bends and magnifies the light of these faraway objects, turning these clusters into natural telescopes.

    A cluster’s mass bends and magnifies light from more distant objects behind it, uncovering objects otherwise too faint for even Hubble’s sensitive vision.

    Using this cosmological trick — known as strong gravitational lensing — Hubble is able to explore some of the earliest and most distant galaxies in the Universe.

    The most stunning demonstration of gravitational lensing in Abell 370 can be seen just below the center of the cluster.

    Nicknamed ‘The Dragon,’ this feature is a combination of five gravitationally lensed images of the same spiral galaxy that lies beyond the cluster.

    This image of Abell 370 and its surroundings was made as part of the new Beyond Ultra-deep Frontier Fields And Legacy Observations (BUFFALO) survey.

    This project was designed to succeed the successful Frontier Fields project. 101 Hubble orbits have been dedicated to exploring the six Frontier Field galaxy clusters. These additional observations focus on the regions surrounding the galaxy clusters, allowing for a larger field of view.

    BUFFALO’s main mission, however, is to investigate how and when the most massive and luminous galaxies in the Universe formed and how early galaxy formation is linked to dark matter assembly.

    This will allow astronomers to determine how rapidly galaxies formed in the first 800 million years after the Big Bang.

    Driven by the Frontier Fields observations, the BUFFALO survey will be able to detect the most distant galaxies 10 times more efficiently than its progenitor program.

    BUFFALO will also take advantage of other space telescopes which have already observed the regions around the clusters. These datasets will be included in the search for the first galaxies.

    “By expanding the area that we map around each of these clusters, we will significantly improve our estimate of the clusters’ magnification, a mandatory step for studying the distant galaxies that BUFFALO will discover,” said BUFFALO project leader Dr. Mathilde Jauzac, an astronomer in the Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy at Durham University, UK.

    “Plus, BUFFALO will allow us to map precisely the distribution of dark matter in these massive clusters, and thus trace their evolutionary history, a missing piece of information in today’s evolution theories.”

    “BUFFALO represents an amazing opportunity to understand how dark matter assembles, interacts, and evolves in the most massive structures present in our Universe.”

  • AI Just Detected 72 Radio Bursts That Could Come From Aliens

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    by Kristin Houser   September 12, 2018   Off World

    ALIEN AI

    Searching the skies for extraterrestrial life means spending a lot of time separating signals from noise. Luckily, AI is particularly good at that.

    In a new study accepted by The Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe how they used data previously collected from fast radio bursts (FRBs), a type of mysterious pulse from billions of light years away, to train a neural network to find dozens more in already-collected data.

    THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

    FRBs, also known as “cosmic whistles,” are powerful, short pulses of energy emanating from deep space. Scientists don’t know what causes them, but they’ve got some theories — they could be generated by magnetized neutron stars and black holes, or they could be transmissions from an alien society.

    FRBs are so brief that they’re tedious to detect manually. So it makes sense that AI could help.

    First, the researchers at the University of California, Berkeley trained their algorithm to detect FRBs using previously recorded bursts. Then they put it to work, feeding it five hours of radio activity collected from a part of the sky that often returns FRB data. In that data the algorithm identified a whopping 72 new FRBs, bringing the number recognized from that single source to about 300.

    NEW FINDINGS

    “This work is exciting not just because it helps us understand the dynamic behavior of fast radio bursts in more detail, but also because of the promise it shows for using machine learning to detect signals missed by classical algorithms,” said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and principal investigator of the new paper.

    The Berkeley team believes this information could help astronomers home in on the cause of FRBs. They also hope it could inspire others to look for ways to apply AI to radio astronomy.

    READ MORE: AI Helps Track Down Mysterious Cosmic Radio Bursts [Berkeley News]

    More on FRBs: Fast Radio Bursts Have a Unique Property That Can Help Us Determine Their Source

    References: Berkeley News

  • After the cat: Celebrating Schrödinger’s 75-year influence on biology

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    Erwin Schrödinger delivered his landmark lecture in 1943
    Wolfgang Pfaundler/Science Photo Library
    In 1943, physicist Erwin Schrödinger gave a lecture in Dublin that kick-started modern biology. A star-studded conference last week celebrated his legacy

    By Graham Lawton

    “I’m a neuroscientist, and we have a technical expression in the field,” quips consciousness researcher Christoph Koch. “My brain is full.”

    I know how he feels. After 24 talks delving deep into some of the most exciting ideas in science, mine is fit to burst. Over the past two days, I’ve met six Nobel prizewinners, plus some good bets for future invitees to Stockholm. All are here in Dublin to celebrate the 75th anniversary of one of the most famous lectures in science.

    In 1943, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger stood in the physics lecture theatre at Trinity College Dublin and delivered his three-part lecture What Is Life?. Later published as a book, his ideas are widely credited with inspiring the molecular biology revolution. At the time, the molecular basis of life was unknown. Within 10 years, the structure of DNA had been discovered, and the genetic code was cracked eight years after that.

    Schrödinger moved to Dublin in 1939 after fleeing Nazi Germany and Austria. He was 53 and had already done the work that made him famous, including his eponymous wave equation and his infamous cat. He won a share of the 1933 physics Nobel prize for his work in quantum mechanics, but, as an outspoken critic of the Nazis, he was dismissed from his position at the University of Graz in Austria. He fled to Italy, the UK, and then Belgium.

    In 1940, he received a speculative offer from the Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera – a former mathematician – to become the director of the planned Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Luckily for de Valera, Schrödinger was an admirer of the Irish physicist William Hamilton, whose reformulation of Newtonian mechanics inspired his own work. He was glad to escape to neutral Ireland and stayed there until 1956.

    As director of the institute, it was Schrödinger’s duty to deliver annual public lectures. Like many a Nobel prizewinner, he used his academic freedom to think outside his subject. In What Is Life?, he used his knowledge of physics and atomic theory to speculate that life would turn out to be based on some sort of “aperiodic crystal”. He also floated the idea of a genetic code.

    James Watson and Francis Crick famously sent their 1953 Nature paper on the structure of DNA to Schrödinger, saying “we thought you might be interested in the enclosed reprints – you will see that it looks as though your term ‘aperiodic crystal’ is going to be a very apt one”.

    “As a feast of information, the event served as an excellent crash course in modern life science”

    Watson himself made a rare public appearance at the meeting, having seemingly put recent controversies around racist remarks behind him. He declined to speak to any journalists.

    But it wasn’t just scientists and journalists in attendance – the celebration was open to the general public. Given how productive the life sciences are right now, with daily advances in neuroscience, genetics, immunology, bioengineering, gerontology and related disciplines, this added up to a mouth-watering prospect. Dublin’s 1200-seater National Concert Hall was packed full for the duration of the conference.

    As a feast of scientific information, the event succeeded brilliantly, serving up an excellent crash course in modern life science. But as an exercise in futurology, it was less satisfying. Most of the speakers dwelt firmly in the present, or replayed their greatest, Nobel prizewinning hits.

    That was always likely. Twenty-five years ago, Dublin hosted a similar conference to mark the 50th birthday of What Is Life?. It attempted to recapture Schrödinger’s spirit of speculation but, according to Mike Murphy of the University of Cambridge, who organised both conferences, it failed. “One of our goals for the 2018 conference is to encourage the speakers to look to the future and to take risks in speculating on future challenges and predictions,” he said.

    Sadly the conference, on 5 and 6 September, didn’t quite manage it. But who can blame scientists for declining to speculate? Back at the 1993 meeting, nobody could have predicted some of the recurring highlights of this meeting: gene editing, optogenetics, cancer immunotherapy, ancient DNA sequencing, memory research and theories of consciousness.

    In fact, even Schrödinger himself was a reluctant crystal-ball gazer, admitting in the preface to his book that his speculations were based on “second-hand and incomplete knowledge” and that he was risking making a fool of himself.

    I hope I’m still around in 25 years to attend Schrödinger at 100 and refill my brain with the science no one dared predict this time.

    This article appeared in print under the headline “Biology’s greatest hits pull a crowd”