Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 220

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson has set yet another record. After becoming the first woman to command the Space Station in 2008, and the first woman to command the Station twice (on April 9th, 2017), she has now set the record for cumulative time spent in space by a US astronaut.

At the moment of breaking the record, Whitson spent 534 days, 2 hours, and 49 minutes in space. And with the recent extension of her stay at the International Space Station, she will accumulate even more time. When she returns to Earth, she'll have spent more than 650 days in space, and decades supporting spaceflight from the ground.

Until now, the record-holder, when talking about the US astronauts, was Jeff Williams with 534 days, 2 hours and 48 minutes of cumulative time in space.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has sent yet another stunning image from space.

The photo was taken when Cassini was 870 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) away from Earth, and it shows our planet between the rings of Saturn.

Although far and too small to be visible in the image, the part of Earth facing Cassini at the time was the southern Atlantic Ocean. Even Earth's Moon is visible in a zoomed-in version of the image.

Google had some of its best engineers on its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) project, but some of them have departed the search giant for one of the most secretive AI projects in the world.

The engineers left Google, teaming with one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists, Chamath Palihapitiya. The company that Palihapitiya lured the engineers to is called Groq Inc., at least for now - but there's little known about Groq. There are a few SEC filings from October and December, with the company raising $10.3 million. In its SEC documents, Groq named three principals: Jonathan Ross, who helped invent the TPU, Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at the Google X "moonshot factory" and Palihapitiya, the founder of investment firm Social Capital. The listed address is Social Capital's headquarters, reports CNBC.

Palihapitiya said in an email: "We're really excited about Groq. It's too early to talk specifics, but we think what they're building could become a fundamental building block for the next generation of computing". The fundamental building block for the next generation of computing? Alright, now I'm excited.

Languages... who needs them? These are the thoughts that go through Tony Stark's Elon Musk's mind, so the Tesla and Space X founder and his think tank have devised a device that would plant a neural plant inside of your head.

Musk's grand plan would make AI assistants of today look like they were made in the stone age, for one big reason: languages. These brain implants would push through "uncompressed" communication between people, so that you could upload your thoughts instantaneously between your brains - without language barriers. It sounds fantastic, doesn't it?

During a recent interview, Musk said: "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy. There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person".

After a little over a week with just four crew members on board the Space Station, the Expedition 51 is now complete. After a six-hour flight, NASA astronaut Jack Fischer and cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian space agency Roscosmos arrived at the International Space Station.

The two launched aboard the Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Before docking to the Station, they orbited Earth 4 times.

The arrival of Fischer and Yurchikhin increased the Station's crew complement to five. The two join Expedition 51 Commander Peggy Whitson of NASA and Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy of Roscosmos and Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency).

After more than 12 years studying Saturn, its rings, and moons, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has entered the final year of its epic voyage. The conclusion of the historic scientific odyssey is planned for September 2017. Cassini already sent some impressive images of Saturn's atmosphere and shown us detailed images of Saturn's rings.

However, Cassini's most important discovery reveals much more. NASA has announced that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The paper from researchers with the Cassini mission, published in the journal Science, indicates hydrogen gas, which could potentially provide a chemical energy source for life, is pouring into the subsurface ocean of Enceladus from hydrothermal activity on the seafloor.

The presence of ample hydrogen means that microbes if they exist there, could use it to obtain energy by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide dissolved in the water.

Expedition 50 crew members safely returned to Earth on Monday after 173 days in space.

The Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft, carrying Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough of NASA, and Flight Engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, has landed in Kazakhstan at approximately 7:20 AM. The three touched down southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

"It was a textbook touchdown," said NASA's spokesperson Rob Navias. "The Soyuz was pulled by its main parachute onto its side, but the crew was quickly extracted and are in good shape."

SpaceX made history by successfully launching and landing already used Falcon 9 rocket. This is the first time in history that an already used rocket has been launched again.

The Falcon 9 in question was first used in April last year when it launched the Dragon towards the International Space Station. It was the second rocket that SpaceX successfully landed, and the first one that they landed on an ocean platform.

SpaceX has been landing rockets for little over two years now. Up until then, rockets were only disposable, destroyed after the launch. The company has now shown that the rockets can be re-used, which will lower the cost of space missions and space flights.

SpaceX just made history. Again. They have just successfully launched and landed an already used Falcon 9 rocket. This is the first time in history that an already used rocket has been launched again.

The Falcon 9 in question was first used in April last year when it launched the Dragon towards the International Space Station. It was the second rocket that SpaceX successfully landed, and the first one that they landed on an ocean platform.

SpaceX is all set to make history on Thursday, March 30th, when they plan to launch their first reusable rocket.

The Falcon 9 rocket, which they plan to launch on Thursday, was first used in April last year when it launched the Dragon towards the International Space Station. It was the second rocket that SpaceX successfully landed, and the first one that they landed on an ocean platform.

SpaceX test-fired the rocket this week, and they announced that the static fire test was successful.

Elon Musk is making some big moves towards getting your mind inside of a machine, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Musk has launched a new company called Neuralink, which is pushing the boundaries on something Musk teases as "neural lace technology".

Back in February, Musk said that humans can communicate at around 10 bits per second when typing on smartphones, but computers can talk to each other at trillions of bits per second. In order for the human race to begin trying to keep up with advanced machines will be a high-speed link, something Musk calls neural laces, between computers and our brains. Oh, is that all, Elon?

WSJ's sources say that Musk has taken a key role in Neuralink, and might even be in a leadership position. Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak confirmed the company is in operation, and Musk is involved, but it's early days for Neuralink.

So, we're now at a point where scientists can scan our brain waves while we watch movie trailers - and are able to pretty accurately predict whether that movie will be a box office success... or whether it'll bomb.

Researchers from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management have been working on a method of scanning brain waves of moviegoers, scanning over 120 of them wearing EEG brain monitors while they watched movie trailers, scanning their brain wave patterns. The researchers used this data, to see how well the trailers were keeping the attention of the viewers, and how similar the viewers' brain waves were.

This provided them with something called "neural similarity", and was a great way of predicting whether the final movie would be a box office hit - as those with more neural similarity made more money at the box office, with better engagement. The team tested over a dozen movie trailers, with X-Men: Days of Future Past coming in at #1 on the brain scans, while Mr. Peabody and Sherman came in dead last. The researchers added that neural similarity ratings accurately predicted the box office performance of both of these movies, and that this technology is at least 20% more accurate at predicting box office success than "less scientific" survey options.

Stephen Hawking, a well-known English physicist, and cosmologist has announced that he has accepted Sir Richard Branson's invitation to fly to space on board Virgin Galactic's new spacecraft.

In an interview on Monday with the British program Good Morning Britain, Hawking said he's been waiting to visit space for a while.

"My ambition is to fly into space. I thought no one would take me, but Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic, and I said yes", said Hawking.

Skynet is coming, and it'll be here sooner than you think: 2029. That's at least according to Google's Director of Engineering, Ray Kurzweil - who said: "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence".

This new claim is a big one, as the Singularity has been teased by the smartest people in the world - the point where computers become smarter than humans. Others have said that the Singularity would take place in 2045 or so, with British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking staking claims on the Singularity happening in 2045.

Softbank recently acquired ARM Holdings, with plans of bringing the Singularity to us within the next 30 years. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son explained in a press conference last October: "I think a big paradigm shift is coming. The biggest theme in my view is the Singularity. I think it is coming into reality in the next 30 years. For that vision, I am exercising that strategy. $100 billion is an interesting size of ammunition. In my view, that is the beginning. My passion is bigger than many people think".

We all know what happens when Skynet is turned on, and it feels like we continue to get closer each week - with Google now teasing its new AI, after it learned "highly aggressive" behavior.

Google had its AI technology in a wolfpack hunting game scenario, where the AI had to gather fruit - with the concept of the game based around cooperation, but it went bad. AI were represented by colored squares that moved on a grid collecting fruit squares of differing colors.

As they collected fruit, the AI collected points - while the fruit squares would regenerate. But then the AI began to change, as they were capable of damaging the other AI players in the game with laser beams. The AI was fine when there were plenty of fruit squares, but when the fruit squares became scarce - the AI started attacking other AI, just like we would against other gamers in a video game.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, called TRAPPIST-1. The system is named after The Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile, which first discovered three of these planets.

At their press event, NASA has confirmed that three of those planets are located in the habitable zone. All of the seven planets could have liquid water, meaning there is a chance that some form of life might have developed on them. Scientists believe that the highest chances of finding extraterrestrial life are the three planets in the habitable zone.

The discovery also sets a new record for greatest number of habitable-zone planets found around a single star outside our solar system.

NASA has announced that they will hold a news conference at 1 PM Wednesday, February 22nd, to "present new findings on planets that orbit stars other than our sun, known as exoplanets." NASA's announcement didn't reveal any further details.

There are thousands of known exoplanets that scientists discovered in the past two decades. Scientists believe that exoplanets are our best chance to find an extraterrestrial life.

There is special interest in planets that orbit in a star's habitable zone, where it is possible for liquid water, a prerequisite for life on Earth, to exist on the surface.

After a postponed launch on Saturday, SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday at 9:39 EST.

SpaceX's Dragon cargo craft launched from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the first commercial launch from Kennedy's historic pad. The first-ever launch from Kennedy's Pad 39-A was Apollo 4. Lifting off on November 9th, 1967, it was the first test flight of the Saturn V rocket that took Apollo astronauts to the moon. The SpaceX CRS-10 launch of a Dragon spacecraft is the first from Pad 39-A since the final space shuttle mission on July 8th, 2011.

SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is now on its way to International Space Station where it will arrive on Wednesday, February 22nd. Shane Kimbrough of NASA and Thomas Pesquet of the ESA (European Space Agency) will use the station's robotic arm to capture it.

SpaceX is scheduled to launch its tenth Commercial Resupply Services mission to the International Space Station on Saturday, February 18th.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is targeting liftoff on the company's Falcon 9 rocket at 10:01 AM from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft will carry supplies and hardware needed for the scientific research of the Expedition 50 and 51 crew members.

After a two-day trip, the spacecraft should arrive at the Station where Shane Kimbrough of NASA and Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) will use the station's robotic arm to capture it.

The world is quickly stumbling into the world of fully autonomous everything, and it looks like factories are going to really win with robots if the results of a Chinese factory are anything to go by.

Changying Precision Technology Company (CPTC) replaces 600 human workers with robots, and saw a gigantic 250% increase in productivity, while they also noted an 80% decrease in defects. Factory workers can't be happy with that, as I don't think that even with the best training, they could provide a 250% productivity boost overnight like their robotic overlords did.

CPTC has 60 human workers remaining, which will be sliced down to just 20 in the coming months. Now we've all got to sit back and think: where will we all be in 10-20 years, and is your job truly safe from robotics or a fully advanced AI-based system?