Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 425

Ever wondered the fastest possible time with a Rubik's Cube? Its not by a human, but of course an artificial intelligence and boy its quick.

Above we have Ben Katz and Jared Di Carlo who have engineered a robot that can solve a Rubik's Cube much faster than humanly possible. This robot can solve a puzzle in just 0.38 seconds, which is the current record on paper. This news came out in March of last year, but now we have a new invention in the artificial intelligence Rubik's Cube solving field. This time, researchers behind DeepCubeA have managed to teach their artificial intelligence through human experience to solve a cube in 1.2 seconds.

While this might not be as fast as Katz and Di Carlo's demonstration, DeepCubeA's AI managed to solve the cube in less moves. This is because the system focuses on using real learning experience and to improve speeds. DeepCubeA equipped their AI with roughly 10 billion different puzzle combinations, this repertoire of combinations allowed for the AI to complete the puzzle in just 28 moves. The average human takes around 50 moves to solve a Rubik's Cube.

Israeli-Russian physicist, Yuri Milner has decided to partner up with VERITAS to go on the hunt for alien communication code in a completely different way.

Yuri Milner decided to fund Breakthrough Listen, a science based program with the initiative of discovering extraterrestrial intelligence somewhere across the cosmos. To help them do that, Breakthrough have partnered up with VERITAS, or - Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System. The goal of the partnership is to basically search the surrounding stars for alien morse code through nanosecond-long optical pulses.

The most conventional way of looking for alien communication is through radio waves, so the line of thinking behind is the project is to stray away from the norm and try something different in hopes of receiving some form of information. As we don't know how aliens communicate, anything is really worth a shot. Its certainly not guaranteed that Breakthrough or VERITAS will stumble across something, but hopefully they do because it will be good to know that we aren't alone out here.

Elon Musk's research company that is creating what could be the bridge between the brain and technology is beginning its testing on human subjects as early as next year.

Musk's Neuralink is the newest technology in brain-interfacing and has the goal of what Musk describes as a way of achieving a "a sort of symbiosis with artificial intelligence." Doing this will pave the way forward for human benefits in the field of medical science and other fields. At the moment the technology is quite new, and for it to be used applicants will have to surrender their skulls to a drilling process that will create the ultra thin holes that are required to insert the Neuralink threading.

While this might seem out of the ball park for human technological capabilities, Musk's company performed tests on rats and the performance results exceeded that of today's systems. The rats that were tested showed exceptional data transfer results, the data was captured through a USB-C port located on the head of the rat, and provided 10x more than what the best current sensors can offer. Long term, Neuralink plans to allow for the electrodes that are planted in the subjects head to be able to communicate wirelessly with chips outside the brain (image above).

Area 51 is going to light up on September 20 for all the right reasons, with a huge crowd of people planning to storm Area 51 in Nevada. The event is being organized on Facebook with 1.6 million people (and it keeps going up) planning to attend Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us.

The event will see the millions of people at the time meeting at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and then from there the post says they will "coordinate our entry" into Area 51. Better yet, in case the government starts shooting at people to stop them the post adds that "if we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets", finishing on a more positive note of "Lets see them aliens". Yeah BOI.

The United States Air Force is putting its military foot to the ground, with Air Force spokesperson Laura McAndrews telling ABC News: "The United States Air Force is aware of the Facebook post. The Nevada Test and Training Range is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. As a matter of practice, we do not discuss specific security measures, but any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous".

Americans are currently celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 space launch, and what better way to experience it all over again then with an interactive website that shows you the entire thing.

In celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch that occurred on Wed Jul 16th, 1969 a website has been developed and dedicated to re-living the whole experience. Users can go to this website here which has been sourced entirely of historical material.

Heading over to the website we can see that it can filtered by 'mission milestones', as well as the transcript has been provided and updates in real-time as the launch progresses. There is also images on the right-hand side of the site, each of the images are from the official launch taken by NASA and the astronauts themselves.

Perhaps the future of human health benefits will come in the form of tiny robots that assist your health problems from the inside your body.

The above video has been released onto the official Georgia Tech YouTube Channel and showcases what is has been called a "bristle-bot". The bot is only 2mm (about 0.08in) in length, weighs 5mg and can move at about 8mm per second. Not only are the bots, small fast and diversable, but they are made out of lead ziconate titante and have the ability to turn voltage into vibration for movement.

Georgia Tech has developed these bots but at the moment they wouldn't be much benefit to health insitutes as they can only move in one director and can't carry a payload. The end goal of these bots is eventually equipping them with the ability to jump and swim. Once these goals are completed and implemented, we could see these bots being adopted to combat health problems and fix people from inside their bodies out.

Humans are continuously attempting to map the stars and gain a better understanding of the planets we have in our solar system. One of those planets that are in our understanding slow cooker is our very own red planet, Mars.

Scientists are hell-bent on attempting to figure out if Mars was home to its very own version of life and now a recent discovery coming out MSL Curiosity regarding a specific Mars landmark and how it could of potentially been the spot life developed. MSL Curiosity is Mars Space Laboratory, a space probe mission with a goal of discovering more about Mars and if life was ever at home on the planet.

Christopher House is a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State University, he is involved within NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission and in a press release from Penn State University he talked about the discoveries made in Mars' Gale Crater. "Gale Crater appears to have been a lake environment. The water would have persisted for a million years or more." The team managed to locate a mudstone in the crater and also find that "the whole system, including the groundwater that ran through it, lasted much longer, perhaps even a billion or more years."

As America and NASA come closer to the 50th anniversary celebration of the Moon landing, NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine shined a light on what the next space-program will be.

Bridenstine was on Face The Nation and was iasked about how NASA plans on getting to the Moon within the next 5 years. According to Bridenstine, "There's two risks. There's technical risk and there's political risk. We would be on the moon right now if it weren't for the political risk. We would be on Mars, quite frankly, by now had it not been for the political risk." Combining into the 'political risk' is the other half the equation which is funding, which Bridenstine also says that was a massive issue.

Since the announcement by the Vice President for a Moon mission in the next 5 years, NASA has recently received the funding necessary to make this mission possible. Donald Trump recently said on Twitter that the Moon mission should not be focused on, and rather that Mars should be America's next goal.

The human race has made another milestone in the quantum entanglement field where they have managed to teleport an electron to a low-orbiting satellite 300 miles away.

According to a team of researchers in China, scientists have managed to use quantum entanglement to teleport an electron 300 miles away. An MIT Technology Review said that this is the furthest the technology has managed to teleport an object, the scientists findings have been published in a paper online at arXiv.

This isn't the first test of its kind, for about a month these scientists have conducted many tests and have beamed up millions of photons from their ground site located in Tibet. The team said that "This work establishes the first ground-to-satellite up-link for faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation, an essential step toward global-scale quantum Internet."

The global understanding of how the universe works could get another injection of information after a new Russian space probe conducts its 6.5 year survey of the cosmos once it reaches its destination.

Russia partnered with Germany has successfully launched a new space probe telescope called Spektr-RG, and after its 100 day journey to Lagrange Point 2 it will be surveying the surrounding galaxies. Spektr-RG will be surveying for 6.5 year survey that is expected to gather information on 100,000 galaxies clusters, hundreds of thousands of active stars and 3 million supermassive black holes.

With this new information that will be recovered, its believed that the human race as a whole will be given a better understanding of how the universe is mapped. Not only will this new map be great, scientist also expect to gain a better understanding of how black holes form and the distribution of matter is throughout the universe. Dark energy is also on the list of theories that should gain some level of information.