News

DARPA Is Funding Time Crystal Research

You probably scratched your head last year if you read about time crystals, likely 2017’s most esoteric, widely covered popular science story. Even if you understood how they worked, you might not have known what use they could have. Time crystals, systems of atoms that maintain a periodic ticking behavior in the presence of an added electromagnetic pulse, have now piqued the interest of one well-funded government agency: the Department of Defense.

Dark Matter Is in Our DNA

While some point to galaxy cluster work by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, dark matter was truly “discovered” in the 1970s by Vera Rubin, who was studying the rotation of spiral galaxies. Rubin found that galaxies were spinning too fast for the matter we could see in them, yet they weren’t flying apart. Rubin’s work left astronomers with a choice: Either our laws of gravity were wrong, or there was something else out there pulling on the galaxy’s stars and speeding them up while keeping them together.

‘Robot Bees.’ How Walmart Wants to Use Drones on Future High-Tech Farms

The shape of life

Last spring, the geobiologist Dominic Papineau and colleagues reported that fossilised microorganisms were identified in 3.77-4.28-billion-year-old iron-rich rock in Quebec: hematite tubes and filaments whose appearance is similar to microorganisms that today live in hydrothermal vents. Others dismissed their findings as ‘dubiofossils’, a term the geologist Hans Hofmann coined in 1972 to describe controversial fossils. ‘Fossils,’ Hofmann wrote, were proven biological; ‘pseudofossils’ resembled life but were inorganic; ‘dubiofossils’ (also known as Problematica or Miscellanea) were equivocal.

Using Evolutionary AutoML to Discover Neural Network Architectures

The brain has evolved over a long time, from very simple worm brains 500 million years ago to a diversity of modern structures today. The human brain, for example, can accomplish a wide variety of activities, many of them effortlessly — telling whether a visual scene contains animals or buildings feels trivial to us, for example. To perform activities like these, artificial neural networks require careful design by experts over years of difficult research, and typically address one specific task, such as to find what’s in a photograph, to call a genetic variant, or to help diagnose a disease.

AI Detects Papaya Ripeness

Last year, the United States alone imported more than US $107 million worth of fresh papayas as the world’s largest papaya import market. The computer vision software could enable papaya growers to maximize the value of their fruit by sending the ripestpapayas to local markets and saving less ripe papayas for export, says Douglas Fernandes Barbin, a researcher in the department of food engineering at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. But he and his colleagues also want to help individual shoppers get their money’s worth in grocery aisles.

Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice.

How to build a brain – An introduction to neurophysiology for engineers

Amazon looks at dropping packages from as high as 25 feet

Porsche and Bugatti turn to 3D printing for complex or rare parts