GOOGLE JUST INDEXED MILLIONS OF ‘LIFE MAGAZINE’ PHOTOS USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The search giant, which debuted a website for the photo project on Wednesday, said it was able to categorize over 4 million iconic Life Magazine photographs without human help. After clicking on a particular label like “skateboarding,” for example, users are shown photos of people performing skateboard tricks along with Wikipedia’s definition of the sport. Source: fortune.com
OPEN SOURCING THE HUNT FOR EXOPLANETS
Recently, we discovered two exoplanets by training a neural network to analyze data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope and accurately identify the most promising planet signals. And while this was only an initial analysis of ~700 stars, we consider this a successful proof-of-concept for using machine learning to discover exoplanets, and more generally another example of using machine learning to make meaningful gains in a variety of scientific disciplines (e.g. healthcare, quantum chemistry, and fusion research)
Read moreREPTILE: A SCALABLE META-LEARNING ALGORITHM
We’ve developed a simple meta-learning algorithm called Reptile which works by repeatedly sampling a task, performing stochastic gradient descent on it, and updating the initial parameters towards the final parameters learned on that task. This method performs as well as MAML, a broadly applicable meta-learning algorithm, while being simpler to implement and more computationally efficient. Source: openai.com
RESEARCHERS CAN ‘SEE’ YOUR MEMORIES WHILE YOU SLEEP
New research published today by Cairney and his colleagues in Current Biology has made significant headway on this issue by linking sleep spindles—spontaneous bursts of brain activity—to memory processing in a sleeping brain. Incredibly, the researchers claim it is possible to determine the content of the memory being processed by analyzing this brain activity. Source: vice.com
CAN RETROCAUSALITY SOLVE THE PUZZLE OF ACTION-AT-A-DISTANCE?
Einstein’s objections to quantum mechanics began very early. Schrödinger’s version of the theory introduced a new mathematical entity, the wave function, which seemed to allow the position of an unmeasured particle to be spread out across an arbitrarily large region of space. When the particle’s position was measured, the wave function was said to ‘collapse’, suddenly becoming localised where the particle was detected.
Read moreCOMPARING AWS LAMBDA PERFORMANCE OF NODE.JS, PYTHON, JAVA, C# AND GO
As an engineer who maintained serverless-golang, I was curious to learn how the performance of each runtime compared — especially after participating in some insightful discussions with other developers on this topic. Source: acloud.guru
BRAIN TISSUE SAMPLES SUGGEST WE STOP GROWING NEW NEURONS IN OUR EARLY TEENS
Two brain samples reveal how neurogenesis changes over time. At left, a sample from an infant brain reveals young neurons (green) in the hippocampus alongside more mature neurons (red), At right, mature neurons predominate in an adult human hippocampus. (Ken Probst and Sorrells et al.) Source: latimes.com
THE WORSENING COSMIC RAY SITUATION
The story begins four years ago when Schwadron and colleagues first sounded the alarm about cosmic rays. Analyzing data from the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument onboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), they found that cosmic rays in the Earth-Moon system were peaking at levels never before seen in the Space Age. The worsening radiation environment, they pointed out, was a potential peril to astronauts, curtailing how long they could safely travel through space.
Read moreSCIENTISTS FIND ODD AND AMAZING CYCLONES AT JUPITER’S POLES
This composite image, derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter, shows the central cyclone at the planet’s north pole and the eight cyclones that encircle it. Source: arstechnica.com
WHY IS CHINA BURNING UP ITS SPACE STATION IN THE SKY?
Tiangong-1, China’s first space station, is hurtling toward its doom. Launched in September 2011, the 10-meter (34-foot) long spacecraft hosted two crews of “taikonauts,” the term for Chinese astronauts, and laid the groundwork for China’s Tiangong program, which aims to establish a third-generation multi-module space station in orbit during the 2020s. Source: vice.com