Cop Car's Beat

Asimov & Heinlein would be proud at baby steps in robotics

If you watched today's 60 Minutes, you've seen Boston Dynamics' robots dancing the mashed potato and the twist. (The link to 60 Minutes leads to a page with a further link to tonight's show - a 13.5-minute video.)

For those who didn't catch the program, a 3-minute video is embedded, below. Sheer fun! BTW: The quadruped, Spot, is for sale for about 75K USD per copy. 

 

Next is a video with demos of gymnastics & useful work sequences.

 

 

Just to show that I don't play favorites, below is a 12-minute video that demonstrates capabilities of robots made by various companies.

 

 

Then, there's an update from News for Nerds.

Boston Dynamics' New Robot Doesn't Dance. It Has a Warehouse Job (wired.com)51

Posted by msmash on Monday March 29, 2021 @04:41PM from the closer-look dept.

It can't do back flips like Atlas the humanoid robot, nor can it dance or open doors for its friends, like Spot the robotic dog can. Instead, Boston Dynamics' new robot, named Stretch, is going straight to work in a warehouse. Wired:Rolling around on a wheeled base, it's basically a large robotic arm that grabs boxes using vacuum power, and it's designed for tasks like unloading trucks or stacking pallets. If Spot and Atlas are the show-offs in the family, Stretch is the straight-up workhorse. But while these machines all look and move in wildly different ways, they actually share a lot of DNA. Stretch may seem familiar to you, because it's a sort of descendant of another machine that debuted a few years back: Handle. That robot had a similar suction arm, but it balanced on two wheels, like a Segway scooter. Handle would grab a box, scoot backward, turn 90 degrees, and roll away to stack the box somewhere else. It looked neat on video, but in practice the robot needed a lot of room to operate. It could manage unloading boxes from a truck, sure. "But it took a long time," says Kevin Blankespoor, lead of warehouse robotics at Boston Dynamics. "The truck is a pretty confined space. And so for Handle, every time it grabbed the box, it would need to roll back into some space where it could rotate freely without collisions."

Which is all to say: If Handle were a human, it'd be let go. So Boston Dynamics pivoted (sorry) to a new form factor for Stretch that slapped a similar robotic vacuum arm on a base with four wheels. Each wheel can move independently, so the robot can shift side to side or forward and backward to orient itself in, say, the back of a truck. This new base granted Stretch two powers. For one thing, resting on four wheels is a whole lot more energy efficient than trying to constantly balance on two. The same is true for animals: A dog or cat is inherently more stable than a human. (Stretch will get 8 hours of battery life, and clients will have the option to upgrade to a double battery that holds 16 hours of charge.) The second advantage is that Stretch's arm can now pivot around its base, while Handle had to pivot its whole body to turn. Stretch can shift up to 800 boxes an hour.

Tidbits for another week - 3/12/2021

Electrical Problems (3/10/2021):

We have overkill in my kitchen: There are four ovens in it. Since I'm not much of a cook (I only cook to keep us from starving), you may not think that logical. However, the number of ovens in my kitchen is not the point of my sad tale. The point is that I had an electrical problem with the small toaster oven (to left of microwave on the counter in the photo, above) which proved to the world that I, who completed a minor in Electrical Engineering back in the late 1950s, am an idiot.

I wanted to toast a sandwich bun for our dinner, last night. I put the bun in the toaster oven, set the controls and started the oven, and left the room. Upon my return, I discovered that the oven was not hot, did not even have glowing digital control numbers showing. I unplugged the unit, re-plugged it. (That's the plug to the toaster oven at the right end of the toaster oven and above it. The other plug to the left of the toaster oven is actually the plug to the microwave.) Nothing. Exasperated, I used a skillet and the range top to toast the bun. As I went downstairs to bed, last night, I took the toaster oven down to our workshop where I intended to check it, later, to see if there is a fuse inside the casing.

This morning, as I came upstairs, I brought our standby toaster oven up from the basement. Later, I stuck a bagel into the standby toaster oven and set its simple mechanical controls. I listened to the hum of the spring-loaded timer as I walked away. When I returned, did I find a toasted bagel? Nope. The toaster oven was (electrically) dead as a doornail. Bah! Humbug! The poor thing had served me well in Albuquerque in the 1980s and had served me well for the first 10 years after my return to Derby KS; but, it hadn't been used since about 2000 - at which time it had been replaced by the newer unit.

A bit later, after working in the yard and kicking back thinking to take a short nap, my idle mind realized what was going on with the little ovens: I had been checking the wrong ground fault interrupter (GFI) unit. I had checked the GFI into which the microwave is plugged. That's logical since it is, physically, the nearest GFI unit to the outlet into which the toaster oven is plugged. However, the electrical outlet into which the toaster oven plugs is actually wired into the GFI unit of the outlet that is to the right of the microwave. Duh!

While everyone is looking at the photo of the ovens, please note that the little woodwork one can see is nice and clean. I started on spring cleaning, in the kitchen, the other day. It took me four days to finish scrubbing all of the cabinets in the kitchen, but they are clean!

Terminology Illuminated (3/12/2021):

The other day I asked that anyone who understood "Lie group" and/or "surfaces of ignorance" let me know so that I could share the Zoom login information to yesterday's Wichita State University Physics Seminar. I needed someone to watch and translate for me. The seminar featured Dr. Shannon Ray, National Research Council Fellow, Air Force Research Laboratory, speaking on“The Purification of 3-Level Quantum States and Surfaces of Ignorance”.

No one took me up on the challenge of translating for me, so I watched the presentation, alone. It turned out to be an interesting talk. Although I understood the math (heavy on tensor algebras), there was a lot of what turned out to be jargon - much of it invented by the presenter and his colleagues. One term that he used in a peripheral comment turned out to be less esoteric than I had perceived or considered: it was "The Bottom Turtle".

In exchanging emails with Ole Phat Stu, a few minutes ago, I was inspired to research "The Bottom Turtle". *Face Palm*  The term is from Yertle the Turtle by Dr Seuss.

Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel) has been in the news, much, of late - at least, here in the States. Fortunately, Yertle the Turtle was not implicated in the loud complaints against some of the Seuss books. Who knew it would contain an allegory during a physics talk? Whoo boy.

Personal Tidbits from Hunky Husband and me:

As of Wednesday (3/10/2021), Hunky Husband and I are considered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be "fully vaccinated". We may now meet with a few other people who are also "fully vaccinated", indoors, without masking and distancing. Unfortunately, in our family, being "fully vaccinated" has skipped the generation of our daughters. We are looking forward to their attaining the designation no later than the end of May.

On Friday (3/12/2021), HH & I met with our tax guy. Yikes! HH had, without my having noticed it, until we gathered our tax papers, chosen to skip the Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) from his Volunteer Investment Plan (VIP) with Boeing, for 2020. The problem that it presented for our 2020 taxes was that by not taking his RMD (not required in 2020 because of COVID-19), he did not contribute the taxes that he would have had withheld from the distribution.

For 2020, we had under-withheld (Fed & State) by an amount equal to my income from retirement benefits plus social security. (Of course, for 2019 we had over-withheld 1.2 times that much.) HH had left home without his checkbook, so the rest of our taxes will be automatically syphoned off of my checking account.  Fortunately, I am in the habit of carrying a blank check in my wallet and Robert was able to get the routing information off of it to give the Feds and the State Revenuers. (The minute we got home I transferred the funds from my savings. In the meantime, HH had received texts from H&R Block informing him that both sets of taxes had been accepted and would be deducted from the indicated account.)

 

More from News for Nerds - Computers, eyes, & antennae

Light-Based Quantum Computer Exceeds Fastest Classical Supercomputers (scientificamerican.com) 6

Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 04, 2020 @08:00AM from the far-too-complicated dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons -- particles of light -- has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang. The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons -- far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers.

Unlike a traditional computer built from silicon processors, Jiuzhangis an elaborate tabletop setup of lasers, mirrors, prisms and photon detectors. It is not a universal computer that could one day send e-mails or store files, but it does demonstrate the potential of quantum computing. Last year, Google captured headlines when its quantum computer Sycamore took roughly three minutes to do what would take a supercomputer three days (or 10,000 years, depending on your estimation method). In their paper, the USTC team estimates that it would take the Sunway TaihuLight, the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, a staggering 2.5 billion years to perform the same calculation as Jiuzhang. [...] This latest demonstration of quantum computing's potential from the USTC group is critical because it differs dramatically from Google's approach. Sycamore uses superconducting loops of metal to form qubits; in Jiuzhang, the photons themselves are the qubits. Independent corroboration that quantum computing principles can lead to primacy even on totally different hardware "gives us confidence that in the long term, eventually, useful quantum simulators and a fault-tolerant quantum computer will become feasible," Lu says.

... [T]he USTC setup is dauntingly complicated. Jiuzhang begins with a laser that is split so it strikes 25 crystals made of potassium titanyl phosphate. After each crystal is hit, it reliably spits out two photons in opposite directions. The photons are then sent through 100 inputs, where they race through a track made of 300 prisms and 75 mirrors. Finally, the photons land in 100 slots where they are detected. Averaging over 200 seconds of runs, the USTC group detected about 43 photons per run. But in one run, they observed 76 photons -- more than enough to justify their quantum primacy claim. It is difficult to estimate just how much time would be needed for a supercomputer to solve a distribution with 76 detected photons -- in large part because it is not exactly feasible to spend 2.5 billion years running a supercomputer to directly check it. Instead, the researchers extrapolate from the time it takes to classically calculate for smaller numbers of detected photons. At best, solving for 50 photons, the researchers claim, would take a supercomputer two days, which is far slower than the 200-second run time of Jiuzhang.

 

Reversal of Biological Clock Restores Vision In Old Mice (scitechdaily.com) 26

Posted by BeauHD on Friday December 04, 2020 @05:00AM from the epigenetic-reprogramming dept.

John Trumpian shares a report from SciTechDaily: Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The team's work, described today in Nature, represents the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age. In addition to resetting the cells' aging clock, the researchers successfully reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.

The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression, the team said. If replicated through further studies, the approach could pave the way for therapies to promote tissue repair across various organs and reverse aging and age-related diseases in humans. Sinclair and colleagues caution that the findings remain to be replicated in further studies, including in different animal models, before any human experiments. Nonetheless, they add, the results offer a proof of concept and a pathway to designing treatments for a range of age-related human diseases.

For their work, the team used an adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle to deliver into the retinas of mice three youth-restoring genes -- Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4 -- that are normally switched on during embryonic development. The three genes, together with a fourth one, which was not used in this work, are collectively known as Yamanaka factors. The treatment had multiple beneficial effects on the eye. First, it promoted nerve regeneration following optic-nerve injury in mice with damaged optic nerves. Second, it reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma. And third, it reversed vision loss in aging animals without glaucoma.

 

 

SOURCE:  Arecibo Observatory, a U.S. National Science Foundation facility

Drone Footage Shows the Shocking Collapse of the Arecibo Observatory (theverge.com) 91

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday December 03, 2020 @05:40PM from the video-evidence dept.

Iwastheone shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo's Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air. Slashdot reader joshgs shares a petition to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory. "On December 1, the platform of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory suffered a catastrophic collapse," the petition states. "This telescope had many capabilities that cannot be replaced by any existing or planned facility. It had the world's most powerful and most sensitive planetary radar system, providing unparalleled capacity to track and characterize near-Earth asteroids. The telescope was also a source of tourism, education, and pride for the people of Puerto Rico, inspiring many to pursue careers in science and technology."

"We ask Congress to allocate funding to build a new Arecibo radio telescope with greater capabilities than the previous telescope -- to maintain American leadership in planetary defense, astronomy, and ionospheric studies; and to inspire a new generation of scientists."

It's the principle that counts

 In some recent year, I posted an imbedded  video showing a group of 300 men moving a rather large farm barn by lifting the barn and carrying it to the desired location. I can't find the posting. (That's what happens when I opt for not letting external search engines access my postings. The internal search engine - or my use of it - sucks.) Since I cannot find the previous posting, I'll embed the YouTube video one-more-once.

 

Below is the mechanized equivalent - the moving of a 5-story building in Shanghai.

 

More from Slashdot.org - long songs, recurrent infections, & stochastic systems analysis

IMHO: The article, below, nicely illustrates a good reason why I long ago came up with my "rule" that, "Just because one can do something does not mean that one must do it."

639-Year Organ Performance Changes Chords for the First Time in Seven Years (theguardian.com) 100

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 06, 2020 @02:34PM from the long-now dept.

"Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a musical composition that lasts for 639 years," reports the BBC. "It is the first change in the piece, As Slow As Possible, in seven years."

The Guardian reports: The performance of the composition began in September 2001 at the St Burchardi church in the eastern town of Halberstadt and is supposed to end in 2640 — if all goes well.

The music piece by the American composer John Cage is played on a special organ inside the medieval church... A compressor in the basement creates energy to blow air into the organ to create a continuous sound. When a chord change happens, it's done manually. On Saturday, soprano singer Johanna Vargas and organist Julian Lembke changed the chord.
The BBC notes the score for the 639-year composition is just eight pages long. But though the piece was written in the 1980s, it wasn't until nine years after the composer's death in 1992 that anyone dared to attempt playing it. That performance then began — with a pause that lasted nearly 18 months.

The next chord change is scheduled for February 5 of the year 2022.

 

 

More Covid-19 Reinfections Found, But Researchers Urge Caution (statnews.com) 117

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday September 06, 2020 @01:34PM from the sky-not-falling dept.

That Covid-19 reinfection in Hong Kong was followed by similar reports in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was announced today that a 27-year-old woman in Karnataka, India also tested positive for the disease a second time (though the government is still seeking confirmation), and now researchers in Nevada are also reporting a "likely" case of reinfection.

The health-news site Stat reports: What caught experts' attention about the case of the 25-year-old Reno man was not that he appears to have contracted SARS-CoV-2 (the name of the virus that causes Covid-19) a second time. Rather, it's that his second bout was more serious than his first. Immunologists had expected that if the immune response generated after an initial infection could not prevent a second case, then it should at least stave off more severe illness. That's what occurred with the first known reinfection case, in a 33-year-old Hong Kong man.

Still, despite what happened to the man in Nevada, researchers are stressing this is not a sky-is-falling situation or one that should result in firm conclusions. They always presumed people would become vulnerable to Covid-19 again some time after recovering from an initial case, based on how our immune systems respond to other respiratory viruses, including other coronaviruses. It's possible that these early cases of reinfection are outliers and have features that won't apply to the tens of millions of other people who have already shaken off Covid-19. "There are millions and millions of cases," said Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The real question that should get the most focus, Mina said, is, "What happens to most people...?"

Researchers are finding that, generally, people who get Covid-19 develop a healthy immune response replete with both antibodies (molecules that can block pathogens from infecting cells) and T cells (which help wipe out the virus). This is what happens after other viral infections.

 

 

Sir Martin Hairer is an Austrian mathematician working in the field of stochastic analysis, in particular stochastic partial differential equations. He is Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College London, having previously held appointments at the University of Warwick and the Courant Institute of New York University. Wikipedia

 

I am in awe of the work done by the fellow in the above photo because stochastic vibrations was a course in my graduate studies days, years and years ago (before Hairer was born, but who's keeping track?)

 

UK Mathematician Wins Richest Prize in Academia For His Work On Stochastic Analysis (theguardian.com) 8

Posted by msmash on Friday September 11, 2020 @03:25PM from the moving-forward dept.

Lanodonal writes: A mathematician who tamed a nightmarish family of equations that behave so badly they make no sense has won the most lucrative prize in academia. Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige. Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem. His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to "regularity structures," so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.

Hairer, who rents a London flat with his wife and fellow Imperial mathematician, Xue-Mei Li, heard he had won the prize in a Skype call while the UK was still in lockdown. "It was completely unexpected," he said. "I didn't think about it at all, so it was a complete shock. We couldn't go out or anything, so we celebrated at home." The award is one of several Breakthrough prizes announced each year by a foundation set up by the Israeli-Russian investor Yuri Milner and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. A committee of previous recipients chooses the winners who are all leading lights in mathematics and the sciences. Other winners announced on Thursday include a Hong Kong scientist, Dennis Lo, who was inspired by a 3D Harry Potter movie to develop a test for genetic mutations in DNA shed by unborn babies, and a team of physicists whose experiments revealed that if extra dimensions of reality exist, they are curled up smaller than a third of a hair's width.

More from Slashdot.org - Sleep, Laser Firing, Cell Phone Review

Individualized Circadian Clocks: New Research Suggests Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours of Sleep (time.com) 58

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @05:43PM from the beating-the-clock dept.

Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: "the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks." Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so greatly that they could form the next frontiers of personalized medicine...

Human sleep is largely a mystery. We know it's important; getting too little is linked to heightened risk for metabolic disorders, Type 2 diabetes, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration and many types of cancer. "It's probably true that bad sleep leads to increased risks of virtually every disorder," says Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco... The ideal sleep duration has long been thought to be universal. "There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don't get it," says Ptacek. "But that's as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It's just not true..."

About a decade ago, Ptacek's wife Ying-Hui Fu discovered the first human gene linked to natural short sleep; people who had a rare genetic mutation seemed to get the same benefits from six hours of sleep a night as those without the mutation got from eight hours. In 2019, Fu and Ptacek discovered two more genes connected to natural short sleep, and they'll soon submit a paper describing a fourth, providing even more evidence that functioning well on less sleep is a genetic trait...

Doctors once dismissed short sleepers as depressed or suffering from insomnia. Yet short sleepers may actually have an edge over everyone else. Research is still early, but Fu has found that besides being more efficient at sleep, they tend to be more energetic and optimistic and have a higher tolerance for pain than people who need to spend more time in bed. They also tend to live longer.

 

 

Scientists Solve a Mystery By Firing a Laser at the Moon (yahoo.com) 33

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @04:34PM from the laser-shows dept.

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

 

 

Reviewer Calls Linux-based PinePhone 'the Most Interesting Smartphone I've Tried in Years' (androidpolice.com) 41

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 16, 2020 @09:39PM from the Linux-PC-in-your-palm dept.

A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64's new Linux-based PinePhone "the most interesting smartphone I've tried in years," with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There's a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It's good to know that even if PinePhone vanished overnight, you could still purchase new batteries for around $10-15...

There's a microSD card slot above the SIM tray, which supports cards up to 2TB in size. While it can be used as extra storage, just like the SD slots in Android phones and tablets, it can also function as a bootable drive. If you write an operating system image to the SD card and put it in the PinePhone, the phone will boot from the SD card. This means you can move between operating systems on the PinePhone by simply swapping microSD cards, which is amazing for trying out new Linux distributions without wiping data. How great would it be if Android phones could do that?

Finally, the inside of the PinePhone has six hardware killswitches that can be manipulated with a screwdriver. You can use them to turn off the modem, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and headphone jack. No need to put a sticker over the selfie camera if you're worried about malicious software — just flip the switch and never worry about it again.... For a $150 phone produced in limited batches by a company with no previous experience in the smartphone industry, I'm impressed it's built as well as it is...

I look forward to seeing what the community around the PinePhone can accomplish.
A Pine64 blog post this weekend touts "a boat-load of cool and innovative things" being attempted by the PinePhone community, including users working on things like a fingerprint scanner or a thermal camera, plus a community that's 3D-printing their own custom PinePhone cases. And Pine64 has now identified three candidates for a future keyboard option (each of which can be configured as either a slide-out or clamshell keyboard): I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month... I don't know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days...

While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins)...

More from Slashdot.org - birds and gravity

AI Distinguishes Birds That Even Experts Can't (sciencemag.org) 11

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 02, 2020 @09:34AM from the birds-of-a-feather dept.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quote Science magazine: It's a fact of life for birders that some species are fiendishly difficult to tell apart — in particular, the sparrows and drab songbirds dubbed "little brown jobs." Distinguishing individuals is nearly impossible. Now, a computer program analyzing photos and videos has accomplished that feat. The advance promises to reveal new information on bird behaviors...

The tool, called a convolutional neural network, sifts through thousands of pictures to figure out which visual features can be used to classify a given image; it then uses that information to classify new images. Convolutional neural networks have already been used to identify various plant and animal species in the wild, including 48 kinds of African animals. They have even achieved a more complicated task for elephants and some primates: distinguishing between individuals of the same species. Team member André Ferreira, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montpellier, fed the neural network several thousand photos of 30 sociable weavers that had already been tagged... [W]hen given photos it hadn't seen before, the neural network correctly identified individual birds 90% of the time, they report this week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Behavioral ecologist Claire Doutrelant of CNRS, the French national research agency, says that's about the same accuracy as humans trying to spot color rings with binoculars.

Ferreira then tried the approach on two other bird species studied by Damien Farine, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The tool was just as accurate...

 

Gravity Error Detected? (independent.co.uk) 61

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday August 02, 2020 @12:34PM from the weighty-matters dept.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The large scale maps of the universe show something is seriously wrong with current models of gravity and dark matter. The universe simply isn't clumping right and, no, it's not the new improved formula. As you go from the early universe to the present day, gravity should cause things to clump in specific ways.

It isn't. Which means dark matter can't be cold and general relativity may have a problem.

They need more data to prove it's not just a freaky part of the universe they're looking at, which is being collected.
"The new results come from the Kilo-Degree Survey, or KiDS, which uses the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to map the distribution of matter across our universe," according to the Independent: So far, it has charted roughly 5% of the extragalactic sky, from an analysis of 31 million galaxies that are as much as 10 billion light years away... That allows researchers to build up a picture of all matter in the universe, of which some 90 per cent is invisible, made up of dark matter and tenuous gas.

 

Please note that the error in AI identification of birds is 10%. By following the link in the gravity item, I learned that the error in homogeneity is also 10%. While birders find 10% an entirely acceptable error rate, the physicists find 10% unacceptable. I guess that while wearing my "physicist's hat", I understand the latter; but, while wearing my "engineer's hat" I'm finding that 10% is almost negligible. When I wear my "birder's hat", I say, "Wish I could be that good."

Oh, yuck!

"Oh, yuck!" was what popped into my head when first I read the header of the item, below, from Slashdot.org. Of course, I would be in line to try out the product. I postulate that should I try it out on Hunky Husband, he would (not knowing its origin) pronounce that his portion was gristly.

 

3D-Printed Plant-Based Steaks Could Arrive In 2021 (engadget.com) 27

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday July 02, 2020 @06:00AM from the what-to-expect dept.

In 2021, Israeli startup Redefine Meat plans to launch a 3D printer that will allow customers to produce plant-based flank steak at home. Engadget reports: Redefine Meat says that through 3D printing, it's able to create plant-based meat with the same "appearance, texture and flavor of animal meat," according to its website. Texture specifically seems to be the 3D printer's hallmark achievement. "You need a 3D printer to mimic the structure of the muscle of the animal," Redefine Meat CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit told Reuters.

3D printing differs from other methods companies have used for reproducing meat taste and texture. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat use combinations of plant-based proteins, oils and binders, like methylcellulose and potato starch, to achieve a realistic texture for their ground beef and patties -- though the texture of ground beef is arguably easier to achieve than that of steak. Atlast Food uses mushroom fibers to emulate animal tissue in its meatless bacon.

 

More from Slashdot.org - black matter found - NOT

The diamond stamp cell that was used to create black nitrogen

Christian Wißler

Never-Before-Seen 'Black Nitrogen' Plugs Puzzle in Periodic Table (newatlas.com) 32

Posted by msmash on Friday June 05, 2020 @07:30PM from the unravelling-mysteries dept.

Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have created a form of nitrogen that's never been seen before. Nicknamed "black nitrogen," the new substance is crystalline, occurs in two-dimensional sheets, and could one day be useful in advanced electronics. From a report: Strangely enough, the idea that black nitrogen didn't exist has long been considered a mystery. The periodic table is arranged in recurring "periods" where each column is made up of elements with similar properties. Those at the top have the fewest protons and the lowest weight, and each successive element in the group gains protons and weight. Under high pressure, elements on the top of a column usually take on structures similar to elements further down the group. These different forms are known as allotropes. Ozone is an allotrope of oxygen, for example, while graphite and diamond are both allotropes of carbon. But nitrogen only has one allotrope -- dinitrogen -- and doesn't have any that resemble heavier elements in its group. This was always considered a bit weird, but now a new study has found a previously-unknown allotrope that shows that nitrogen isn't an exception to the rule, as has long been believed.

More from Slashdot.org - a great lunar and/or a great COVID-19 project?

NASA Contemplates Turning a Moon Crater Into a Giant, Powerful Telescope (cnet.com) 59

Posted by BeauHD on Thursday April 09, 2020 @03:00AM from the decisions-decisions dept.

NASA has selected a lunar-crater radio telescope idea to receive funding through its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, the agency announced on Tuesday. The Phase I award goes to projects in very early stages of development. CNET reports: Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, a robotics technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is the mind behind the moon dream. Making it happen would require sending robots to the far side of the moon and using the machines to deploy a wire mesh over a crater. Bandyopadhyay's proposal lists the benefits of locating a telescope on the far side of the moon, including that "the moon acts as a physical shield that isolates the lunar-surface telescope from radio interferences/noises from Earth-based sources, ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and sun's radio-noise during the lunar night."

The moon telescope project is one of 23 concepts that received part of a $7 million investment through NIAC. The Phase I award consists of $125,000 to fund a nine-month study of the idea. Other concepts include investigating solar sails, lunar landing pads and a robotic explorer for Saturn's moon Enceladus. NASA pointed out that these projects will mostly require a decade or more of technology development, and that they are not official NASA missions

 

70 Coronavirus Vaccines in Development, 3 Candidates Already Undergoing Human Trials (theprint.in) 3

Posted by msmash on Monday April 13, 2020 @04:10PM from the moving-forward dept.

There are 70 coronavirus vaccines in development globally, with three candidates already being tested in human trials, according to the World Health Organization, as drugmakers race to find a cure for the deadly pathogen. From a report: The furthest along in the clinical process is an experimental vaccine developed by Hong Kong-listed CanSino Biologics and the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology, which is in phase 2. The other two being tested in humans are treatments developed separately by U.S. drugmakers Moderna and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, according to a WHO document. Progress is occurring at unprecedented speed in developing vaccines as the infectious pathogen looks unlikely to be stamped out through containment measures alone. The drug industry is hoping to compress the time it takes to get a vaccine to market -- usually about 10 to 15 years -- to within the next year.