The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
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UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
04-09-2021
World’s First Portable MRI Machine Helps Doctors Make Quick Life or Death Determination By: Nidhi Goyal
World’s First Portable MRI Machine Helps Doctors Make Quick Life or Death Determination
MRI machines can be used to detect cases of stroke that require immediate surgical intervention. But these huge and expensive MRI machines require custom-built rooms due to their powerful magnetic field. Therefore patients are brought to the MRI scanners rather than the other way around.
This is about to change soon!
Hyperfine, a healthcare technology company headquartered in Connecticut has won FDA clearance for the first portable MRI scanner. The easy-to-use MRI scanner can be wheeled to a patient’s bedside.
A breakthrough in approachability for MR imaging
Dubbed the Portable Point-of-Care MRI system, the machine is 10 times lighter, consumes 35 times less power, and is 20 times less costly than current MRI machines.
The traditional MRI scans often require long wait times. But the portable MRI system, patients can be imaged at the point of care with initial scan results available in 30 seconds.
Though it’s not a lightweight machine, the 55” (140cm) tall machine weighs 1,400lbs (630kg). But a motorized wheel array on the bottom makes it quite manageable to roll up to a patient’s bedside.
In addition, this portable easy to use MRI scanner does not interfere with other equipment. Even the metal objects need not be removed from the room.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
18-08-2021
Kameleonrobot kan van kleur veranderen
Kameleonrobot kan van kleur veranderen
Een nieuwe robot kan van kleur veranderen zoals een kameleon. Dat doet die door een combinatie van nanodraadnetwerken en kleursensoren te gebruiken.
Artificiële camouflage imiteert de natuurlijke camouflage die te vinden is bij verschillende diersoorten. Een van de voorwaarden om artificiële camouflage goed te laten werken, is dat het een grote hoeveelheid kleuren moet kunnen weergeven en op bevel van kleur kan veranderen. Tot nu toe was dat een moeilijke opgave.
Seung Hwan Ko is professor aan het laboratorium voor toegepaste nano- en thermowetenschappen aan de Nationale Universiteit van Seoul in Korea. Hij past een nieuwe strategie1 toe door gebruik te maken van vloeibare kristallagen met nanodraadnetwerken. De kristallagen vangen licht op en reflecteren dat als verschillende kleuren. Samen met kleurensensoren en terugkoppelingscontrolesystemen maakten de professor een kunstmatige kameleonhuid en zette die op een robot. Het resultaat is een robot die in real time van kleur kan veranderen.
Er is nog meer onderzoek nodig om verschillende soorten textuur te kunnen herkennen en correct weer te kunnen geven. Deze ontdekking kan gevolgen hebben voor de volgende generatie van draagbare camouflagetechnologie.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
12-08-2021
Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence
Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence
Picture yourself driving on a narrow road in the near future when suddenly another car emerges from a bend ahead. It is a self-driving car with no passengers inside. Will you push forth and assert your right of way, or give way to let it pass? At present, most of us behave kindly in such situations involving other humans. Will we show that same kindness towards autonomous vehicles?
Using methods from behavioural game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London have conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as cooperatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans.
Cooperation holds a society together. It often requires us to compromise with others and to accept the risk that they let us down. Traffic is a good example. We lose a bit of time when we let other people pass in front of us and are outraged when others fail to reciprocate our kindness. Will we do the same with machines?
The study which is published in the journal iScience found that, upon first encounter, people have the same level of trust toward AI as for human: most expect to meet someone who is ready to cooperate.The difference comes afterwards. People are much less ready to reciprocate with AI, and instead exploit its benevolence to their own benefit. Going back to the traffic example, a human driver would give way to another human but not to a self-driving car.The study identifies this unwillingness to compromise with machines as a new challenge to the future of human-AI interactions.
Credit: Pixabay
“We put people in the shoes of someone who interacts with an artificial agent for the first time, as it could happen on the road,” explains Jurgis Karpus, Ph.D., a behavioural game theorist and a philosopher at LMU Munich and the first author of the study. “We modelled different types of social encounters and found a consistent pattern. People expected artificial agents to be as cooperative as fellow humans. However, they did not return their benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans.”
With perspectives from game theory, cognitive science, and philosophy, the researchers found that ‘algorithm exploitation’ is a robust phenomenon. They replicated their findings across nine experiments with nearly 2,000 human participants. Each experiment examines different kinds of social interactions and allows the human to decide whether to compromise and cooperate or act selfishly. Expectations of the other players were also measured. In a well-known game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people must trust that the other characters will not let them down. They embraced risk with humans and AI alike, but betrayed the trust of the AI much more often, to gain more money.
“Cooperation is sustained by a mutual bet: I trust you will be kind to me, and you trust I will be kind to you. The biggest worry in our field is that people will not trust machines. But we show that they do!” notes Dr. Bahador Bahrami, a social neuroscientist at the LMU, and one of the senior researchers in the study. “They are fine with letting the machine down, though, and that is the big difference. People even do not report much guilt when they do,” he adds.
Biased and unethical AI has made many headline — from the 2020 exams fiasco in the United Kingdom to justice systems — but this new research brings up a novel caution. The industry and legislators strive to ensure that artificial intelligence is benevolent. But benevolence may backfire. If people think that AI is programmed to be benevolent towards them, they will be less tempted to cooperate. Some of the accidents involving self-driving cars may already show real-life examples: drivers recognize an autonomous vehicle on the road, and expect it to give way. The self-driving vehicle meanwhile expects for normal compromises between drivers to hold.“
Algorithm exploitation has further consequences down the line. “If humans are reluctant to let a polite self-driving car join from a side road, should the self-driving car be less polite and more aggressive in order to be useful?” asks Jurgis Karpus.
“Benevolent and trustworthy AI is a buzzword that everyone is excited about. But fixing the AI is not the whole story. If we realize that the robot in front of us will be cooperative no matter what, we will use it to our selfish interest,” says Professor Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher and senior author on the study, who also works with Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo on the ethical implications of integrating autonomous robot soldiers along with human soldiers.
“Compromises are the oil that make society work. For each of us, it looks only like a small act of self-interest. For society as a whole, it could have much bigger repercussions. If no one lets autonomous cars join the traffic, they will create their own traffic jams on the side, and not make transport easier”.
Contacts and sources:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Publication:
Algorithm exploitation: humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI. Jurgis Karpus, Adrian Krüger, Julia Tovar Verba, Bahador Bahrami, Ophelia Deroy. iScience, 2021; 102679 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102679
WHAT DO A MIGHTY morphing dinosaur, several children in a trench coat, and a swarm of smiling robots have in common? They know there’s power in numbers — at least when it comes to their constituent parts.
Megazord from the Power Rangers franchise and the Teselecta from Doctor Who are examples of superstructures, or a structure in robotics made up of tinier robots. And they’re not just science fiction anymore.
In a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, a team of physicists from the University of Bordeaux designed a new kind of superstructure that uses mindless mini-robots to power a seemingly intelligent superstructure that can squeeze through obstacles, pull things, and even battle other superstructure bots.
“We made them play games — we played billiards — and they do it so well that you're like, ‘The hell with it, they are intelligent!’” Hamid Kellay, a professor of physics at the University of Bordeaux and a senior author on the paper, tells Inverse. “But they’re not.”
WHAT’S NEW
When it comes to the mini-robots themselves, which Kellay calls “bugs,” he says they’re not too different from what you find in similar studies on this subject. And in fact, they’re the same kind of small, vibrating toy you might give a child or a cat. They’re roughly 1.7 inches long and less than an inch tall and colored orange and red with tiny, non-functional legs.
Using these off-the-shelf toys helps the lab cut down on time and money in 3D printing something of their own, Kellay explains.
With no intelligence to be found, these bots are still capable of working together to overcome obstacles.Boudet et al. / Science Robotics
The true significance of their studies lies in the collaborative motion they observed when a collection of the robot bugs were set loose in a thin, flexible shell — similar to putting a wind-up toy inside a rubber band. Even though these bugs are truly mindless (i.e., they’re just a plastic shell and a vibrating motor), they appear to move intelligently within the flexible scaffold.
Studying how these superstructures move through different obstacles will help the research team understand the new kinds of forces these superstructures exert, says Kellay. In other words, how they interact with the world around them.
WHY IT MATTERS
These kinds of superstructures are still in the early stages of development. Still, Kellay says they could have several practical applications in the future, including cleaning hard-to-reach or dangerously infected areas of your house.
And if they were to be scaled down much smaller in the future, these bots might one day also play an important role in the future of internal drug delivery.
The same toy bug your kid loves to play with is powering nearly intelligent superstructure robots.H. Kellay and collaborators / University of Bordeaux
HOW IT WORKS
Unlike complex speaking or dancing robots that might seem standard today, Kellay says that these robots and driven purely by “physics and chance.”
Here’s how they work in a nutshell:
The robot bugs are painted with small lines to help the researchers keep track of their orientation
These bugs are then let loose in a flexible scaffold on a flat surface
Turned on, these bugs vibrate and move randomly until they run into one another
Running into each other then creates a “clustering” movement where the bugs align together at a barrier
This collaborative movement at the barrier then propels the entire scaffold, or superstructure, forward
The team put these superstructures through many trials, including climbing through small openings, cleaning up obstacles, and even battling each other for supremacy.
The robot bug wearing its modified light-sensing backpack. Courtesy of Hamid Kellay
In later trials, the team also outfitted a group of the bugs with what Kellay describes as a tiny backpack containing an extra motor, light sensor, and battery. When exposing this group of bugs to bright light, the researchers found they would change their motion from a straight line to a small orbit.
“If you have no lights, they will go straight, but if you turn the light on and turn the second motor on, they start orbiting,” explains Kellay. “This orbiting actually turns out to be very nice because when you put a bunch of these things into this scaffold when they're turning like this, they generate more collisions... and cluster faster.”
This means you need fewer bugs to accomplish the same result.
WHAT’S NEXT
In the future, Kellay says he’s interested in exploring more options for controlling these structures using flashing lights to maneuver individual bots at a time.
And as a professor, Kellay says he’s also excited for the learning opportunity these “idiotic” little bugs offer for students just getting interested in the field of physics.
“Things like this are of really of high educational value,” says Kellay. “Show this to kids, and you get them immediately interested... As a university professor, that’s very important to me.”
Abstract:
A swarm of simple active particles confined in a flexible scaffold is a promising system to make mobile and deformable superstructures. These soft structures can perform tasks that are difficult to carry out for monolithic robots because they can infiltrate narrow spaces, smaller than their size, and move around obstacles. To achieve such tasks, the origin of the forces the superstructures develop, how they can be guided, and the effects of external environment, especially geometry and the presence of obstacles, need to be understood. Here, we report measurements of the forces developed by such superstructures, enclosing a number of mindless active rod-like robots, as well as the forces exerted by these structures to achieve a simple function, crossing a constriction. We relate these forces to the self-organization of the individual entities. Furthermore, and based on a physical understanding of what controls the mobility of these superstructures and the role of geometry in such a process, we devise a simple strategy where the environment can be designed to bias the mobility of the superstructure, giving rise to directional motion. Simple tasks—such as pulling a load, moving through an obstacle course, or cleaning up an arena—are demonstrated. Rudimentary control of the superstructures using light is also proposed. The results are of relevance to the making of robust flexible superstructures with nontrivial space exploration properties out of a swarm of simpler and cheaper robots.
One of the more intriguing – and highly controversial – claims I’ve heard concerning Area 51 is that top secret research has been undertaken at the base in the field of none other than teleportation. Of course, nothing solid has ever come my way. And, given the fact that the base is impenetrable, it’s unlikely anything ever will. That’s not to say that research isn’t going on in this incredible field, however. Let’s look a bit deeper at the matter of teleportation: the very same technology that has become famous in the likes of Star Trek and the 1958 movie (and its 1986 remake) The Fly. Let’s see what teleportation actually is. IBM stated the following concerning this decidedly fringe part of science: “Teleportation is the name given by science fiction writers to the feat of making an object or person disintegrate in one place while a perfect replica appears somewhere else. How this is accomplished is usually not explained in detail, but the general idea seems to be that the original object is scanned in such a way as to extract all the information from it, then this information is transmitted to the receiving location and used to construct the replica, not necessarily from the actual material of the original, but perhaps from atoms of the same kinds, arranged in exactly the same pattern as the original.”
IBM continues: “A teleportation machine would be like a fax machine, except that it would work on 3-dimensional objects as well as documents, it would produce an exact copy rather than an approximate facsimile, and it would destroy the original in the process of scanning it. A few science fiction writers consider teleporters that preserve the original, and the plot gets complicated when the original and teleported versions of the same person meet; but the more common kind of teleporter destroys the original, functioning as a super transportation device, not as a perfect replicator of souls and bodies.” In 2017, the Guardian said: “Chinese scientists have teleported an object from Earth to a satellite orbiting 300 miles away in space, in a demonstration that has echoes of science fiction. The feat sets a new record for quantum teleportation, an eerie phenomenon in which the complete properties of one particle are instantaneously transferred to another – in effect teleporting it to a distant location.”
The BBC ran an article on the astounding story titled “Teleportation: Photon particles today, humans tomorrow?” It included the following, under the sub-heading of “What has the Chinese team achieved?”: “They created 4,000 pairs of quantum-entangled photons per second at their laboratory in Tibet and fired one of the photons from each pair in a beam of light towards a satellite called Micius, named after an ancient Chinese philosopher. Micius has a sensitive photon receiver that can detect the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. Their report – published online – says it is the first such link for ‘faithful and ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation.’ ‘It is a very nice experiment – I would not have expected everything to have worked so fast and so smoothly,’ says Professor Anton Zeilinger from the University of Vienna, who taught Chinese lead scientist Pan Jianwei.”
Star Trek Teleportation
As for the matter of teleportation in the real world, we have to turn our attentions to a man named Eric W. Davis. In 2004, the U.S. Air Force quietly (as in extremely quietly) contracted Davis’ Las Vegas, Nevada-based Warp Drive Metrics company to prepare a report for them on the feasibility of teleportation being feasible. It became known as the Teleportation Physics Study. We know that as the Air Force has now placed the report in the public domain. The specific arm of the Air Force that had a particular interest in teleportation was the Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, which is based out of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. The Air Force states of the AFRL: “Air Force Research Laboratory, with headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was created in October 1997. The laboratory was formed through the consolidation of four former Air Force laboratories and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The laboratory employs approximately 10,000 military and civilian personnel. It is responsible for managing and annual $4.4 billion (Fiscal Year 2014) science and technology program that includes both Air Force and customer funded research and development. AFRL investment includes basic research, applied research and advanced technology development in air, space and cyber mission areas.
“With headquarters at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, and an additional research facility at Edwards AFB, Calif., the Aerospace Systems Directorate leads the effort to develop and transition superior technology solutions that enable dominant military aerospace vehicles. Areas of focus include vehicle aerodynamics, flight controls, aerospace propulsion, power, rocket propulsion, aerospace structures, and turbine engines. Programs advance a wide variety of aerospace technologies including unmanned vehicles, space access, advanced fuels, hypersonic vehicles, future strike, and energy management.”
What the above tells us is that even if teleportation – as it is popularly perceived – has not been achieved, then, still, a lot of facilities and programs have looked into it. Maybe, one day, we’ll all be surprised and find out that it has been perfected.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
08-07-2021
“IF WE HAVEN'T REALLY UNDERSTOOD HUMAN EMOTIONS, CAN WE ACTUALLY ... PUT THEM INTO MACHINES?”
“IF WE HAVEN'T REALLY UNDERSTOOD HUMAN EMOTIONS, CAN WE ACTUALLY ... PUT THEM INTO MACHINES?”
SAY CHEESE - Bilge Mutlu, University of Wisconsin at Madison
ROBOTS ARE LEARNING TO SMILE AND IT'S MAKING HUMANS CRINGE
WHEN IT COMES TO EXPRESSING EMOTIONS, HUMAN FACES HAVE A LOT TO SAY.
Without speaking a word, we can signal our disgust to those around us with pursed lips and a furrowed brow. Our joy is expressed just as fast: Eyes open wide and lips upturned. Like an overturned flag signaling otherwise unnoticeable distress on a ship at sea, our facial expressions act as a bridge between our internal life and the outside world.
While other humans are generally good at picking up on these small signals, we may soon have another group with which to communicate: intelligent robot companions. From service robots delivering our takeout to companion bots bonding with our grandparents, it’s becoming more important to design robots that use emotion-like signaling to efficiently relate to humans.
But achieving this feat is easier said than done, and getting it wrong could doom a robot to reside in the “uncanny valley” — forever ruining their hopes of a true human relationship.
Enter Eva, a blue-skinned, body-less robot designed by Boyuan Chen, a computer science Ph.D. student at Columbia University, and colleagues from Columbia’s Creative Machines Lab. With 12 tiny muscle-like actuators built into its face, Eva is prepared to express a myriad of human emotions — from fear to joy to disgust.
Chen tells Inverse that he and the rest of the team behind Eva aren’t even sure exactly how many emotions it can express.
“Can you tell me how many expressions you can make?” Chen asks me. “It’s a very hard question to answer and it’s the same for the robot. I'm happy to see this happen because if we know the exact number [of emotions], that means there are limits. We do not know the number, [so] there are no limits.”
Eva is made using a 3D printed and assembled skull with a blue, flesh-like face mask placed on top.Faraj et al.
WHY CREATE A SMILING ROBOT
As for why you’d want to create a smiling robot at all, Chen says that developing robots that can hold their own in human-like interactions — such as reading distress in a human companion and responding accordingly with a comforting face — will be essential for improving human-machine interactions in the future.
Using emotions as a stepping stone toward building emotional and physical intelligence will help robots in the future intuitively know how to help humans, Chen explains, instead of needing to be explicitly programmed to do so.
“When robots see that other people may need help, you want a robot to actively help the people instead of me asking for help and programming it to help us,” he says.
Paula Niedenthal is an emotions researcher and professor of psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She tells Inverse that working toward emotionally express robots is important as well because humans will read emotions into these robots no matter what. Take, for example, food delivery robots milling the streets around UW Madison.
“The robot's behavior rather than a facial expression can look really emotional because it accelerates when there’s danger,” says Niedenthal. “For example, if a robot is crossing the road and then comes across a car there’s kind of a panicked rearing or running away. That makes you actually feel a kind of relationship with it, both sympathy and wanting to use that agent in the future.”
Eva can show a wide range of expressions, starting from 6 base human emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise.
Robots that can expertly express these kinds of emotions will have a better chance at building human relationships and even persuading humans to do what they want, i.e. taking their medicine on time.
But having a robot nail this interaction every time is an incredibly difficult task, says Bilge Mutlu, an associate professor of computer science and psychology and UW Madison. Even humans don’t always get it right.
“When you look at the psychology literature, our understanding of emotions is incomplete,” Mutlu says. “And if we haven't really understood human emotions, can we actually simplify them and put them into machines? That's an open question.”
WHAT IS THE UNCANNY VALLEY?
For humans, these mismatched interactions can be uncomfortable or awkward, but with robots, they can be downright creepy, thanks to the uncanny valley.
The concept was proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s to describe a humanoid robot that looks close — but not quite close enough — to a real human.
According to the uncanny valley concept, humans are comfortable interacting with a more abstract and cute robot (think, Pixar’s WALL-E) or an incredibly human-like robot (think, Battlestar GalacticaCylons.) However, there exists a so-called valley between these two robotic extremes where robots look neither truly human nor robotic. This feeling of the “uncanny” might be the shiver you get when walking through a wax museum or when looking at a robotic Einstein video.
Psychologically, scholars have theorized that this discomfort with the not-quite-human may stem from an instinctual fear or distrust of dead human bodies, explains Niedenthal.
To steer clear of the uncanny valley altogether researchers will typically try and keep their robots on the cuter, more abstract side of the curve, says Mutlu. However, when it comes to programming emotions into your bot, he says avoiding creepiness altogether is a little impossible.
Does Eva creep you out? You’re not alone.Faraj et al.
HOW DOES IT WORK
The uncanny valley was a challenge that Chen and colleagues were willing to take when designing Eva.
To start, they chose to design Eva as just a disembodied head. While this may instinctually sound creepy, the researchers explain in their April 2021 paper on the project that this design choice was made to help viewers more clearly separate this robot from humans in their minds. For similar reasons, the team also chose to leave Eva’s skull exposed and color its face a distinctly non-human color: blue.
Admittedly, Chen says this decision was influenced partially by the lab's affection for the 2009 movie “Avatar.”
In addition to their 2021 paper published in the journal HardwareX, the team also recently presented a second paper at the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation which further describes Eva’s latest hardware and software developments.
Underneath its blue skin, Eva is equipped with:
42 “muscles”
Expressive, hand-milled eyes
Base knowledge of six basic human emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise)
Running an off-the-shelf learning framework on a small Raspberry Pi built into its skull, Eva is able to “look” at human expressions in person or through video and realistically mimic them. This is done by mapping the human face using discrete points, similar to the kind of dot arrays used in motion tracking for CGI in movies. Eva then imagines how these patterns of dots would look on its face and then moves its facial actuators to bring the new face to life.
Altogether, the team reports that Eva can be manufactured for just $900.
WHAT’S NEXT
Eva is still in its infancy, but Chen says he’s excited to see how other researchers will use this open-source platform to design their own emotional robots — from changing the skin tone to programming real human interactions for Eva. In the future, Chen hopes that expressive robots like Eva will find a home as educators or in healthcare to help care for humans when others can’t.
And as for whether or not Chen finds Eva’s smile creepy, he says he could never be scared by a smile like that.
“This is hard for me because the robot is like our baby,” says Chen. “I absolutely love every part of it.”
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
30-06-2021
‘Scary’ Boston Dynamics Dance Video Divides Internet as Robo-Dogs Celebrate Hyundai Acquisition
‘Scary’ Boston Dynamics Dance Video Divides Internet as Robo-Dogs Celebrate Hyundai Acquisition
from RT:
American robotics company Boston Dynamics released a new robot dance video after it announced it had been acquired by Hyundai – and, like its previous effort, this one had many people terrified.
Though it announced the completion of the acquisition last week in a press release, Boston Dynamics decided to mark the occasion in style on Tuesday.
The video shows five of its dog-like ‘Spot’ robots dancing to the song ‘IONIQ: I’m On It’ by South Korean boy band BTS, and demonstrates the precision and complexity of its machines, which feature long arm-like appendages with claws.
Robots may be taking away our jobs, but one consolation (perhaps the ONLY consolation) is that they don’t ever seem to look like they’re enjoying it. Then again, how many of you look like you enjoy your job … at least pre-pandemic? Well, some robots have decided to rub our human noses into our job losses by curling that thing underneath THEIR useless noses into the creepiest smile ever. If you’ve been searching for incentive to rise up against our robot overlords, that look may be it.
“The idea for EVA took shape a few years ago, when my students and I began to notice that the robots in our lab were staring back at us through plastic, googly eyes.”
Hod Lipson, James and Sally Scapa Professor of Innovation (Mechanical Engineering) and director of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia Engineering (Columbia University), explains in a press release how an observation by students who hadn’t yet gotten jobs that they would eventually lose to robots turned into a study called “Smile Like You Mean It: Driving Animatronic Robotic Face with Learned Models” which led to the development of EVA, an autonomous robot with a soft face and AI Learning algorithms it used to mimic the facial expressions of humans around it.
“The greatest challenge in creating EVA was designing a system that was compact enough to fit inside the confines of a human skull while still being functional enough to produce a wide range of facial expressions.”
Undergraduate student Zanwar Faraj led the team in developing artificial cable-and-pulley facial muscles to replace the more than 42 tiny muscles in a human face. That gave the robot the ability to express the six basic emotions of anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, plus an array of more nuanced feelings. Over the mechanics they stretched a blue skin resembling a member of the popular and much-loved Blue Man Group performance art company. To make the robotic face closer to a human one than the animatronic robots at theme parks, they gave EVA deep learning artificial intelligence to “read” and then mirror the expressions on nearby human faces, and then learn more by watching videos of itself. In that way, EVA obtained a ‘self-image’.
Did it work?
“I was minding my own business one day when EVA suddenly gave me a big, friendly smile. I knew it was purely mechanical, but I found myself reflexively smiling back.”
Hod Lipson was one of the first to come under the control of EVA. He admits that his reflex response to the smiling EVA was one of the goals of the project – he had noticed that grocery stores using restocking robots often decked them out in name badges and clothing to give them a human identity, and decided the next step was to make a robot that could control that identity and its responses itself.
“Our brains seem to respond well to robots that have some kind of recognizable physical presence.”
That’s true … but is it wise? Boyuan Chen, a PhD student who led the software phase of the project, added this:
“Robots are intertwined in our lives in a growing number of ways, so building trust between humans and machines is increasingly important.”
What could possibly go wrong?
What’s the harm in making a robot smile? What’s the first thing a con man does? Or a politician? Or a pusher? A kidnapper? Anyone looking to win your trust before they violate it?
We now have a smiling robot that can make you reflexively smile back. What do you think it’s going to say as it smilingly leads you away and you ask it to tell you where it’s taking you? You’ve seen this movie before.
The US Army has high-powered night vision goggles that provide war fighters with the ability to pick out enemies in the dead of night, regardless of weather conditions.
The military group’s Lancer Brigade shared footage of the new Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binoculars in action, which shows glowing figures that some liken to those in the popular ‘Halo’ video game.
The system includes a new, high-resolution display and an embedded soldier wireless personal area network, rapid target acquisition and augmented reality algorithms to interface with the Army’s Nett Warrior.
Using the goggles, soldiers can keep their eyes on their target without looking down to read maps or check radios, as all information is shown on the display.
More than 4,800 of the combat-ready devices are now in the hands of the US Army.
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The military group’s Lancer Brigade shared footage of the new Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binoculars in action, which shows glowing figures that some liken to those in the popular ‘Halo’ video game
The footage shows glowing figures that some liken to those in the popular ‘Halo’ video game (pictured)
The US Army has high-powered night vision goggles that provide war fighters with the ability to pick out enemies in the dead of night, regardless of weather conditions
The Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binoculars (ENVG-B) was developed by L3Harris Technologies, a global aerospace and defense technology innovator, specifically to be used on the battlefield.
Lynn Bollengier, President, Integrated Vision Solutions, L3Harris, said: ‘The ENVG-B is the most advanced night vision goggle ever developed for and fielded by the US Army, enabling a soldier to see and maneuver in zero and low-light situations.
‘We have delivered more than 4,500 combat-ready systems to the US Army, which meet today’s urgent operational needs of our close combat forces.’
In the tweet shared by Lancer Brigade it says: ‘You have never seen night vision like this.’
The clip posted shows the body of soldiers outlined in a glowing light as they move through the forest, fire guns and rest during missions.
However, one Twitter user commented with ‘I have, actually’ to the statement and included an image from the popular video game Halo.
The video game is a military science fiction franchise that is focused around soldiers going to war with aliens.
And the images seen through the ENVG-B looks similar to those with Halo 3’s Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance (VISR).
The clip posted shows the body of soldiers outlined in a glowing light as they move through the forest, fire guns and rest during missions
In the tweet shared by Lancer Brigade it says: ‘You have never seen night vision like this.' One Twitter user commented with ‘I have, actually’ to the statement and included an image from the popular video game Halo
It weighs just 2.5 pounds and attaches to the front of a helmet, allowing users to easily switch between monocular and binocular visioning
VISR provides navigational data and highlights various points of interest in the operational area, along with outlining figures in glowing light.
However, ENVG-B is the real deal that provides soldiers with actionable intelligence through the fusion of Image Intensified (I2) white phosphor tubes and thermal imaging.
The advanced goggles also provide targeting and identification in all battlefield conditions as well as light levels including degraded visual environments such as smoke, fog and debris.
It weighs just 2.5 pounds and attaches to the front of a helmet, allowing users to easily switch between monocular and binocular visioning.
It’s hard to imagine the military without night vision technology to help armed forces see during low-light conditions. The first-night vision device was created in the 1930s by AEG, a German electrical equipment manufacturer. These night vision devices were used in Germany during World War II.
But the night vision technology in present form will soon be the thing of the past
Last week, the U.S. Army released video footage taken from its new Enhanced Night Vision Goggle – Binocular (ENVG-B) …and it’s thrilling!
With these night-vision goggles, The U.S. Army’s troops won’t have any issues seeing in the dark or through the thick mist.
The Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B) goggles are the latest in a long line of futuristic war tech being developed by the world’s most powerful army.
The army’s ENVG-B’s are straight out of science-fiction
These Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B) goggle vastly improves a soldier’s ability to not only see what is going on all around them in dark but also be able to accurately discern what they’re seeing.
ENVG-B gives clear neon white outlines of people and artillery, all displayed right in front of the soldier’s eyes to easily see-through in fog, dust, and smoke-filled battlefields.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
23-05-2021
NOBEL WINNER: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL CRUSH HUMANS, “IT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE”
NOBEL WINNER: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL CRUSH HUMANS, “IT’S NOT EVEN CLOSE”
FROM THE DEPT. OF PEOPLE YOU SHOULD REALLY, REALLY LISTEN TO.
Endgame, Set, Match
It’s common knowledge, at this point, that artificial intelligence will soon be capable of outworking humans — if not entirely outmoding them — in plenty of areas. How much we’ll be outworked and outmoded, and on what scale, is still up for debate. But in a new interview published by The Guardian over the weekend, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman had a fairly hot take on the matter: In the battle between AI and humans, he said, it’s going to be an absolute blowout — and humans are going to get creamed.
“Clearly AI is going to win [against human intelligence]. It’s not even close,” Kahneman told the paper. “How people are going to adjust to this is a fascinating problem.”
Prospect Theory
Why listen to Daniel Kahneman? His 2011 book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” — over two million copies sold — is one of the most influential tomes in the field of behavioral economics, exploring how and why humans think the way they think (the “fast” thinking of the title being intuitive; the “slow” thinking being rational), and what leaves us prepared (or unprepared) to make decisions about our future. But moreover, he won his 2002 Nobel Prize for pioneering “prospect theory,” which explains how people rationalize the difference between gains and losses, and how their thresholds for risk aversion and risk appetite work.
And why, according to Kahneman, are we so unprepared for the forthcoming takeover of artificial intelligence? Speaking to the way the pandemic overtook an unprepared world, Kahneman cited the exponential growth of the virus. Human minds, he explained, are essentially unequipped to handle the basic math underlying how something like a Covid outbreak can spiral out of control on a global scale.
“Exponential phenomena are almost impossible for us to grasp,” he told The Guardian. “We are very experienced in a more or less linear world. And if things are accelerating, they’re usually accelerating within reason. Exponential change [as with the spread of virus] is really something else. We’re not equipped for it. It takes a long time to educate intuition.”
Gird Your Maladaptive Loins
Winding up into the discussion about AI, Kahneman noted the issue with human minds: “There is going to be massive disruption. Technology is developing very rapidly, possibly exponentially. But people are linear. When linear people are faced with exponential change, they’re not going to be able to adapt to that very easily.” Kahneman cites medicine as one place humans are going to be replaced, “certainly in terms of diagnosis.” And elsewhere, he issues a stark message to the boardrooms of the world: “There are rather frightening scenarios when you’re talking about leadership. Once it’s demonstrably true that you can have an AI that has far better business judgment, say, what will that do to human leadership?”
If nothing else, Kahenman’s quotables feel canny — like maybe if the people in the C-suite are scared for their jobs, someone who can do something about any of this might actually listen.
From the “What could possibly go wrong?” and the “They didn’t listen the first time!” files comes the double-whammy news that those controversial genetically-altered mosquitoes, designed to control their populations by killing off all of the biting females while leaving the non-biting males, have been released in Florida and are mating, while scientists not waiting to see what happens are already genetically engineering armyworms to kill off all of the females and stop them from destroying billions of dollars’ worth of crops worldwide. What happens when a genetically-engineered mosquito bites a genetically-engineered armyworm and a human accidentally eats it?
The mosquitoes contain a proprietary gene belonging to Oxitec, which calls it “the world’s leading insect-based biological control system to safely and sustainably control insects that transmit disease and destroy crops.” Residents of the Florida Keys have been demanding more information, independent testing and safety studies for a decade, but claim they’ve received little response from Oxitec nor support from local government or the agricultural industry. Previous tests using Aedes aegypti mosquitoes were conducted in in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Panama and Malaysia, and the company reported that local mosquito populations fell by at least 90% in those locations. However, Live Science reports that in Brazil genes from the insects cropped up in local mosquito populations because the lethal gene failed to kill off all of the females before they could mate.
Besides this, another thing that could go wrong in Florida is that tetracycline turns off the self-destruct mechanism in female larvae. However, that’s the same antibiotic used in sewage treatment plants. Oxitec claims the testing locations are far enough away from plants and other tetracycline-using areas to avoid this possibility. Should the tests be halted while they look for other things that went wrong in Florida?
Too late.
“The collaboration between Bayer and Oxitec in the development of a ‘friendly’ fall armyworm explores a promising new approach to support integrated pest management, helping farmers manage destructive pests more sustainably while reducing the need for other inputs.”
According to Zenger.news, by “friendly” Bob Reiter, head of crop science research and development at Bayer, means these genetically modified male fall armyworms (Spodoptera frugiperda), also from Oxitec, will not harm the environment, other animals or humans while the kill off all of the female armyworms before the eat corn/maize, rice, sorghum, sugarcane, wheat, and 75 other crop species in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Fall armyworms are highly reproductive and spread quickly – they spread to 12 countries in Africa in 2016 and 2017, to India’s southern state of Karnataka in 2018 and to China in 2019. India, with its huge population needing huge amounts of food, is considering the genetically modified male fall armyworms – does anyone think its questionable leadership will handle this any better than the coronavirus?
Adult fall armyworm
Pests are definitely a problem – but pests are in the eye of the beholder. Many traditional crops are resistant to these insects, but they don’t adapt to industrialized mass farming. Similarly, development in areas where the mosquitoes formerly lived undisturbed and not spreading disease to humans results in … disease spreading to humans. Did anyone ask “What could possibly go wrong?” when these things spread?
They did. They didn’t listen the first time. Isn’t it time to ask louder now … and not give up?
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
14-05-2021
Does Putin really need another army? Russia's defence minister wants to CLONE 3,000-year-old ancient warriors from remains found in Siberia (and their horses to boot)
Does Putin really need another army? Russia's defence minister wants to CLONE 3,000-year-old ancient warriors from remains found in Siberia (and their horses to boot)
Sergei Shoigu has unveiled desire to clone ancient royal warriors in Siberia
The ancient Tunnug burial site is located in the Valley of the Kings in Tuva
'We would like very much to find the organic matter,' the defence minister said
Russia's defence minister has taken time out from massing troops on Ukraine's borders to unveil a 'Dolly the Sheep' cloning dream involving ancient royal warriors and their prize horses using DNA preserved in permafrost.
Sergei Shoigu - one of Vladimir Putin's closest allies - spoke about the potential of the extraordinary 3,000-year-old Scythian burials in Tuva, his mountainous native republic in Siberia.
The ancient Tunnug burial site of nomadic warriors - often laid to rest with their horses - is in an area known as the Valley of the Kings in Tuva.
Excavation works at the Tunnug royal burial in the Valley of the Kings, Republic of Tuva
Sergei Shoigu, pictured above, one of Vladimir Putin's closest allies - spoke about the potential of the extraordinary 3,000-year-old Scythian burials in Tuva
Excavation works at the Tunnug royal burial in the Valley of the Kings, Republic of Tuva
Shamans performed a rite to bless the start of excavation at the ancient Tunnug burial mound
The ancient Scythian burials in Siberia
Research on the Tuva burial mound, known as Arzhan 2, began in 1998.
Russian and German archaeologists began excavating the Scythian burial mound on a grassy plain that locals have long called the Valley of the Kings in 2001.
The nomadic Scythian tribes roamed the Eurasian steppe, from the northern borders of China to the Black Sea region, in the seventh to third centuries B.C..
The Scythians are generally believed to have been of Iranian origin and spoke a language of the Scythian branch of the Iranian languages.
In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus and frequently raided the Middle East, playing an important role in the political developments of the region.
When Shoigu, 65, initiated the Russian-Swiss archeological digs here three years ago a modern-day shaman was even drafted in by scientists to ensure the excavations did not anger the spirits.
The defence chief told a session of the Russian Geographical Society, also attended remotely by Putin, on Wednesday: 'Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter.'
He was referring to well-preserved remains of ancient people and animals, explained TASS.
'I believe you understand what would follow that,' said Shoigu in a broadcast by Zvezda TV.
'It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep.'
He added, without explaining more of planned genomic research that 'in general, it will be very interesting'.
The burials were in permafrost and according to scientists, organic matter should be preserved there.
'We have conducted several expeditions there already, it is a big international expedition.
'A lot of things have been confirmed, but a lot remains to be done.'
Shoigu has been in the limelight in recent days spearheading Russia's build up of almost 100,000 troops close to Ukraine, triggering fears of a new war - but at this session he spoke about more ancient warriors.
The burial is among the earlier Scythian remains.
Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century BC claimed the Scythians made cloaks from their victims' scalps after victory.
The savage warriors are believed to have used their enemies' skulls as drinking cups.
Aerial view of the The Valley of the Kings in the Republic of Tuva. The burials were in permafrost and according to scientists, organic matter should be preserved there
Entrance to The Valley of the Kings in the Republic of Tuva
Aerial view of the The Valley of the Kings in the Republic of Tuva. The defence chief told a session of the Russian Geographical Society, also attended remotely by Putin, on Wednesday: 'Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter'
Legend says they drank the blood of their vanquished foes.
The valley contains so-called 'tsar' mounds from the Scythian era.
It is not the first time Shoigu has spoken about finding 'organic' matter which can be investigated by scientists for DNA.
While exciting remains have been found, there are still hopes to dig deeper into the mounds and find remains similar to a tattooed princess discovered in a mound in Siberia's Altai Mountains.
HOW DOLLY WAS CREATED
Dolly was the only surviving lamb from 277 cloning attempts and was created from an mammary cell taken from a six-year-old Finn Dorset sheep.
The sheep was born at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh in July 1996 and announced to the world on February 22 1997.
She was created using a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer.
The pioneering technique the Roslin team used involved transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an unfertilised egg cell whose own nucleus had been removed.
An electric shock stimulated the hybrid cell to begin dividing and generate an embryo, which was then implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother.
Dolly was the first successfully produced clone from a cell taken from an adult mammal.
Dolly's creation showed that genes in the nucleus of a mature cell are still able to revert back to an embryonic totipotent state - meaning the cell can divide to produce all of the difference cells in an animal.
Wikimedia commonsEquipment from Scythian horse riders of northern Black Sea region and Kuban region, dated circa 7-5th century, B.C.
How does cloning work?
Scientists take live cells from a living animal, or a dead one with the right preserved organic matter.
Then they implant nucleus DNA – the building blocks of life – from the cells into a “blank” egg of the same species that has had its DNA removed.
The egg is given electric shocks to trigger cell division and is then implanted into a surrogate female animal of the species.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
Russia's Plan to Clone an Army of 3,000 Year Old Scythian Warriors via Leak Project
Russia's Plan to Clone an Army of 3,000 Year Old Scythian Warriors via Leak Project
Russia’s Plan to Clone an Army of 3,000 Year Old Scythian Warriors via Leak Project
According to the Iran Chamber Society and others sources, the Scythians are of the Ukraine region. From there they migrated into Iran area and brought the Aryan language-(which infers they are Aryan origin). They are known for traits of incredible warrior skills. With this combo, Ukraine-Aryan-natural warrior skills, it’s no wonder Russia’s interest..they always are after the best of the best. y4
Combining living tissue with cold metal robots may sound like a plot from the James Cameron film 'Terminator,' but the idea is being developed for real-world machines at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL).
The US military group is working on a series of 'biohybrid robotics' that integrates living organisms into mechanical systems that 'produces never-seen-before agility and versatile.'
The team envisions growing muscle tissue in a lab that would be added to robotic joints in place of traditional actuators – components responsible for moving and controlling mechanisms.
The project aims to give robots the same agility and precision that muscles offer biological systems, allowing these futuristic machines to venture into spaces too risky for human soldiers.
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The US military group is working on a series of 'biohybrid robotics' that integrates living organisms into mechanical systems that 'produces never-seen-before agility and versatile.' The group is focusing on legged robots like the Army's Legged Locomotion and Movement Adaptation research platform, known as LLAMA (pictured)
Dr. Dean Culver, a research scientist at the laboratory, said: 'Though impressive in their own right, today's robots are deployed to serve a limited purpose then are retrieved some minutes later.'
'ARL wants robots to be versatile teammates capable of going anywhere Soldiers can and more, adapting to the needs of any given situation.'
The team is initially focusing on legged platforms similar to the Army's Legged Locomotion and Movement Adaptation research platform, known as LLAMA, and the U.S. Marine Corps' Legged Squad Support System, or LS3.
The idea is to give these war robots similar abilities to animals, such as balancing on uneven and unreliable terrain.
The team envisions growing muscle tissue in a lab that will added to robotic joints in place of traditional actuators – components responsible for moving and controlling mechanisms
'One obstacle that faces ground-based robots today is an inability to instantly adjust or adapt to unstable terrain,' Culver said.
'Muscle actuation, though certainly not solely responsible for it, is a big contributor to animals' ability to navigate uneven and unreliable terrain.
Pictured is T-800' from Terminator, which features living tissue around its robotic structure
'Similarly, flapping wings and flying organisms' ability to reconfigure their envelope gives them the ability to dart here and there even among branches.'
'In multi-domain operations, this kind of agility and versatility means otherwise inaccessible areas are now viable, and those options can be critical to the U.S. military's success.'
Culver and the researchers are set to share their work with the biohybrid engineering community regarding how to culture strong muscle tissue rather than extract it from a trained organism.
The project aims to give robots., like the U.S. Marine Corps' Legged Squad Support System, or LS3, the same agility and precision that muscles offer biological systems, allowing these futuristic machines to venture into spaces too risky for human soldiers
Ritu Raman, a mechanical engineer who works in biohybrid design, told Science Focus Magazine in October that to make the muscles work with different sized joints, it would be best to create a gel and muscle mixture that can be molded to the same needed for the muscular action of a specific robot.
'Then, because the cells are alive, when they go through this process, they're sensing and responding to their environment,' Raman said.
From the “What could possibly go wrong?” file comes yet another report that the US military is working to create robotic warriors that move more like humans than one of those robotic New York police dogs trying to walk on two legs and carry a gun. The latest technique under trial is something called ‘biohybrid robotics’, which in this case means replacing rods, gears and shock absorbers with real human muscle tissue. Are you ready for robots with bigger biceps than yours … or Arnold’s?
“We look at a wolf in nature: It probably weighs about the same, can pull much more and can travel hundreds of miles without really eating, take a nap and do the same thing the next day.”
Instead of building a better wolf with technology, Dr. Dean Culver, a research scientist at the Army Research Laboratory, told NextGov.com that the lab’s strategy would be to make the robotic wolf better with biology – using real tendons and ligaments to give the robot real wolf speed, spring and agility, and replace its batteries with a chemical system that could be replenished on the run rather than shutting down the robot for recharging. The same strategy is behind building a better robotic soldier for combat. Current robots on wheels powered by batteries are reaching their physical limits. More concerning however are current attempts to make human-like walking robots, which Culver says work well on flat terrain but fall down, literally and figuratively, on gravel and rougher terrain.
“But if you run through a field, and your footsteps into a rabbit hole, even before the signal from your foot has reached your brain to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m in a rabbit hole,’ your body is already moving to accommodate that sudden change. Part of that is the way that control systems are designed in organisms—that’s obviously really amazing—but another part of that is the ability of muscles and tendons to bend and flex a little bit, and offer those control systems an opportunity to adapt.”
Adapting means joining roboticists with biologists to understand how muscle tissue works and converting them to a metal skeleton that provides electrical impulses for power, ions for signals to make decisions and chemicals to replace the nourishment from blood and oxygen. All of that collapses, literally and figuratively, if it’s not durable – they don’t need to last 80 years like human muscles but definitely longer than mechanical robots.
Our days are numbered.
“We’re going to learn how to build things from the ground up, and not only offer robots and devices and mechanisms, the capabilities that we see in nature—but just revolutionize the way that we think about it and push the horizons on what we’re capable of way further back. And that disruption is precisely the kind of thing that we want to lead, and that [ARL] should be front-runners in.”
After World War II, when was the US Army revolutionary in anything … other than getting involved in other countries’ revolutions? Culver sees this as a chance for the Army Research Laboratory to be leading-edge in “biohybrid and bio-inspired engineering.” What could possibly go wrong? Well, other than blurring the line between humans and robots, the fact that the primary purpose of these biohybrids is warfare is always disconcerting at best, scary at worst. If the technology can be shared with industries other than defense – medicine, for example – this may be a good idea. We’ll just have to wait and see .. and hope a war doesn’t drive the development first.
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
04-05-2021
Here's the Pentagon's Terrifying Plan for Cyborg Supersoldiers
Here's the Pentagon's Terrifying Plan for Cyborg Supersoldiers
The U.S. military wants soldiers that have superhuman eyesight, controllable augmented muscles that turn untrained novices into expert killers, and more.
Cybernetic enhancements that fuse humans and machines are coming, and the U.S. Military wants to be prepared.
A new report from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Chemical Biological Center—a scientific research division of the Army with a focus on biological and chemical weapons—detailed what the field of cybernetics might look in 2050. The report, titled Cyborg Soldiers 205: Human/ Machine Fusion and the Implications for the Future of the DOD, reads like the framework for a dystopian novel set in a near future where injured soldiers are cybernetically enhanced, but come home to an America terrified of cyborgs.
“The primary objective of this effort was to determine the potential of machines that are physically integrated within the human body to augment and enhance the performance of human beings over the next 30 years,” the researchers said.
The study identified poor public perception as being a barrier to the mass adoption of cybernetics. Terminator II: Judgement Day poisoned us all against killer robots, much to the military’s chagrin.
“Across popular social and open-source media, literature, and film, the use of machines to enhance the physical condition of the human species has received a distorted and dystopian narrative in the name of entertainment,” the study said. “Defense leadership should understand that negative public and social perceptions will need to be overcome, if these technologies are to be fielded.”
Cyber enhancement is cutting edge technology, and it’s hard to predict where it will go over the next three decades. The Pentagon researchers focused on four probable areas of enhancement: super vision, augmented hearing, enhanced muscles, and “direct neural enhancement of the human brain for two-way data transfer.”
See like the Predator
The Pentagon predicts a world where enhanced soldiers have cybernetically enhanced eyes that allow them to see across the battlefield in different wavelengths, and identify targets in “dense, urban environments or subterranean megacities that will challenge identification and tracking of targets,” they said.
The researchers mention what becomes a disturbing theme of the study—many of these enhancements may only occur after a soldier is injured. When working with a delicate area such as the eye, injury may be the only path towards convincing a wounded warrior to receive the surgery, the study notes.
“Ocular enhancement would be an attractive medical option in situations where the eye tissue has been damaged or destroyed by injury or disease,” the researchers said. “It is deemed unlikely that individuals would willingly undergo removal of healthy tissue in an area considered to be sensitive. However, the central and critical role that vision plays in society would likely motivate warfighters who have lost part or all of their vision to voluntarily undergo surgery that would restore or even improve their ability to see.”
Muscles controlled with light
This trend of fixing fallen soldiers with cybernetics continues with optogenetic musculoskeletal control systems. “The most likely [use] would be in the restoration of lost function due to injury of muscles or nerves,” the study said. “Musculoskeletal injuries are the second leading cause of lost duty time in the U.S. Armed Forces.”
To enhance muscles, the Pentagon would enhance weak tissue with a “network of emplaced subcutaneous sensors that deliver optogenetic stimulation through programmed light pulses,” the researchers said. Optogenetics stimulates muscle tissue, or even neurons, with light instead of electricity.
“The optogenetic controller would, in effect, take control of the motions of a warfighter’s limbs, thereby allowing a novice (i.e., the warfighter) to perform functions professionally"
“The human body would have an array of small optical sensors implanted beneath the skin in the body areas that need to be controlled. These sensors could be manifested as thin optical threads that are placed at regular intervals over critical muscle and nerve bundles and are linked to a central control area designed to stimulate each node only when the muscles below it are needed.”
According to the study, this could allow wounded soldiers to return to battle with cybernetic muscles that operate better than their meat alone did. It could also allow them to control external tools such as drones and weapons systems not directly attached to their body. Or let someone else control them remotely.
“The optogenetic controller would, in effect, take control of the motions of a warfighter’s limbs, thereby allowing a novice (i.e., the warfighter) to perform functions professionally.”
You can hear a pin drop
Cybernetic ears will both enhance perception and allow soldiers to access new abilities, according to the Pentagon.
The study imagines that future advances won’t just improve people’s hearing, but also allow for the “conversion and transmission of these signals to others across distances,” the study said. In other words, people could use cybernetic ears to access a network of voices and communication only perceptible to them. It’s like implanting your smartphone inside your ear, complete with real-time translation features for foreign languages.
Hearing loss is a major problem in the military and, for this reason, the researchers believe selling soldiers on enhanced hearing will be easier than eyes and muscles. However, the researchers feel that upgrading ears will be more invasive and less reversible than other technologies and so they recommend that the Pentagon pursue less invasive approaches. . “Electrodes that directly interface with neural pathways could be implanted with a minor surgical procedure and potentially, could be removed with minimal adverse effects,” they said.
The Pentagon’s study suggests a future where humans with neural implants are jacked into a matrix that allows them to control machines, have machines control them, and to control each other. “The enhancement would not simply entail user control of equipment (brain to machine) but also transmission to operator (machine to brain) and human to human (command and control dynamics) to enhance situational awareness as drone, computational analytical, and human information is relayed to the operator,” it said.
Cybernetically enhanced soldiers could control drones and complicated weapon systems remotely with the power of their mind. The problem is, unlike some of the other technologies discussed, there probably won’t be a non-invasive way to achieve symbiosis between soldier and machine.
Because of that, the researchers suggested that neural links be restricted to an elite class of soldier, like the Navy SEALs, who may be amenable “if they could provide significant improvements in capability, lethality, survivability, and overall battlefield superiority,” they said.
Unexpected consequences
More frightening than negative public perception of cyborgs, which the report goes into, is the Pentagon’s correct assertion that the adoption of technology has outpaced the legal and ethical frameworks that govern society. When a human merges with a machine, should the laws of war still consider it a person or a piece of equipment?
“If an enhanced warfighter is caught and captured, does he have the same protections under the Geneva Convention, and will his enhanced status alter the treatment he is likely to receive?” researchers asked.
There’s also basic questions of national security. Can cyborgs be hacked? What kind of encryption should be used and will it ever be enough? Should a soldier returning home surrender their enhancements? Is it ethical to remove the enhanced muscles that allow a wounded soldier to walk? What will the short and long term health effects of these technologies be? Should military cohorts be integrated with cyborg soldiers or do they need their own units?
The Pentagon doesn’t know. No one knows. All anyone knows is that these enhancements, in some form, are coming. They may not look exactly like what the Pentagon predicts here, but powerful people want them to happen. Billionaires want them to happen. The U.S. Military wants them to happen. The sad truth is that most moral, ethical, and legal considerations will likely be defined after the fact.
"There is so much in the world today that would have seemed like wild science fiction thirty years ago, whether its a computer in your hand on which you could search all the world's information to a President of the United States using that same computer to push foreign government disinformation,” Peter W. Singer—future war strategist, Senior Fellow at New America, and the author of the forthcoming book Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution—told Motherboard in an email. “So while not everything in the military's report on a potential future human-machine fusion in 2050 may come true, we shouldn't be shocked that some parts of it do.”
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Selene IV crewmembers focus on their research projects at their workstations in the HI-SEAS habitat.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Jack Bryan)
Dr. Michaela Musilova is the director of Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) program, which conducts analog missions to the moon and Mars for scientific research at a habitat on the volcano Mauna Loa. Currently, she is in command of the two-week Selene IV lunar mission and contributed this report to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Commander's report for the Selene IV moon mission at HI-SEAS
Lunar day 6 (March 18, 2021)
The alien dust machine — that is what the Selene IV crew has been blaming for the bad weather that we have been having during our analog lunar mission. Today is our sixth day on mission and we have barely been able to see anything outside our window due to the massive dust storm raging outside the habitat (aka a thick fog outside the HI-SEAS habitat on the volcano Mauna Loa in Hawaii).
The crew quickly became skeptical that such storms would occur naturally on the moon, so instead they blame aliens for this activity.
Selene IV crewmembers pretend to be "airlocked" by mission Commander Musilova for misbehaving. (Image credit: Courtesy of Monica Parks)
Personally, I'm rather happy that the "aliens" are accused of complicating the conditions of our mission instead of me. A number of previous crews used to joke that I'm turning on a hidden fog machine to challenge them and make them deal with being stuck indoors for long periods of time.
During our analog missions, crews can't leave the habitat during bad weather. This is both for their safety to not get lost and hurt in the "dust storms," but also because our simulated spacesuits would get damaged in such conditions. This year, the weather has definitely been keeping the crews on their toes during our missions! Or is it really aliens that are torturing us?
The Selene IV crew decided to take the offensive and requested that our volunteers from the Mission Support team on Earth ask the U.S. Space Force to destroy the aliens' dust machines. Funny enough, a local military base in Hawaii, which we have nicknamed "Space Force," has actually started testing their artillery near our HI-SEAS habitat. While they have not yet "destroyed the dust machines," we appreciate their efforts to help us — at least that is what my crewmembers tell themselves to find comfort from both the dust storms and the constant bombing noise that we hear coming from "Space Force."
The Selene IV crew celebrates St. Patrick's Day during their lunar analog mission at HI-SEAS with green and clover shaped pancakes. (Image credit: Courtesy of Lori Waters)
All jokes aside, the real comfort that we have experienced during our mission has been from one another. The crew has been keeping themselves busy with their research projects and fun group activities, such as celebrating St. Patrick's Day. The entire habitat transformed into a forest of clovers within a couple of hours and so did our food. Everything was either green or clover-shaped. Even though I teased my crewmembers for their enthusiasm to celebrate this occasion in style, I was very happy that it cheered them all up and that they worked so well together to make our time on mission even more special.
The great teamwork and "taking one for the team attitude" also manifested itself when it was time to do chores. At HI-SEAS, we have a urinal that everyone needs to use, regardless of gender. In this way, we protect the compost toilets from being "drowned" by too much liquid from the crew's urine. After a few months, the urinal filter needs to be replaced and that's definitely not the most pleasant job to do. Our Crew Engineer Jack Bryan kindly took on this unpleasant duty and I volunteered myself to empty the compost toilets halfway through the mission. It's a necessary chore and I don't mind doing it, as I know that most crewmembers struggle to deal with the views and smells that are involved with that duty.
Officers Lori Waters and Jack Bryan with freshly harvested salad from our LettuceGrow hydroponics greenhouse. (Image credit: Courtesy of Lori Waters)
These crew interactions have been a great source of inspiration for Science Communication Officer Monica Parks. She prepares the social media text and pictures, which Mission Support volunteers then post on the HI-SEAS social media pages. Monica has also been observing the crew for her research study. She has found that there are many similarities in the way each one of the crewmembers has reacted to rejection and obstacles in life. The spirit of perseverance is very strong with this group of analog astronauts. For the remainder of our time here, Monica will be having more in-depth conversations with the crew to confirm her various observations about our resilience and drive.
Growing different types of plants has been another source of distractions and positive energy for the crew. These include the Mission to Mars growing spinach using human hair experiment that the Selene III crew started, as well as our long-term hydroponic greenhouse Lettuce Grow experiment in the habitat. Crew Operations Officer Lori Waters has been taking care of these experiments together with Jack. Lori's personal project is also focused on food crop production methods to produce nutrient-dense clovers and microgreens. The clover seeds in the ExoLab experiment, which is paired with the Magnitude.io experiment aboard the ISS, have germinated. They have a first set of leaves showing strong development in this extreme environment at HI-SEAS.
Spinach growing using human hair as fertilizer, as part of the Mission to Mars competition in Slovakia organized by Dr. Michaela Musilova. (Image credit: Courtesy of Lori Waters)
In situ resource utilization (ISRU) Mission Specialist Cameron Crowell's research relies on gathering samples from the surrounding analog regolith during a moonwalk, which hasn't been possible yet due to the dust storms. In the meantime, he has been preparing his techniques for acquiring the geologic samples, since we may only get a very short window between dust storms to perform a moonwalk. Cameron has been documenting life in the habitat for outreach purposes as well, such as for the Space Frontier Foundation that he's on the board of directors for.
Our Crew Systems Engineer Bill O'Hara has completed much of his data gathering tasks in support of a habitat design and operations case study. This project on HI-SEAS is for the Sierra Nevada Corp., where he's a lead systems engineer. Bill has also completed preparations for evaluating lava tubes for habitability, pending the opportunity to execute moonwalks. Like Cameron, he has prepared all of his equipment to be as easy to use in the field as possible, despite the time constraints for moonwalks and the restrictions of our analog spacesuits.
Jack is yet another crewmember that has been limited by the dust storms that are raging outside. He thus focused on an initial catalog of the habitat's waste materials for combination with in situ harvested materials during moonwalks. Jack has been surprised by the results to date, which is why he is reevaluating his preliminary hybrid material composition estimates. The crew generates a considerable amount of paper waste, but significantly less plastic waste than he anticipated. For these reasons, he is looking into the possibility of adding some of the fibrous paper waste into the hybrid material to add toughness, which would be similar to how fiberglass works with resin.
Commander Musilova signing off to another night of keeping our fingers crossed that the alien dust machines will be destroyed. "Space Force" may have more luck tonight so that we'll be able to venture on our first moonwalk of the mission tomorrow. If not, I'm sure that the crew will come up with yet another fun way to keep ourselves from becoming lunatics on the moon.
Follow Michaela Musilova on Twitter @astro_Michaela. Follow uson Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
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The “What could possibly go wrong” file is so full, it may be time to give China its own manila folder for its experiments with human-animal chimeras that not only cross the ethical line – they wipe it out completely with genetically-altered erasers. The latest entry in the file is an experiment that attempts to reach the unholy grail of hybrids – human-monkey chimeras, created under the ‘good intentions’ guise of developing ways to address the severe shortage of human organs for transplants. Before you start pointing fingers at China’s Kunming University of Science and Technology, the leader of this experiment was an American from the Salk Institute in California who has also been involved in creating human-pig chimeras. Do we need to start TWO files?
“We studied the chimeric competency of human extended pluripotent stem cells (hEPSCs) in cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) embryos cultured ex vivo. We demonstrate that hEPSCs survived, proliferated, and generated several peri- and early post-implantation cell lineages inside monkey embryos.”
Whoa!
In their new paper published in the journal Cell, American geneticist Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte and a team of researchers in China led by primate reproduction biologist Weizhi Ji announced they have successfully injected 25 human stem cells into developing five-day-old macaque monkey embryos, and of the 132 human-monkey chimera embryos created, 103 were still alive after 10 days and 3 survived for 20 days in lab dishes. That’s an impressive success rate when compared to Izpisúa Belmonte’s experiments with human-pig and other chimeras, and he tells Live Science it’s because “the evolutionary distance is smaller” between humans and monkeys.
“Generation of a chimera between human and non-human primate, a species more closely related to humans along the evolutionary timeline than all previously used species, will allow us to gain better insight into whether there are evolutionarily imposed barriers to chimera generation and if there are any means by which we can overcome them.”
In the press release, Izpisúa Belmonte even destroys the chalk used to draw the ethical line by revealing his experiments seek to hurdle the barriers to chimera generation. Right now, by doing the experiments in China, the only barriers he hasn’t hurdled are regulations in other countries. Alejandro De Los Angeles, a stem cell biologist at the Yale University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study, told Live Science:
“The embryos here were not transferred into a uterus, and thus could not lead to living chimeric animals or even fetuses. Implantation of human-monkey embryos would be ethically contentious and will need to be discussed by scientists, ethicists and the public before moving forward with such experiments.”
Right — just like the creation of these human-monkey embryos was … not. In fact, one of the big concerns about allowing human-monkey chimeras to live longer is that the human cells would migrate to the monkey brains and grow there, transferring humanness to them. Unfortunately, it appears some communications already occurred in the 20-day-old chimera embryos, according Izpisua Belmonte in the press release.
“From these analyses, several communication pathways that were either novel or strengthened in the chimeric cells were identified. Understanding which pathways are involved in chimeric cell communication will allow us to possibly enhance this communication and increase the efficiency of chimerism in a host species that’s more evolutionarily distant to humans.”
This is too much!
Even if we eliminate the more cinematic, sci-fi and dystopian scenarios from the “what could possibly go wrong” discussions, there are still plenty of other outcomes worth worrying about and preventing. As always, the reality is that these experiments are being conducted in China and those scenarios may have already played out, even though Izpisua Belmonte assures us that “it is our responsibility as scientists to conduct our research thoughtfully, following all the ethical, legal, and social guidelines in place.”
Sorry, Izpisua Belmonte. What if you’re in a place where there are no such guidelines? Isn’t that why you went to China?
How many more “What could possibly go wrong” files do we need? Is it time for a cabinet? A warehouse?
A fifth force of nature has been found and it violates the laws of physics – why are we still in existence? “Muon g-2” sounds like a villainous robot in a sci-fi movie, but it’s actually the experiment conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago that resulted in the discovery that muons – massive cousins of electrons – wobble while spinning through a strong magnetic field and the force created is not known under the Standard Model of particle physics. That would make it a fifth fundamental force of nature. Is that a bad thing?
“This quantity we measure reflects the interactions of the muon with everything else in the universe. But when the theorists calculate the same quantity, using all of the known forces and particles in the Standard Model, we don’t get the same answer. This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory.”
Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment, doesn’t sound too concerned in the press release that he may have helped create a force in the universe that isn’t gravity, electromagnetic, weak or strong forces. Then again, he may be playing the odds that the numbers are wrong — there is a one in a 40,000 chance that the result could be a statistical fluke. On the other hand, Professor Ben Allanach from Cambridge University, who was not involved with the study, sounds positively giddy in his interview with the BBC.
“My Spidey sense is tingling and telling me that this is going to be real.I have been looking all my career for forces and particles beyond what we know already, and this is it. This is the moment that I have been waiting for and I’m not getting a lot of sleep because I’m too excited.”
Allanach and other physicists are hoping a fifth fundamental force might help explain dark matter and other mysteries and puzzles of the Universe. Gordan Krnjaic, a cosmologist at Fermilab, told The New York Times he thinks this will also help find new subatomic particles, like the theoretical leptoquark or the Z-prime boson.
“If the central value of the observed anomaly stays fixed, the new particles can’t hide forever. We will learn a great deal more about fundamental physics going forward.”
Since it’s a possible new force of nature, it needs a name. Allanach has already given the possible fifth force various names in his theoretical models — the “flavour force,” the “third family hyperforce” and “B minus L2.”
Needless to say, Gravity and Electromagnetic aren’t impressed with any of those. However, they probably agree that Leptoquark would make a great name for a band.
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
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