shychemist:

joshbyard:

“Google and Stanford have created the [digital equivalent of the] visual cortex of an infant human”

Jeff Dean and his team from Google, working with Andrew Ng and Quoc Le from Stanford University, have effectively created a rudimentary, low-resolution digital version of the brain’s visual cortex.

The system, which comprises of a cluster of 1,000 computers (totaling 16,000 processor cores), analyzes 10 million 200×200 still frames from YouTube. Over 3 days, the system’s software builds up a network of hundreds of neurons and thousands (millions?) of synapses. During this period, the system tries to identify features — edges, lines, colors — and then creates object categories based on these features.

The rather intriguing result is that, when the system looks at an image of a cat, a specific (digital) neuron fires — just like in a human brain. Watching the system in action — watching the neurons light up — is almost like performing a virtual, digital MRI scan. In the picture below, you can see the contents of the “human face” neuron, alongside some of the stimuli that successfully trigger the neuron.

(via Google and Stanford create a digital brain that, like an infant, learns to identify a human face from scratch | ExtremeTech)

This is pretty mind blowing stuff!

The robot/ AI age is happening so fast.

thenewenlightenmentage:

Today in Mind Reading: Brain Scans Can Predict If You’re About to Make a Math Mistake

Along with predicting our future behaviors, brain scans can guess when we’re about to make a cognitive error, mis-processing a math problem because we’re thinking too hard. Like a dashboard widget watching your computer’s RAM, brain wave patterns can be used to detect when the brain is approaching its limits of processing power, according to new research.

Federico Cirett at the University of Arizona was studying learning differences among non-native English speakers versus fluent English speakers, and noticed the non-fluent people had more difficulty answering various types of questions. He attached an EEG to volunteers’ heads to monitor their brain activity as they solved math problems on the SAT exam, and tried to figure out why they were distracted.

Continue Reading

Wow !

quantumaniac:

The Antikythera Mechanism.

Antikythera is an insignificant small Greek island in the Aegean Sea. In 1900, sponge divers discovered a shipwreck there dating back to the 1st century BC. Aside from the artefacts you would expect to recover from a trading vessel of the period, there was also a small, enigmatic box that turned out to be an extraordinary find, inspiring one noted scholar to claim it more valuable than the Mona Lisa.

Because of its fragile condition and our inability to see inside it at that time, this mechanical conundrum was put on the backburner as perhaps an anachronism that was way too complex to have been created by ancient Greeks. However, beginning in the 1950s, much investigation has gone into deciphering its secrets. In fact, the latest studies show the level of miniaturisation of intricate gears within was on a par with 19th-century clocks.

It now appears this device performed many tasks. Composed of 30 gears and a number of faces and dials, it stakes a claim to being the first analog computer. Its internal construction and movements are based on astronomical and mathematical theories developed by Greek astronomers of the Hellenistic period. It’s thought to be possibly connected to Archimedes and his teachings because the inscriptions of the months on its face are those used in Corinth and its colonies, where he lived, and he was known for designing innovative machines.

With the use of modern, non-invasive methods to determine its interior structure, we came to understand it could predict the positions of the known planets, sun and moon, much like a modern planetarium. Furthermore, it could be used as a calendar with compensation for the extra quarter day of the solar year. As well as having a spherical model of the moon that could show its current phase, it could also forecast eclipses and simulate the anomaly in the moon’s angular velocity.

Brilliant - but there’s more. It indicated which years were to feature the Olympic Games, the Panhellenic Games and others. All this and more spell out an amazing genius, producing clockwork mechanisms way before we had the first clocks.

blamoscience:

Researchers have cleverly devised a way to make paper that is waterproof, bacterial resistant, and magnetic. By wrapping certain nanoparticles around the fibers of the paper, it’s properties can be changed. The researchers point to using iron oxide nanoparticles to make the paper magnetic, and using silver nanoparticles to repel bacteria. The implications this technology has on the future of food packaging and medical applications are astounding. 

Full story here.

WOW. This is getting me all excited!

logicianmagician:

Why Getting Women Into STEM Matters

Oh, the hours folks have dedicated to figuring out why women aren’t represented in science, technology, engineering and math — otherwise known as the “STEM” careers.

There’s ample data to show women are just as good — if not better — than men in the STEM career track. And some reports show that simple bias keeps even elementary school-age girls from advancing in math and science, putting the kink in the pipeline at the very earliest stage.

But here’s a question: Exactly why is it so crucial to get women into math and science in the first place? Gender diversity not good enough for you? You need practical reasons for this big STEM push? For the non-believers, a new report from the White House Council on Women and Girls provides some answers — and suggests that non-participation in STEM may be costlier than ever for women

I CONTACT is a contact lens made for the purpose of a mouse. It’s laced with sensors to track eye movement, relaying that position to a receiver connected to your computer.

The idea was originally created for people with disabilities.

(Source: )