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Robot

Israeli firm unveils armed robot to patrol volatile borders

Alon Bernstein, Jack Jeffery
Military.com
Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00 UTC
Man and machine
© AP/Sebastian Scheiner
Deputy head of Israel Aerospace Industries autonomous systems division, Rani Avni, speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in an IAI facility near the central Israeli city of Lod, Thursday, Sept. 9, 2021.
An Israeli defense contractor on Monday unveiled a remote-controlled armed robot it says can patrol battle zones, track infiltrators and open fire. The unmanned vehicle is the latest addition to the world of drone technology, which is rapidly reshaping the modern battlefield. Proponents say such semi-autonomous machines allow armies to protect their soldiers, while critics fear this marks another dangerous step toward robots making life-or-death decisions.

The four-wheel-drive robot presented Monday was developed by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries' "REX MKII."

It is operated by an electronic tablet and can be equipped with two machine guns, cameras and sensors, said Rani Avni, deputy head of the company's autonomous systems division. The robot can gather intelligence for ground troops, carry injured soldiers and supplies in and out of battle, and strike nearby targets.

It is the most advanced of more than half a dozen unmanned vehicles developed by Aerospace Industries' subsidiary, ELTA Systems, over the past 15 years.
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Mars

Perseverance's rock samples hint that Mars had long-lasting ancient water


Science Alert
Sat, 11 Sep 2021 00:00 UTC
Perseverance on Mars
© NASA/JPL-Caltech
Perseverance
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has now collected two rock samples, with signs that they were in contact with water for a long period of time boosting the case for ancient life on the Red Planet.

"It looks like our first rocks reveal a potentially habitable sustained environment," said Ken Farley, project scientist for the mission, in a statement Friday. "It's a big deal that the water was there for a long time."

The six-wheeled robot collected its first sample, dubbed "Montdenier" on September 6, and its second, "Montagnac" from the same rock on September 8. Both samples, slightly wider than a pencil in diameter and about six centimeters long, are now stored in sealed tubes in the rover's interior. A first attempt at collecting a sample in early August failed after the rock proved too crumbly to withstand Perseverance's drill.

The rover has been operating in a region known as the Jezero Crater, just north of the equator and home to a lake 3.5 billion years ago, when conditions on Mars were much warmer and wetter than today.
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Info

Scientists solve mystery of icy plumes that may foretell deadly supercell storms

Josie Garthwaite
Stanford University
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 22:20 UTC
The most devastating tornadoes are often preceded by a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billowing above a severe thunderstorm. New research reveals the mechanism for these plumes could be tied to "hydraulic jumps" - a phenomenon Leonardo Da Vinci observed more than 500 years ago.
Super Storm Cell
© Sci-Tech Daily
When a cloudy plume of ice and water vapor billows up above the top of a severe thunderstorm, there's a good chance a violent tornado, high winds or hailstones bigger than golf balls will soon pelt the Earth below.

A new Stanford University-led study, published Sept. 10 in Science, reveals the physical mechanism for these plumes, which form above most of the world's most damaging tornadoes.

Previous research has shown they're easy to spot in satellite imagery, often 30 minutes or more before severe weather reaches the ground. "The question is, why is this plume associated with the worst conditions, and how does it exist in the first place? That's the gap that we are starting to fill," said atmospheric scientist Morgan O'Neill, lead author of the new study.

The research comes just over a week after supercell thunderstorms and tornadoes spun up among the remnants of Hurricane Ida as they barreled into the U.S. Northeast, compounding devastation wrought across the region by record-breaking rainfall and flash floods.

Understanding how and why plumes take shape above powerful thunderstorms could help forecasters recognize similar impending dangers and issue more accurate warnings without relying on Doppler radar systems, which can be knocked out by wind and hail - and have blind spots even on good days. In many parts of the world, Doppler radar coverage is nonexistent.

"If there's going to be a terrible hurricane, we can see it from space. We can't see tornadoes because they're hidden below thunderstorm tops. We need to understand the tops better," said O'Neill, who is an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth).
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Nebula

Physicists glimpse first signs of 'triangle singularity': Particles swap identities in mid-flight

Paul Sutter
LIve Science
Sat, 11 Sep 2021 20:03 UTC
particle accelerator trace singularity
© All About Space Magazine/Getty Images
Physicists sifting through old particle accelerator data have found evidence of a highly-elusive, never-before-seen process: a so-called triangle singularity.

First envisioned by Russian physicist Lev Landau in the 1950s, a triangle singularity refers to a rare subatomic process where particles exchange identities before flying away from each other. In this scenario, two particles — called kaons — form two corners of the triangle, while the particles they swap form the third point on the triangle.

"The particles involved exchanged quarks and changed their identities in the process," study co-author Bernhard Ketzer, of the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn, said in a statement.

And it's called a singularity because the mathematical methods for describing subatomic particle interactions break down.
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Brain

How computationally complex is a single neuron?

Allison Whitten
Quanta Magazine
Thu, 02 Sep 2021 19:37 UTC
neuron
© ktsdesign/Shutterstock
Computational neuroscientists taught an artificial neural network to imitate a biological neuron. The result offers a new way to think about the complexity of single brain cells.

Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: "We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge." In other words, the medium doesn't matter, only the computational ability.

Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?
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Info

Birds exploit wind and uplift conditions for long flights across open ocean


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Wed, 08 Sep 2021 19:19 UTC
Migrating birds choose routes with the best wind and uplift conditions, helping them to fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the sea.
Eleonora's falcon
© Wouter Vansteelant
A dark morph Eleonora's falcon flying off Alegranza islet in the Atlantic Ocean. Despite being powerful flyers, Nourani et al. show that falcons are highly selective of supportive winds during trans-oceanic migration.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and University of Konstanz in Germany have identified how large land birds fly nonstop for hundreds of kilometers over the open ocean — without taking a break for food or rest. Using GPS tracking technology, the team monitored the global migration of five species of large land birds that complete long sea crossings. They found that all birds exploited wind and uplift to reduce energy costs during flight — even adjusting their migratory routes to benefit from the best atmospheric conditions. This is the most wide-ranging study of sea-crossing behavior yet and reveals the important role of the atmosphere in facilitating migration over the open sea for many terrestrial birds.

Flying over the open sea can be dangerous for land birds. Unlike seabirds, land birds are not able to rest or feed on water, and so sea crossings must be conducted as nonstop flights. For centuries, bird-watchers assumed that large land birds only managed short sea crossings of less than 100 kilometers and completely avoided flying over the open ocean.

However, recent advances in GPS tracking technology have overturned that assumption. Data obtained by attaching small tracking devices on wild birds has shown that many land birds fly for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers over the open seas and oceans as a regular part of their migration.

But scientists are still unraveling how land birds are able to accomplish this. Flapping is an energetically costly activity, and trying to sustain nonstop flapping flight for hundreds of kilometers would not be possible for large, heavy land birds. Some studies have suggested that birds sustain such journeys using tailwind, a horizontal wind blowing in the bird's direction of flight, which helps them save energy. Most recently, a study revealed that a single species — the osprey — used rising air thermals known as "uplift" to soar over the open sea.
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Camcorder

LifeLog 2.0.? Facebook summons the ghost of Google Glass with Ray-Ban 'smart glasses' capable of stealthily recording uninitiated

Helen Buyniski
RT
Fri, 10 Sep 2021 03:37 UTC
facebook raybans smart glasses
© Reuters / Carlos Jasso (inset Facebook and Ray-Ban)
Social media giant Facebook is breathing new life into the cringiest accessory of the '00s - Google Glass - joining forces with sunglasses powerhouse Ray-Ban to unleash a pair of "smart" glasses that can record your every move.

The first product of a reported multi-year device partnership with Facebook, Ray-Ban 'Stories' sunglasses are almost indistinguishable from normal eyewear - except they sync up with a companion app called Facebook View on the user's phone and require a Facebook account to use, according to Alex Heath, who tested them for The Verge. As of Thursday, the $299 glasses will be ubiquitous, on sale at all sunglasses stores that stock Ray-Bans.

In addition to two forward-facing cameras for taking photos and video, the glasses contain dual Bluetooth speakers - all the better to record your phone calls with - and boast a six-hour battery life with a USB-C charger. According to Heath, the image quality pales in comparison to normal smartphones, making the glasses more useful for unobtrusive, spur-of-the-moment, or hands-free image capturing. The accompanying app allows basic editing of clips and photos, with the capability to share the content with other apps (apparently not just Facebook).

Comment: Anyone who would trust Facebook with even more intrusive data collecting is either naive or a complete authoritarian.

See also:

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Blue Planet

World's oldest forest unlike anything imagined, leaves scientists confused

Carly Cassella
Science Alert
Fri, 10 Sep 2021 22:00 UTC
Fossilized
© Stein et al., Current Biology, 2019
Fossilized roots in Cairo, New York.
The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.

The picture they have painted couldn't be more different to what now sits in its place. Near the small town of Cairo in upstate New York, under an old highway department quarry, scientists have reconstructed the remains of what was a mighty and mature old-growth forest - home to at least three of the world's earliest tree-like plants.

Some of these initial tree 'wannabes' (known as cladoxylopsids) would have looked like large stalks of celery, shooting 10 meters (32 feet) into the sky. Others resembled pine trees, but with hairy, fern-like fronds for leaves (Archaeopteris). The third long-lost plant would have taken after the palm tree, with a bulbous base and canopy of fern-like branches (Eospermatopteris).

Comment: It may be that the fossil record is being misinterpreted, and it may also be that archaeologists theories of what the environment was like back then is wrong:

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Stock Up

No, minister, vaccine passports are not necessary to end the pandemic

Will Jones
The Daily Sceptic
Thu, 09 Sep 2021 20:51 UTC
Nadhim Zahawi
Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi has insisted to MPs in the Commons that vaccine passports are necessary to end the pandemic. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

While the U.K. has seen a spike in reported 'cases' in recent days, much of it is driven by the increase in testing as schools have returned. The positive rate, by contrast, shows a gentle decline.
covid stats

There's no sign here of vaccine passports being needed to prevent unmanageable spread.

Comment: Among the U.S., UK, EU, and Switzerland, Israel is leading in "new confirmed cases." The surge is hitting the double vaccinated almost as quickly as the unvaccinated.

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Mars

China develops miniature helicopter to accompany future Mars missions


RT
Thu, 02 Sep 2021 11:48 UTC
mini chopper
© NSSC/CAS
China's mini helicopter
China's National Space Science Center (CAS) has unveiled a newly developed helicopter which could be used in the country's exploration of the Red Planet. The new tool comes months after China landed a robotic rover on Mars. Chinese media released images online of the astronomical equipment.

China's state-affiliated media channel, the Global Times, said that researchers from CAS recently approved the Beijing Science & Technology Commission's examination of their Mars drone prototype.
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