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Boaty McBoatface Prepares For First Antarctic Mission
March 13, 201711:13 AM ET
Camila Domonoske
The name Boaty McBoatface is attached to three submersibles like this one, according to the BBC, instead of a large research vessel.
Department for Business, Innovation & Skills
The remotely operated underwater research vessel known as Boaty McBoatface is preparing for its first research mission — an expedition into "some of the deepest and coldest abyssal ocean waters on earth."
Boaty McBoatface, of course, was the moniker that emerged triumphant in an online poll meant to name the newest research ship in the U.K.'s Natural Environment Research Council fleet. But the council opted to overrule the will of the people, and named the ship the Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough instead.
As a consolation gesture, however, a smaller autonomous underwater vehicle was named Boaty McBoatface. So the name lives on — albeit in a way that makes less sense, because a submersible vehicle isn't actually a boat. (Subby McSubface, anybody?)
The RRS Sir David Attenborough is still under construction, but Boaty McBoatface is already on the job.
The British Antarctic Survey explains that the submersible will be investigating "an abyssal current of Antarctic Bottom Water along the Orkney Passage," as part of an expedition that begins Friday.
Antarctic Bottom Water is cold and dense, and its movement contributes to ocean circulation worldwide, the BAS writes. Boaty McBoatface will gather information on the intensity of turbulence in the Orkney Passage — information that could help improve climate change models.
"One of the most surprising features of the climate change that we are currently experiencing is that the abyssal waters of the world ocean have been warming steadily over the last few decades," professor Alberto Naveira Garabato wrote in the press release. "Establishing the causes of this warming is important because the warming plays an important role in moderating the ongoing (and likely future) increases in atmospheric temperature and sea level around the globe."
The BBC notes that there are actually three Boaty McBoatfaces:
"The name covers a trio of vehicles in the new Autosub Long Range class of underwater robots developed at Southampton's National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
"These machines can all be configured slightly differently depending on the science tasks they are given.
"The one that will initiate the 'adventures of Boaty' will head out of Punta Arenas, Chile, on Friday aboard Britain's current polar ship, the RRS James Clark Ross."
The U.K.'s National Oceanography Centre has designed a cartoon version of Boaty McBoatface to help teach children about marine research. According to The Guardian, a full-size, inflatable version of the submersible will "travel to events across the country."
Two million stars on the move
12 April 2017
The changing face of our Galaxy is revealed in a new video from ESA’s Gaia mission. The motion of two million stars is traced 5 million years into the future using data from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution, one of the products of the first Gaia data release. This provides a preview of the stellar motions that will be revealed in Gaia's future data releases, which will enable scientists to investigate the formation history of our Galaxy.
Two million stars in our Galaxy, with their motions traced five million years into the future. Click here for details and large versions of the video. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Stars move through our Galaxy, the Milky Way, although the changes in their positions on the sky are too small and slow to be appreciated with the naked eye over human timescales. These changes were first discovered in the eighteenth century by Edmond Halley, who compared stellar catalogues from his time to a catalogue compiled by the astronomer Hipparchus some two thousand years before. Nowadays, stellar motions can be detected with a few years' worth of high-precision astrometric observations, and ESA's Gaia satellite is currently leading the effort to pin them down at unprecedented accuracy.
A star’s velocity through space is described by the proper motion, which can be measured by monitoring the movement of a star across the sky, and the radial velocity, which quantifies the star's motion towards or away from us. The latter can be inferred from the shift towards blue or red wavelengths of certain features – absorption lines – in the star's spectrum.
Launched in 2013, Gaia started scientific operations in July 2014, scanning the sky repeatedly to obtain the most detailed 3D map of our Galaxy ever made. The first data release [1], published in September 2016, was based on data collected during Gaia's first 14 months of observations and comprised a list of 2D positions – on the plane of the sky – for more than one billion stars, as well as distances and proper motions for a subset of more than two million stars in the combined Tycho–Gaia Astrometric Solution, or TGAS.
The TGAS dataset consists of stars in common between Gaia's first year and the earlier Hipparcos and Tycho-2 Catalogues, both derived from ESA's Hipparcos mission, which charted the sky more than two decades ago.
This video shows the 2 057 050 stars from the TGAS sample, with the addition of 24 320 bright stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue that are not included in Gaia's first data release. The stars are plotted in Galactic coordinates and using a rectangular projection: in this, the plane of the Milky Way stands out as the horizontal band with greater density of stars. Brighter stars are shown as larger circles, and an indication of the true colour of each star is also provided; information about brightness and colour is based on the Tycho-2 catalogue from the Hipparcos mission.
The video starts from the positions of stars as measured by Gaia between 2014 and 2015, and shows how these positions are expected to evolve in the future, based on the proper motions from TGAS [2]. The frames in the video are separated by 750 years, and the overall sequence covers 5 million years. The stripes visible in the early frames reflect the way Gaia scans the sky and the preliminary nature of the first data release; these artefacts are gradually washed out in the video as stars move across the sky.
The location of the Orion constellation (right) and of two stellar clusters (left) in the first frame of the video. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
The shape of the Orion constellation can be spotted towards the right edge of the frame, just below the Galactic Plane, at the beginning of the video. As the sequence proceeds, the familiar shape of this constellation (and others) evolves into a new pattern. Two stellar clusters – groups of stars that were born together and consequently move together – can be seen towards the left edge of the frame: these are the alpha Persei (Per OB3) and Pleiades open clusters.
Stars seem to move with a wide range of velocities in this video, with stars in the Galactic Plane moving quite slow and faster ones appearing over the entire frame. This is a perspective effect: most of the stars we see in the plane are much farther from us, and thus seem to be moving slower than the nearby stars, which are visible across the entire sky.
Some of the stars appear to dart across the sky with very high velocities: for some stars, this is an effect of their close passage to the Sun – for example, in about 1.35 million years, the star Gliese 710 will pass within about 13 500 au (10 trillion kilometres) from the Sun. Other stars seem to trace arcs from one side of the sky to the other, passing close to the galactic poles, accelerating and decelerating in the process: in fact, this acceleration and deceleration are spurious effects since these stars move with a constant velocity through space.
Stars located in the Milky Way's halo, a roughly spherical structure in which the Galactic Plane is embedded, also appear to move quite fast because stellar motions in the video are calculated with respect to the moving Sun, which is located in the Galactic Plane; however, halo stars move very slowly with respect to the centre of the Galaxy.
Although this visualisation displays only the motion of stars, there is an indication in the first frame of interstellar clouds of gas and dust that block our view of more distant stars. The subsequent sequence of stellar motions shows where each star is expected to be at a given time in the future, but does not track the motion of interstellar clouds. The fact that dark clouds seem to disappear over time is a spurious effect. Similarly, the video does not predict the future positions of stars that are currently hidden by interstellar material and hence have not been observed by Gaia.
After a few million years, the plane of the Milky Way appears to have shifted towards the right: this is mainly the consequence of the motion of the Sun with respect to that of other, nearby stars in the Milky Way. However, the regions that are depleted of stars in the video will not appear as such to future observers looking at the sky from Earth: instead, they will be replenished by stars that are not part of the TGAS sample and therefore not present in this view. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, whose stars are not well sampled in the TGAS data, are not visible in this view.
Compiled as a taster to the much larger and more precise catalogue that will be published with Gaia's second data release, TGAS is twice as precise and contains almost 20 times as many stars as the previous definitive reference for astrometry, the Hipparcos Catalogue. As such, it represents a major advance in terms of high precision parallaxes and proper motions.
Scientists across the world have been combining TGAS data with other stellar catalogues assembled using ground-based observations, to obtain larger samples of stars for which positions, distances and proper motions are available. Thus far, three such catalogues have been compiled: the HSOY ("Hot Stuff for One Year") catalogue, which contains the proper motions for 580 million stars, the US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog 5 (UCAC 5), listing 100 million proper motions, and the Gaia-PS1-SDSS (GPS1) proper motion catalogue, which includes 350 million proper motions.
Gaia's second data release, in April 2018, will include not only the positions, but also distances and proper motions for over one billion stars, as well as radial velocities for a small subset of them. This will mark a new era in the field of astrometry, enabling scientists to study the past positions of stars – to explore the formation history of our Galaxy – and to predict their future positions to a level of accuracy that was never achieved before.
Notes
[1] Gaia’s first data release (Gaia DR1) was published on 14 September 2016. This comprised a catalogue of the positions on the sky and the brightness of more than a billion stars – the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date – as well as the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS), containing the distances and motions for the two million stars in common between the Gaia dataset and the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues. The TGAS dataset is twice as precise and contains almost 20 times as many stars as the previous definitive reference for astrometry, the Hipparcos Catalogue.
[2] To calculate the future positions of stars, the astrometric measurements from the TGAS dataset were combined with a sample of 235,966 radial velocity measurements from the RAVE, GALAH, and APOGEE catalogues. The calculation is based on a linear extrapolation of the measured velocities of stars, which is a reasonable first-order approximation to study stellar motions on short timescales of millions of years, such as the ones shown in the video; to investigate longer timescales, scientists make use of N-body simulations, a numerical procedure that takes into account the gravity actually experienced by the stars at any time in the past or future.
Two million stars on the move
12 April 2017
The changing face of our Galaxy is revealed in a new video from ESA’s Gaia mission. The motion of two million stars is traced 5 million years into the future using data from the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution, one of the products of the first Gaia data release. This provides a preview of the stellar motions that will be revealed in Gaia's future data releases, which will enable scientists to investigate the formation history of our Galaxy.
Two million stars in our Galaxy, with their motions traced five million years into the future. Click here for details and large versions of the video. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
Stars move through our Galaxy, the Milky Way, although the changes in their positions on the sky are too small and slow to be appreciated with the naked eye over human timescales. These changes were first discovered in the eighteenth century by Edmond Halley, who compared stellar catalogues from his time to a catalogue compiled by the astronomer Hipparchus some two thousand years before. Nowadays, stellar motions can be detected with a few years' worth of high-precision astrometric observations, and ESA's Gaia satellite is currently leading the effort to pin them down at unprecedented accuracy.
A star’s velocity through space is described by the proper motion, which can be measured by monitoring the movement of a star across the sky, and the radial velocity, which quantifies the star's motion towards or away from us. The latter can be inferred from the shift towards blue or red wavelengths of certain features – absorption lines – in the star's spectrum.
Launched in 2013, Gaia started scientific operations in July 2014, scanning the sky repeatedly to obtain the most detailed 3D map of our Galaxy ever made. The first data release [1], published in September 2016, was based on data collected during Gaia's first 14 months of observations and comprised a list of 2D positions – on the plane of the sky – for more than one billion stars, as well as distances and proper motions for a subset of more than two million stars in the combined Tycho–Gaia Astrometric Solution, or TGAS.
The TGAS dataset consists of stars in common between Gaia's first year and the earlier Hipparcos and Tycho-2 Catalogues, both derived from ESA's Hipparcos mission, which charted the sky more than two decades ago.
This video shows the 2 057 050 stars from the TGAS sample, with the addition of 24 320 bright stars from the Hipparcos Catalogue that are not included in Gaia's first data release. The stars are plotted in Galactic coordinates and using a rectangular projection: in this, the plane of the Milky Way stands out as the horizontal band with greater density of stars. Brighter stars are shown as larger circles, and an indication of the true colour of each star is also provided; information about brightness and colour is based on the Tycho-2 catalogue from the Hipparcos mission.
The video starts from the positions of stars as measured by Gaia between 2014 and 2015, and shows how these positions are expected to evolve in the future, based on the proper motions from TGAS [2]. The frames in the video are separated by 750 years, and the overall sequence covers 5 million years. The stripes visible in the early frames reflect the way Gaia scans the sky and the preliminary nature of the first data release; these artefacts are gradually washed out in the video as stars move across the sky.
The location of the Orion constellation (right) and of two stellar clusters (left) in the first frame of the video. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
The shape of the Orion constellation can be spotted towards the right edge of the frame, just below the Galactic Plane, at the beginning of the video. As the sequence proceeds, the familiar shape of this constellation (and others) evolves into a new pattern. Two stellar clusters – groups of stars that were born together and consequently move together – can be seen towards the left edge of the frame: these are the alpha Persei (Per OB3) and Pleiades open clusters.
Stars seem to move with a wide range of velocities in this video, with stars in the Galactic Plane moving quite slow and faster ones appearing over the entire frame. This is a perspective effect: most of the stars we see in the plane are much farther from us, and thus seem to be moving slower than the nearby stars, which are visible across the entire sky.
Some of the stars appear to dart across the sky with very high velocities: for some stars, this is an effect of their close passage to the Sun – for example, in about 1.35 million years, the star Gliese 710 will pass within about 13 500 au (10 trillion kilometres) from the Sun. Other stars seem to trace arcs from one side of the sky to the other, passing close to the galactic poles, accelerating and decelerating in the process: in fact, this acceleration and deceleration are spurious effects since these stars move with a constant velocity through space.
Stars located in the Milky Way's halo, a roughly spherical structure in which the Galactic Plane is embedded, also appear to move quite fast because stellar motions in the video are calculated with respect to the moving Sun, which is located in the Galactic Plane; however, halo stars move very slowly with respect to the centre of the Galaxy.
Although this visualisation displays only the motion of stars, there is an indication in the first frame of interstellar clouds of gas and dust that block our view of more distant stars. The subsequent sequence of stellar motions shows where each star is expected to be at a given time in the future, but does not track the motion of interstellar clouds. The fact that dark clouds seem to disappear over time is a spurious effect. Similarly, the video does not predict the future positions of stars that are currently hidden by interstellar material and hence have not been observed by Gaia.
After a few million years, the plane of the Milky Way appears to have shifted towards the right: this is mainly the consequence of the motion of the Sun with respect to that of other, nearby stars in the Milky Way. However, the regions that are depleted of stars in the video will not appear as such to future observers looking at the sky from Earth: instead, they will be replenished by stars that are not part of the TGAS sample and therefore not present in this view. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, whose stars are not well sampled in the TGAS data, are not visible in this view.
Compiled as a taster to the much larger and more precise catalogue that will be published with Gaia's second data release, TGAS is twice as precise and contains almost 20 times as many stars as the previous definitive reference for astrometry, the Hipparcos Catalogue. As such, it represents a major advance in terms of high precision parallaxes and proper motions.
Scientists across the world have been combining TGAS data with other stellar catalogues assembled using ground-based observations, to obtain larger samples of stars for which positions, distances and proper motions are available. Thus far, three such catalogues have been compiled: the HSOY ("Hot Stuff for One Year") catalogue, which contains the proper motions for 580 million stars, the US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog 5 (UCAC 5), listing 100 million proper motions, and the Gaia-PS1-SDSS (GPS1) proper motion catalogue, which includes 350 million proper motions.
Gaia's second data release, in April 2018, will include not only the positions, but also distances and proper motions for over one billion stars, as well as radial velocities for a small subset of them. This will mark a new era in the field of astrometry, enabling scientists to study the past positions of stars – to explore the formation history of our Galaxy – and to predict their future positions to a level of accuracy that was never achieved before.
Notes
[1] Gaia’s first data release (Gaia DR1) was published on 14 September 2016. This comprised a catalogue of the positions on the sky and the brightness of more than a billion stars – the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date – as well as the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS), containing the distances and motions for the two million stars in common between the Gaia dataset and the Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues. The TGAS dataset is twice as precise and contains almost 20 times as many stars as the previous definitive reference for astrometry, the Hipparcos Catalogue.
[2] To calculate the future positions of stars, the astrometric measurements from the TGAS dataset were combined with a sample of 235,966 radial velocity measurements from the RAVE, GALAH, and APOGEE catalogues. The calculation is based on a linear extrapolation of the measured velocities of stars, which is a reasonable first-order approximation to study stellar motions on short timescales of millions of years, such as the ones shown in the video; to investigate longer timescales, scientists make use of N-body simulations, a numerical procedure that takes into account the gravity actually experienced by the stars at any time in the past or future.
Astronomers piece together first image of black hole
April 12, 2017 by Laurence Coustal
Theoretical astronomy tells us that when a black hole absorbs matter, a brief flash of light is visible as depicted in this arti
Theoretical astronomy tells us that when a black hole absorbs matter, a brief flash of light is visible as depicted in this artist's rendering
After training a network of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to Antarctica to Spain at the heart of our galaxy for five nights running, astronomers said Wednesday they may have snapped the first-ever picture of a black hole.
It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is made of and how it came into being.
"Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror," said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope.
"This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth—about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) is diameter," he told AFP.
The bigger the telescope, the finer the resolution and level of detail.
The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth.
Dubbed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short), the gravity- and light-sucking monster weighs as much as four million Suns.
Theoretical astronomy tells us when a black hole absorbs matter—planets, debris, anything that comes too close—a brief flash of light is visible.
No going back
Black holes also have a boundary, called an event horizon.
The British astronomer Stephen Hawking has famously compared crossing this boundary to going over Niagra Falls in a canoe: if you are above the falls, it is still possible to escape if you paddle hard enough.
Once you tip over the edge, however, there's no going back.
The Event Horizon Telescope radio-dish network is designed to detect the light cast-off when object disappear across that boundary.
"For the first time in our history, we have the technological capacity to observe black holes in detail," said Bremer.
The virtual telescope trained on the middle of the Milky Way is powerful enough to spot a golf ball on the Moon, he said.
The 30-metre IRAM telescope, located in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains, is the only European observatory taking part in the international effort.
Other telescopes contributing to the project include the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the desert of northern Chile.
All the data—some 500 terabytes per station—will be collected and flown on jetliners to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, where it will be processed by supercomputers.
"The images will emerge as we combine all the data," Bremer explained. "But we're going to have to wait several months for the result."
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronome ... e.html#jCp
rt wrote: ‘Not a Terminator’: Russian android learns to shoot akimbo style (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
Published time: 16 Apr, 2017 12:06
Edited time: 16 Apr, 2017 12:08
‘Not a Terminator’: Russian android learns to shoot akimbo style (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
© Roberto Leones Masini / YouTube
Russian humanoid robot FEDOR has been taught to dual-wield pistols, adding one more skill to his already impressive list. Vice Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin has shared videos of the android’s exercises on Twitter.
FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research), which is expected to go on a solo space mission in 2021, can now hit the mark with a gun in each hand.
https://giphy.com/gifs/nxt3Eep99sGDm
“A robot of the F.E.D.O.R. platform has shown skills of shooting with both hands. Work is underway on fine motor skills and decision-making algorithms,” Rogozin tweeted, attaching a picture of the humanoid robot.
https://giphy.com/gifs/5BDODYpXNJWzm
“We are not creating a terminator, but artificial intelligence,” Rogozin also tweeted, explaining that the shooting exercises were a way to “teach the machine to instantly set priorities and make decisions.”
He also posted a clip featuring the combat robots, “guys with iron character,” which he believes are the key to creating intelligent machines.
Although FEDOR doesn’t look much like a human, his designation acronym is also a Russian male name. He has already learned to use keys, extinguish a fire, drive a car, and use a saw and a welding machine.
All of these skills will, hopefully, prepare FEDOR for one of its biggest future tasks – to go to space aboard the Federation spacecraft in 2021.
Created in 2014, FEDOR was initially aimed at replacing humans in high risk conditions, including rescue work.
One of the developers of the project, the Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects, announced a competition to create a software design for individual control for FEDOR. The contest will start on May 1 and run till February 28, 2018.
sMASH wrote:https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronomers-piece-image-black-hole.html
Astronomers piece together first image of black hole
April 12, 2017 by Laurence Coustal
Theoretical astronomy tells us that when a black hole absorbs matter, a brief flash of light is visible as depicted in this arti
Theoretical astronomy tells us that when a black hole absorbs matter, a brief flash of light is visible as depicted in this artist's rendering
After training a network of telescopes stretching from Hawaii to Antarctica to Spain at the heart of our galaxy for five nights running, astronomers said Wednesday they may have snapped the first-ever picture of a black hole.
It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is made of and how it came into being.
"Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror," said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope.
"This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth—about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) is diameter," he told AFP.
The bigger the telescope, the finer the resolution and level of detail.
The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth.
Dubbed Sagittarius A* (Sgr A* for short), the gravity- and light-sucking monster weighs as much as four million Suns.
Theoretical astronomy tells us when a black hole absorbs matter—planets, debris, anything that comes too close—a brief flash of light is visible.
No going back
Black holes also have a boundary, called an event horizon.
The British astronomer Stephen Hawking has famously compared crossing this boundary to going over Niagra Falls in a canoe: if you are above the falls, it is still possible to escape if you paddle hard enough.
Once you tip over the edge, however, there's no going back.
The Event Horizon Telescope radio-dish network is designed to detect the light cast-off when object disappear across that boundary.
"For the first time in our history, we have the technological capacity to observe black holes in detail," said Bremer.
The virtual telescope trained on the middle of the Milky Way is powerful enough to spot a golf ball on the Moon, he said.
The 30-metre IRAM telescope, located in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains, is the only European observatory taking part in the international effort.
Other telescopes contributing to the project include the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in the desert of northern Chile.
All the data—some 500 terabytes per station—will be collected and flown on jetliners to the MIT Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts, where it will be processed by supercomputers.
"The images will emerge as we combine all the data," Bremer explained. "But we're going to have to wait several months for the result."
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-04-astronome ... e.html#jCp
sMASH wrote:the image posted in the article isn't a photo of a black hole. its concept art, make believe, used their imagination and drew what they thought it would look like.
overclock3d.net wrote:A Google AI has successfully created a more powerful AI
Google has been developing their own AI for quite some time, though it is undeniable that human-made AIs take a lot of time and testing to improve, especially given the early states of both AI software and hardware.
One question that inevitably comes to mind with AI is simple, could an AI be created to develop a better AI in a faster timeframe? This problem is what Google Brain wanted to solve with their AutoML project, where a "parent AI" would create its own "child AI"to see how this new AI compares to its human-made counterparts.
The "child AI" in this case is called NASNet (Not quite SkyNet), an AI which is designed to detect and identify objects like people, cars, kites, handbags and backpacks. In simple terms, the AI can recognise what is visible in a photograph or video, even real-time video.
When NASNet was tested on ImageNet's validation test, it was discovered that Google's AI taught AI was 82.7% accurate, making it 1.2% more accurate than any previously published result while also operating with higher levels of efficiency. When a less demanding version of NASNet was tested, a mobile-oriented variant, it was found to be 3.1% more accurate than similar demanding AIs.
Google's research showcases the benefits of using AIs to train other AIs, as more efficient and accurate algorithms will be much easier to apply to real-world applications.
While the benefits of AI-assisted AI creation are clear, problems arise when problems exist in parent AIs, allowing unwanted quirks and biases to be passed on to "child AIs". This isn't likely to cause a Terminator-style "SkyNet" problem, though it does have the potential to create flawed AIs if incorrect information is passed on.
astronomy.com wrote:A star turned into a black hole before Hubble’s very eyes
Bye bye supernove
By John Wenz | Published: Thursday, May 25, 2017
When a massive star expends its fuel, its core collapses into a dense object and sends the rest of its gas outward in an event called a supernova. What’s left is mostly neutron stars or black holes. And now, Hubble seems to have seen a supernova blink out — suggesting it captured the moment when a black hole took over.
While some supernova events are explosive and leave clouds of debris for thousands of years (aka nebula) like SN 1054, the star in question seems to have begun to explode and then had all its gas sucked right back into the black hole at the center. This can happen when the core collapse of the star is especially massive. Rather than exploding, the gas collapses directly into the core of the star.
star disappear to black
Only a few of these so called “massive fails” (yes, that’s what they’re calling them) have been spotted, so astronomers are cautious about the results. But this particular star, located in the galaxy NGC 6946, was bright enough to see from 22 million light years away and faded in an instant, suggesting a massive stellar-mass black hole was the driving culprit.
artist's impression of a star imploding and not exploding
maj. tom wrote:Wow that one is an amazing event to actually observe in a human's lifetime. One day in humanity's future, Betelgeuse will suddenly shine very brightly in our skies as a Supernova event. It's only 643 light years away. Or maybe it has a few hundred thousand years to go before its collapse.
Imagine observing events like SN 1054 or SN 1572 with your naked eye in our skies! In our lifetime!
) 
bbc wrote:Scientists target cancer with 'killer cells'
Scientists have developed 'cancer killing cells' - genetically engineered outside the body - which can find and destroy malignant tumours.
The researchers at McMaster University say the killer cells are based on T-cell technology, but are designed to attack only cancer cells and not healthy ones. This means it could be used on 'solid body' tumours as well as blood tumours.
The lead author is Ana Portillo from the university's Department of Medicine.
"The disadvantage of T-cells is that they are able to become highly activated against healthy cells... They don't have an off-switch to prevent them killing healthy cells. In blood cancers, if you get rid of your healthy immune cells in the blood you can reinfuse back immune cells to prevent that toxicity. But when you're targeting something like solid tumours, you can't necessarily give someone a new heart or lung
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