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Science

SCIENCE: First Fireworks Created In Chinese Search for Immortality

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fireworks - pixabay

One thousand years before the first Fourth of July, the first fireworks exploded. It didn’t rain twinkling stars or light up the night sky — but to the complete surprise and misfortune of one Chinese chemist, it did go “bang.” This “bang” was the product of an ancient quest for immortality, according to Gunpowder, Explosives and the State: A History (Routledge, 2016) . In early-ninth-century China, alchemy was all the rage. The goal of alchemy was to produce a substance that would prolong life, or even cheat death. Alchemy never did uncover a death-defying concoction. But it did produce an … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Listens to Voices, Then Generates Speakers’ Faces

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AI Creates Faces From Voices - Oh et al

Have you ever constructed a mental image of a person you’ve never seen, based solely on their voice? Artificial intelligence (AI) can now do that, generating a digital image of a person’s face using only a brief audio clip for reference. Named Speech2Face, the neural network — a computer that “thinks” in a manner similar to the human brain — was trained by scientists on millions of educational videos from the internet that showed over 100,000 different people talking. From this dataset, Speech2Face learned associations between vocal cues and certain physical features in a human face, researchers wrote in a … Read more

SPACE: The Moon is Flashing Us

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moon - pixabay

There’s something flashing us on the moon, and we don’t know what it is. But that might be about to change. We have known about the mysterious flashes since at least the late 1960s, when the astronomers Barbara Middlehurst and Patrick Moore reviewed the scientific literature and found nearly 400 reports of strange events on the moon. Small regions of the lunar surface would get suddenly brighter or darker, without obvious explanation. The scientists’ survey of the flashes and dimming, which they called “lunar transient phenomena,” was published in the journal Science on Jan. 27, 1967. (Later, astronomers flipped the … Read more

The Heat Is Coming

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heat - pixabay

When I say, “how about that heat wave,” perhaps you think of the western United States, where temperatures last week soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius), smashing dozens of historical heat records from Oregon to Arizona. Or maybe you think of India — where intense heat has scorched the country for more than a month, killing at least 36 people and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate their villages — or perhaps Kuwait, where local media recently reported high temperatures of 145 F (63 C), potentially the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. The point is, the Northern … Read more

An AI Animates the Mona Lisa, and It’s freaky – Live Science

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The enigmatic, painted smile of the “Mona Lisa” is known around the world, but that famous face recently displayed a startling new range of expressions, courtesy of artificial intelligence (AI). In a video shared to YouTube on May 21, three video clips show disconcerting examples of the Mona Lisa as she moves her lips and turns her head. She was created by a convolutional neural network — a type of AI that processes information much as a human brain does, to analyze and process images. Researchers trained the algorithm to understand facial features’ general shapes and how they behave relative to each other, and then … Read more

Scientists Create tectonic Map of westeros

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Westeros Map - HBO

Scientists are among the millions of die-hard Game of Thrones fans digesting the show’s finale. The striking landscape of Game of Thrones has led some researchers to build climate simulations that explain the erratic seasons depicted in the show, and others to piece together the geological history. Inspired by this work, we have built the first plate tectonic reconstruction of the Game of Thrones continents. Tectonic plates are moving slabs that make up the outer layer of our planet, and behave like conveyor belts in the way they carry and drag continents around on the surface. Even in this fantasy … Read more

Coming Soon – Mind-Controlled Weapons?

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mind - pixabay

DARPA, the Department of Defense’s research arm, is paying scientists to invent ways to instantly read soldiers’ minds using tools like genetic engineering of the human brain, nanotechnology and infrared beams. The end goal? Thought-controlled weapons, like swarms of drones that someone sends to the skies with a single thought or the ability to beam images from one brain to another. This week, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced that six teams will receive funding under the Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. Participants are tasked with developing technology that will provide a two-way channel for rapid and seamless communication … Read more

Zombie Science: Bringing People Back From the Dead?

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zombie - pixabay

There are few things in life more permanent and guaranteed than death. Yet, that doesn’t stop us from imagining what life would be like if death was only temporary. In AMC’s “Fear the Walking Dead,” returning Sunday, June 2, at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT, reanimated human corpses roam the world, having avoided the permanent stillness of death only to devour the living. Now, we know zombies aren’t real, but reanimated corpses aren’t exactly a figment of the imagination. Scientists have been attempting to restore life to the dead for hundreds of years. In the 1800s, physicist Giovanni Aldini became … Read more

Let’s Move the Earth

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Earth - pixabay

In the Chinese science fiction film The Wandering Earth, recently released on Netflix, humanity attempts to change the Earth’s orbit using enormous thrusters in order to escape the expanding sun — and prevent a collision with Jupiter. The scenario may one day come true. In five billion years, the sun will run out of fuel and expand, most likely engulfing the Earth. A more immediate threat is a global warming apocalypse. Moving the Earth to a wider orbit could be a solution — and it is possible in theory. But how could we go about it and what are the … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Ferocity

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Ferocity

There’s some weird opinions floating around the science intelligentsia all the time. It’s common knowledge and it usually comes down to ideas about how the universe works, until that idea is put to rigorous tests. That’s just the proper way to science. Sometimes though, someone gets a really weird opinion on a topic and this particular one honestly made me scratch my head. One geneticist says we should stop human evolution. This scientist states that evolution is a scourge on our species and we have to stop feeding our children to this evil monster of natural force. They go on … Read more