NextBigFuture.com

Physicist Edward Boyda of St. Mary’s College of California in Moraga and colleagues fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into the D-Wave 2X processor, which contains 1152 qubits. The researchers asked the computer to consider dozens of features—hue, saturation, even light reflectance—to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree.

For artificial general intelligence (AGI) it would be efficient if multiple users trained the same giant neural network, permitting parameter reuse, without catastrophic forgetting. PathNet is a first step in this direction. It is a neural network algorithm that uses agents embedded in the neural network whose task is to discover which parts of the network to re-use for new tasks. Agents are pathways (views) through the network which determine the subset of parameters that are used and updated by the forwards and backwards passes of the backpropogation algorithm. During learning, a tournament selection genetic algorithm is used to select pathways through the neural network for replication and mutation. Pathway fitness is the performance of that pathway measured according to a cost function.

Iran test-fired Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missiles about 155 miles away, destroying a targeted floating barge in one case. Iran tested a medium-range ballistic missile in February, in apparent violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution; the incident led to U.S. economic sanctions against 13 people and 12 businesses in Iran.

China’s foreign minister urged North Korea to halt its nuclear activities and the U.S. to suspend nearby military drills, as a way to quell growing tensions and get Kim Jong Un back to the negotiating table.

Structures seem to be microfossils formed around hydrothermal vents as much as 4.28 billion years ago have been found embedded in crystal. Stalks of iron-rich minerals, each a fraction the size of an eyelash, may be evidence of the earliest life-forms to inhabit the newborn planet Earth. The tiny hematite tubes are as much as 4.28 billion years old, according to the scientists announcing the find, and they are stunningly similar to structures produced by microbes living around undersea hydrothermal vents.

The International Potato Center (CIP) launched a series of experiments to discover if potatoes can grow under Mars atmospheric conditions and thereby prove they are also able to grow in extreme climates on Earth. This Phase Two effort of CIP’s proof of concept experiment to grow potatoes in simulated Martian conditions began on February 14, 2016 when a tuber was planted in a specially constructed CubeSat contained environment built by engineers from University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima based upon designs and advice provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Ames Research Center (NASA ARC), California. Preliminary results are positive.

In October, Adair demonstrated a new technology she thinks could democratize access to gene therapy. Tweaking a cell-processing device sold by German instrument maker Miltenyi, she mostly automated the process of preparing blood cells with a gene therapy for HIV that her center is also testing. Cells dripped in one end came out the other 30 hours later with little oversight needed. She even added wheels. Adair calls the mobile lab “gene therapy in a box.”

Using data from an electroencephalography (EEG) monitor that records brain activity, a MIT system can detect if a person notices an error as a robot performs an object-sorting task. The team’s novel machine-learning algorithms enable the system to classify brain waves in the space of 10 to 30 milliseconds.

Softbank is about to sell 25 percent of ARM — roughly $8 billion — to a new, Saudi-backed $100 billion investment fund, the Financial Times reported today. The Japanese shelled out $32 billion to purchased ARM only six months ago. In the global semiconductor industry. Mubadala (Abu Dhabi / UAE state-backed), which owns 100 percent of Globalfoundries, reportedly wanted the $100 billion Vision Fund to own a portion of ARM.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Japan adopted a sweeping policy of modernization in pursuit of parity with the industrial West, under the slogan fukoku kyōhei: “enrich the country, strengthen the military.” Growth in Japan’s per capita GDP between 1870 and 1940 reflects the economic success of this campaign, which continued through the prewar era. As the graph indicates, Japan was steadily catching up with Britain and the United States, two of the world’s most advanced industrial economies. Japan’s per capita GDP grew from 23% of Britain’s and 30% of America’s in 1870 to 42% of Britain’s and 41% of America’s on the eve of the Pacific War.

Russia is developing a 100 megaton nuclear bomb that is put into a robotic submarine drone. It would explode in bay or off of a coast and trigger and megatsunami. It might also include cobalt 60 to spread radioactive fallout in the tsunami. Some have questioned the 400+ page analysis in the Water Waves Generated By Underwater Explosions by the US Department of Defense by Bernard Le Mehaute and Shen Wang. The report, published in 1996, exhaustively examines and summarizes all available research about the ocean waves created by nuclear explosions.

The South China Morning Post reports that China will not adopt highly advanced electromagnetic take-off technology on its second domestically built aircraft carrier but instead rely on a conventional steam system, naval experts say.

The U.S. Navy has 10 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. That's below the number mandated by Federal law, but the Navy was granted a waiver while it waited for the Gerald R. Ford to enter the fleet. The Ford has seen repeated delays. The Navy expects Ford to enter the fleet this Spring, but hasn't yet set a commissioning date.

Russia will start modernizing its sole aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov before July. The ageing warship will undergo a massive refit that will modernize her problematic and unreliable propulsion system along with other upgrades. The exact plan will be determined over the next 6 months.

Speaking at the Aspen Abu Dhabi Ideas Forum, Dr Brad Perkins, chief medical officer, Human Longevity, said: “Right now the most daunting and expensive human health problem that the world is facing is age related chronic disease. Our hypothesis at Human Longevity is that genomics and the technologies that support its application in medicine and drug discovery are going to be the next accelerant in extending a high performance human lifespan

a former Tesla top manager Peter Carlsson will build Europe's largest battery factory - in Sweden. The project is estimated to cost 40 billion krona (US$4.4 billion) and is expected to create thousands of jobs.

Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks began its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

Neuromorphic (brain-like brain inspired chips) chips require far less power to process AI algorithms. For example, one neuromorphic chip made by IBM contains five times as many transistors as a standard Intel processor, yet consumes only 70 milliwatts of power. An Intel processor would use anywhere from 35 to 140 watts, or up to 2000 times more power.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have—in just two years—nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels.

Researchers propose a space-based gravitational wave detector consisting of two spatially separated, drag-free satellites sharing ultra-stable optical laser light over a single baseline. Each satellite contains an optical lattice atomic clock, which serves as a sensitive, narrowband detector of the local frequency of the shared laser light. A synchronized two-clock comparison between the satellites will be sensitive to the effective Doppler shifts induced by incident gravitational waves (GWs) at a level competitive with other proposed space-based GW detectors, while providing complementary features. The detected signal is a differential frequency shift of the shared laser light due to the relative velocity of the satellites, and the detection window can be tuned through the control sequence applied to the atoms' internal states. This scheme enables the detection of GWs from continuous, spectrally narrow sources, such as compact binary inspirals, with frequencies ranging from ~3 mHz - 10 Hz without loss of sensitivity, thereby bridging the detection gap between space-based and terrestrial optical interferometric GW detectors. Our proposed GW detector employs just two satellites, is compatible with integration with an optical interferometric detector, and requires only realistic improvements to existing ground-based clock and laser technologies.

Machine learning is a fascinating and exciting field within computer science. Recently, this excitement has been transferred to the quantum information realm. Currently, all proposals for the quantum version of machine learning utilize the finite-dimensional substrate of discrete variables. Here we generalize quantum machine learning to the more complex, but still remarkably practical, infinite-dimensional systems. Researchers present the critical subroutines of quantum machine learning algorithms for an all-photonic continuous-variable quantum computer that achieve an exponential speedup compared to their equivalent classical counterparts. Finally, they also map out an experimental implementation which can be used as a blueprint for future photonic demonstrations.

A U.S. Navy surveillance ship was harassed by an Iranian fast attack craft while entering the Persian Gulf on Saturday, a defense official confirmed to USNI News on Monday.

Hyperloop Technologies, which is building a super-fast transportation solution based on an idea by billionaire Elon Musk, is in initial talks with the Indian government and companies to partially build and operate the vehicle on some routes, its chief executive officer said.

1. Universe Today - 7 Questions For 7 New Planets

Bigelow Aerospace founder Robert Bigelow‘s company makes in-space habitats. One (the BEAM adds 16 cubic meters of living area to the ISS) is now attached to the International Space Station and he and his company are developing permanent, stand-alone habitats to serve as private space stations in orbit around the Earth, ready to house private astronauts.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard Team is the winner of Aviation Week’s 60th Annual Space Laureate. New Shepard is only the first step in fulfilling Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos’ vision of using ever larger reusable rockets to send an entire economy into Earth orbit and beyond. Following the Laureate Award presentations held at Washington’s National Building Museum on March 2, Bezos talked to Aviation Week and Space Technology Editor-in-Chief Joe Anselmo and the audience at the awards dinner about the importance of expanding into the solar system.

Reports from Russia indicate a new drone submarine will be armed with a 100-megaton nuclear warhead.

IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build a commercially available universal quantum computers for business and science. While technologies like AI can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.

An inflatable structure(s) can generate a magnetic dipole field at a level of perhaps 1 or 2 Tesla (or 10,000 to 20,000 Gauss) as an active shield against the solar wind and allow the Martian atmosphere to thicken overtime.

The US has implemented revolutionary new technologies as part of nuclear modernization. These will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing—boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three—and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.

The claimed solid metallic hydrogen sample has been lost on February 11. It was being stored at temperatures around 80 Kelvin (-193 degrees Celsius and -316 degrees Fahrenheit), and at incredibly high pressures between two diamonds in a type of vice.

IDC sees widespread adoption of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence (AI) across a broad range of industries will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8.0 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020. According to a new Worldwide Semiannual Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems Spending Guide from International Data Corporation (IDC), the market for cognitive/AI solutions will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 55.1% over the 2016-2020 forecast period.

The Army cancelled a future Ground Combat Vehicle but, some of the innovations, technologies and weapons systems may get into a new tank design. Design specs, engineering, weapons and other innovations envisioned for the GCV are now being analyzed for the new tank. In particular, the new tank may use an emerging 30mm cannon weapon planned for the GCV – the ATK-built XM813. XM813 is computer-controlled and electronically driven weapon can fire up to 200 rounds per minute, uses a dual-recoil firing system and a semi-closed bolt firing mode. The new tank will emerge after the Army first fields its M1A2 SEP v4 upgraded Abrams tank in the 2020s

Boeing’s plan to deploy a constellation of V-band satellites in non-geostationary orbit has prompted at least five companies, including SpaceX and OneWeb, to file me-too proposals with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

China will raise its defense budget by about 7 percent this year, a government spokeswoman said Saturday, continuing a trend of lowered growth amid a slowing economy.

I always liked the television Stargate SG1 and Stargate Atlantis. I missed this information from 2014.

Alec Peters discusses how they intend to tell the most story for the two 15 minute segments that are permitted in the lawsuit settlement.

Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin have been circulating a seven-page white paper to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition team about their interest in developing a lunar spacecraft with a lander that would touch down near a crater at the south pole where there is water and nearly continuous sunlight for solar energy. The memo urges the space agency to back an Amazon-like shipment service for the moon that would deliver gear for experiments, cargo and habitats by mid-2020, helping to enable “future human settlement” of the moon.

MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.

The U-Battery consortium, led by Urenco, has registered its micro-modular reactor technology for pre-licensing vendor design review with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).

The recent evolution of the U.S. labor force participation rate—that is, the percentage of the population employed or looking for work—has been a controversial topic in macroeconomic discussions and policy debates. After peaking in early 2000, the rate has trended downward, with the bulk of the drop occurring after 2008. The controversy focuses on whether the trend is the result of weak economic conditions or long-run structural forces.

Researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks. But whether the technology takes off may depend on its cost.

Air Force Special Operations Command plans to install and test combat lasers on AC-130 gunships within a year. General Atomics and other companies have been spending their own research and development (IRAD) money on the capability.

A team of engineers led by 94-year-old John Goodenough, professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and co-inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has developed the first all-solid-state battery cells that could lead to safer, faster-charging, longer-lasting rechargeable batteries for handheld mobile devices, electric cars and stationary energy storage.

Scientists at Rice University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chile offered a glimpse into a possible new path toward controlled nuclear fusion.

The first full-size model of Russia's future long-range bomber PAK DA, being developed for the Aerospace Force, has been created by the Tupolev company, a source in Russia's defense-industrial complex told TASS.

Russia has announced the start of commercial operation of its first VVER-1200 reactor, unit 1 of the Novovoronezh II nuclear power plant.