Tag: technology

Brain implants revive cognitive abilities long after traumatic brain injury in clinical trial

In 2001, Gina Arata was in her final semester of college, planning to apply to law school, when she suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. The injury so compromised her ability to focus she struggled in a job sorting mail.

“I couldn’t remember anything,” said Arata, who lives in Modesto with her parents. “My left foot dropped, so I’d trip over things all the time. I was always in car accidents. And I had no filter—I’d get pissed off really easily.”

Her parents learned about research being conducted at Stanford Medicine and reached out; Arata was accepted as a participant. In 2018, physicians surgically implanted a device deep inside her brain, then carefully calibrated the device’s electrical activity to stimulate the networks the injury had subdued. The results of the clinical trial were published Dec. 4 in Nature Medicine.

She noticed the difference immediately. When she was asked to list items in the produce aisle of a grocery store, she could rattle off fruits and vegetables. Then a researcher turned the device off, and she couldn’t name any.

“Since the implant I haven’t had any speeding tickets,” Arata said. “I don’t trip anymore. I can remember how much money is in my bank account. I wasn’t able to read, but after the implant I bought a book, ‘Where the Crawdads Sing,’ and loved it and remembered it. And I don’t have that quick temper.”

For Arata and four others, the experimental deep-brain-stimulation device restored, to different degrees, the cognitive abilities they had lost to brain injuries years before. The new technique, developed by Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators from other institutions, is the first to show promise against the long-lasting impairments from moderate to severe traumatic brain injuries.

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Pentagon Seeks EMP Weapon To Eliminate Drone Swarms

Faced with the reality that drones are reshaping the modern battlefields in Ukraine and Gaza, the Pentagon has been tasked with finding a budget-friendly solution to eliminate these “flying IEDs.” While missiles are too expensive, and laser beams are a distant dream, the next best cost-effective weapon US military officials are eyeing up could be electromagnetic pulse weapons to counter drone swarms.

According to the System for Award Management (SAM.gov) website, the US Air Force has published a contract opportunity for private industry titled “Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Defense Against Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS).” 

The service outlined the drone-killing features of the new EMP weapon it is seeking:

“The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL/RI) is conducting market research to seek information from industry on the landscape of research and development (R&D) for available Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) solutions towards countering multiple Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). EMP solutions could be ground and/or aerial based that provide effective mitigation against Department of Defense (DoD) UAS groups 1, 2, and smaller group 3 aircraft.” 

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GOVERNMENT-FUNDED STUDY EXPLORES WARP DRIVES AS MEANS OF FASTER-THAN-LIGHT COMMUNICATION THROUGH “HYPERWAVES”

Exploring faster-than-light (FTL) communication, a concept rooted in science fiction has intrigued scientists and engineers for years. The proverbial little brother to FTL travel, where a spacecraft is sent at warp to a distant location, FTL communication may be a promising first step, and one theorist is shifting focus to “Hyperwaves,” a method of sending messages across vast distances faster than the speed of light.

The recent paper, partially funded by the British government’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Ministry of Defence, uploaded to arXiv, “Hyperwave: Hyper-Fast Communication within General Relativity,” by Dr. Lorenzo Pieri, offers a novel approach to this challenge. It suggests using “hypertubes” – structures that can manage the distribution and configuration of negative energy – to accelerate and decelerate warp bubbles, facilitating FTL communication. 

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China’s online censors target short videos, artificial intelligence and ‘pessimism’ in latest crackdown

China’s internet censors are targeting short videos that spread “misleading content” as part of its latest online crackdown.

The Cyberspace Administration of China said on Tuesday that it would target short videos that spread rumours about people’s lives or promoted incorrect values such as pessimism – included for the first time – and extremism.

The campaign would also target fake videos generated using artificial intelligence, the watchdog said.

The country’s top censorship body has been running an annual online crackdown known as “Qing Lang”, which means clear and bright, since 2020.

It said this year’s crackdown would benefit people’s mental health and create a healthy space for competition that would help the short video industry develop.

The country’s best known short video platform is Douyin – the Chinese sibling of TikTok – but content is shared on a number of other Chinese social media platforms, including major players such as WeChat and Weibo.

The watchdog said one of the targets of the latest campaign would be content producers who make up stories about social minorities to win public sympathy. It would also crack down on people staging incidents, “making up fake plots and spreading panic”.

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A Google DeepMind AI Just Discovered 380,000 New Materials. This Robot Is Cooking Them Up.

A robot chemist just teamed up with an AI brain to create a trove of new materials.

Two collaborative studies from Google DeepMind and the University of California, Berkeley, describe a system that predicts the properties of new materials—including those potentially useful in batteries and solar cells—and produces them with a robotic arm.

We take everyday materials for granted: plastic cups for a holiday feast, components in our smartphones, or synthetic fibers in jackets that keep us warm when chilly winds strike.

Scientists have painstakingly discovered roughly 20,000 different types of materials that let us build anything from computer chips to puffy coats and airplane wings. Tens of thousands more potentially useful materials are in the works. Yet we’ve only scratched the surface.

The Berkeley team developed a chef-like robot that mixes and heats ingredients, automatically transforming recipes into materials. As a “taste test,” the system, dubbed the A-Lab, analyzes the chemical properties of each final product to see if it hits the mark.

Meanwhile, DeepMind’s AI dreamed up myriad recipes for the A-Lab chef to cook. It’s a hefty list. Using a popular machine learning strategy, the AI found two million chemical structures and 380,000 new stable materials—many counter to human intuition. The work is an “order-of-magnitude” expansion on the materials that we currently know, the authors wrote.

Using DeepMind’s cookbook, A-Lab ran for 17 days and synthesized 41 out of 58 target chemicals—a win that would’ve taken months, if not years, of traditional experiments.

Together, the collaboration could launch a new era of materials science. “It’s very impressive,” said Dr. Andrew Rosen at Princeton University, who was not involved in the work.

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ENTANGLEMENT ON-DEMAND ACHIEVED IN BREAKTHROUGH STUDY POINTING TO “NEW FRONTIER” IN QUANTUM SCIENCE

Physicists at Princeton University report the successful on-demand entanglement of individual molecules, a significant milestone that they say leverages quantum mechanics to achieve these unusual states, according to new research.

Quantum entanglement remains one of the great enigmas in contemporary physics. Essentially, the phenomenon entails particles that are bound together in such a manner that any alteration in the quantum state of one particle instantaneously influences its entangled counterpart.

Remarkably, this connection persists even over vast distances, an effect initially labeled as “spooky action at a distance” following its introduction in a seminal 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.

While remaining mysterious, recent years have seen substantial progress in unraveling the mysteries of entanglement, with the additional promise for its practical application in diverse fields such as quantum computing, cryptography, and communication technology.

Now, the Princeton team’s recent success can be counted among these developments, in the application of quantum entanglement toward producing beneficial future technologies. The team’s work was recently described in a paper that appeared in the journal Science. 

Lawrence Cheuk, assistant professor of physics at Princeton and the paper’s senior author, says the achievement helps to pave the way toward the construction of quantum computers and related technologies, which will inevitably overtake their classical counterparts in speed and efficiency in the coming years.

Significantly, the new research also achieves “quantum advantage,” whereby quantum bits, or qubits, can simultaneously exist in multiple states, unlike classical binary computer bits which are limited to assuming values of either 0 or 1.

“This is a breakthrough in the world of molecules because of the fundamental importance of quantum entanglement,” Cheuk said in a statement.

“But it is also a breakthrough for practical applications because entangled molecules can be the building blocks for many future applications,” Cheuk added.

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Collaborative Combat Aircraft Cost, Capability Concerns Emerge In Congress

Members of Congress want the U.S. Air Force, as well as the U.S. Navy, to better explain how they plan to keep down the costs of their future Collaborative Combat Aircraft drones, or CCAs. Legislators also want more information about the expected capabilities of those uncrewed aircraft and how they will slot into both services’ larger tactical aviation plans. The War Zone just recently published a deep dive about how the Air Force looks to be leaning toward CCA designs with less range and higher performance than previously expected, and that are at the top end of previously stated estimated price ranges.

Congressional concerns about the two separate, but heavily interconnected CCA programs are contained in a new draft of the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for Fiscal Year 2024. This bill, details about which were released yesterday, is a compromise that members of the House and Senate have been negotiating the specifics of for weeks.

“The conferees agree that CCAs, procured affordably with reasonably defined capability requirements, fielded in sufficient capacity, based on thoroughly considered analysis and successfully demonstrated concepts of operations and employment beforehand, have the potential to significantly increase the lethality of existing tactical fighter aircraft,” according to a report accompanying the new draft NDAA.

“Unfortunately, neither the Secretary of the Air Force nor the Secretary of the Navy has sufficiently explained to the congressional defense committees: (1) How the Departments can acquire the vehicles affordably in sufficient numbers to execute the concept of operations; or (2) How the program is being defined to apply to challenges in the near-, mid-, and long-terms, particularly as it relates to unpiloted CCA capabilities that may be used in either an attritable or expendable mission taskings,” the report adds.

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INVISIBILITY COAT’ THAT HIDES HUMANS FROM AI SECURITY CAMERAS DEVELOPED BY CHINESE STUDENTS

At first glance, it may look like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill camouflage coat. However, what a group of Chinese graduate students have actually developed is a cost-effective “invisibility coat” capable of concealing the human body from AI-monitored security cameras, both day and night.

At the forgivable price of just $70 USD, the high-tech jacket, which has been dubbed the “InvisDefense coat,” was crafted by a team of four graduate students from Wuhan University in China. The real-life sci-fi coat secured the top prize at the inaugural “Huawei Cup,” a cybersecurity innovation contest sponsored by the Chinese tech giant Huawei. 

Professor Wang Zheng from the School of Computer Science oversaw the team, comprising doctoral student Wei Hui from the School of Computer Science, along with postgraduates Li Zhubo and Dai Shuyv from the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, and postgraduate Jian Zehua from the Economics and Management School.

The InvisDefense invisibility cloak involves a kind of camouflage pattern designed by a new algorithm, which challenges the efficacy of this commonly used method of AI pedestrian detection. “In layman’s terms, it means cameras can detect you but cannot determine that you are human,” according to a statement released by Wuhan University (WHU).

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GENERATIVE AI CHATBOTS CAN ALREADY MATCH OUR CAPABILITIES IN THIS KEY AREA OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE, STUDIES REVEAL

Recent research has revealed that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT versions 3 and 4, Studio.ai, and YouChat, have already reached creativity levels comparable to humans.

The new findings, based on several recently published empirical studies, challenge the long-standing belief that creativity is an exclusive domain of human intelligence.

For years, the general assumption has been that while AI can excel in logical and structured tasks, creativity remains a uniquely human trait. However, a recent study led by Dr. Jennifer Haase from the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, and Dr. Paul H. P. Hanel from the University of Essex is turning that notion on its head by demonstrating that the line between human and AI-generated creativity is blurring.

In a series of meticulously designed tests, Dr. Haase and Dr. Hanel compared ideas generated by humans with those produced by various GAI chatbots, including prominent names like alpa.ai, Copy.ai, ChatGPT (versions 3 and 4), Studio.ai, and YouChat. 

The study employed the Alternative Uses Test (AUT), a standard measure frequently used in creativity tests. Using the AUT, 100 human participants and five general artificial intelligence chatbots were asked to generate original images of five everyday objects, such as pants, a ball, a tire, a fork, or a toothbrush. 

The human and GAI-generated responses were then measured based on their originality and fluency of ideas. 

What made the research particularly interesting was the assessments of creativity were conducted by humans (following the Consensual Assessment technique) and by an AI program designed explicitly for assessing AUT-trained large-language models. This dual approach was meant to ensure a more comprehensive evaluation of creativity, considering human intuition and AI’s analytical capabilities. 

Remarkably, when examining the results, researchers found no significant qualitative difference in the creativity of general artificial intelligence chatbots compared to humans. 

These findings are pivotal, suggesting that AI’s potential in creative domains is much broader and more profound than previously thought.

The study showed that although 9.4% of humans surpassed the most creative Generative Artificial Intelligence in the tests, GPT-4, the most recent version of ChatGPT, was notably the highest-performing AI model among those evaluated.

GPT-4’s ability to generate original and creative responses to the prompts underscores the rapid advancements in AI. It also strongly indicates that AI’s role in creative processes is not just supplementary but can be central.

Affirming these findings, another study recently published in the Journal of Creativity found that GPT-4 ranked in the top percentile for originality and fluency on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. 

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Due to AI, “We are about to enter the era of mass spying,” says Bruce Schneier

In an editorial for Slate published Monday, renowned security researcher Bruce Schneier warned that AI models may enable a new era of mass spying, allowing companies and governments to automate the process of analyzing and summarizing large volumes of conversation data, fundamentally lowering barriers to spying activities that currently require human labor.

In the piece, Schneier notes that the existing landscape of electronic surveillance has already transformed the modern era, becoming the business model of the Internet, where our digital footprints are constantly tracked and analyzed for commercial reasons. Spying, by contrast, can take that kind of economically inspired monitoring to a completely new level:

“Spying and surveillance are different but related things,” Schneier writes. “If I hired a private detective to spy on you, that detective could hide a bug in your home or car, tap your phone, and listen to what you said. At the end, I would get a report of all the conversations you had and the contents of those conversations. If I hired that same private detective to put you under surveillance, I would get a different report: where you went, whom you talked to, what you purchased, what you did.”

Schneier says that current spying methods, like phone tapping or physical surveillance, are labor-intensive, but the advent of AI significantly reduces this constraint. Generative AI systems are increasingly adept at summarizing lengthy conversations and sifting through massive datasets to organize and extract relevant information. This capability, he argues, will not only make spying more accessible but also more comprehensive.

“This spying is not limited to conversations on our phones or computers,” Schneier writes. “Just as cameras everywhere fueled mass surveillance, microphones everywhere will fuel mass spying. Siri and Alexa and ‘Hey, Google’ are already always listening; the conversations just aren’t being saved yet.”

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