IBM has developed an artificial intelligence-based system designed to engage in debates with humans, Tech Xplore reports. In their paper published in the journal Nature, IBM team members describe their system and how well it performed against human opponents. It listens to moderators and opponents and responds in a female voice. Having already impressed a human audience, you can expect to see Project Debater applying for the job of government lobbyist to push for loose...
Jupiter has long been known for the massive storm in its Great Red Spot, but astronomers claim that winds near the gas giant's poles make that storm look like a stiff breeze, CNET reports. The winds, found in the stratosphere under the bright auroras observed near the poles, have been measured at speeds of 1,450 kilometers per hour. That's roughly twice as fast as the speeds seen in the Great Red Spot and three times the power...
A U.S. teenager will spend three years in prison after pleading guilty to hacking high-profile Twitter accounts in a large-scale Bitcoin scam, the BBC reports. Graham Ivan Clark was 17 when he co-ordinated the scam, which hijacked the profiles of celebrities including Kim Kardashian West, Kanye West, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. Clark will be banned from using computers without permission and supervision from law enforcement. BIG Media predicts that once he gets out of...
Dozens of newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls fragments were found in a Judean Desert cave occupied by Jewish refugees 1,900 years ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced. The exploration team also recovered rare coins, a large basket estimated to be about 10,500 years old, and the skeleton of a mummified child dating back about 6,000 years, CNET reports.
https://www.cnet.com/news/new-dead-sea-scrolls-fragments-unveiled-for-first-time-in-60-years/
Researchers said today that lightning strikes billions of years ago may have freed up phosphorus required for the formation of biomolecules essential to life. A bolt of lightning can create glassy rocks called fulgurites by superheating and sometimes vaporizing surface rock, freeing phosphorus locked inside, Reuters reports.
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/primordial-lightning-strikes-may-helped-160801153.html
Dyret, a four-legged robot, has the ability to adjust the length of its legs in adapting to varying terrain, reports Tech Xplore. "The robot uses a camera to see how rough the terrain is, and it uses sensors in the legs to feel how hard the walking surface is," says researcher and senior lecturer Tonnes Nygaard. "The robot continuously learns about the environment it's walking on and, combined with the knowledge it gained indoors...
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket made a record ninth successful launch and landing as part of a mission to carry 60 satellites into orbit, PCMag reports. Early Sunday morning, the capsule took off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. About nine minutes later, its first stage landed on SpaceX's drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-breaks-its-own-falcon-9-flight-record-during-starlink-launch
A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge found that out of the more than 300 COVID-19 machine learning models described in scientific papers in 2020, none is suitable for detecting or diagnosing COVID-19 from standard medical imaging, due to biases, methodological flaws, lack of reproducibility, and "Frankenstein datasets", reports Tech Xplore. "... any machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data it's trained on," said first author Dr. Michael Roberts...
A supermassive black hole (SMBH) is on the move, it seems. About 230 million light-years from Earth, the black hole is moving peculiarly at a speed of around 177,000 kilometres per hour, reports CNET. In a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of astronomers cited abnormal activity in galaxy J0437+2456. A possible explanation is that the SMBH is from an external galaxy that collided recently with J0437+2456 ... but there is a big hole in...
Bob McDonald, host of our favourite CBC radio show Quirks & Quarks, makes the case for lightweight, gas-filled creatures, possibly as close as 128 light years from our planet.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/birthday-balloon-inspires-speculation-about-alien-life-1.5946513
