Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences via “socialstructed learning,” an aggregation of microlearning experiences drawn from a rich ecology of content and driven not by grades but by social and intrinsic rewards, suggests Marina Gorbis, Executive Director at the Institute for the Future, in Fast Company.
“Today’s obsession with MOOCs is a reminder of the old forecasting paradigm: In the early stages of technology… read more
“Neuroscience — one of the greatest challenges facing science and engineering — is at a crossroads. …There exist few general theories or principles that explain brain function [due partly to] limitations in current methodologies,” say neuroscientists in a new ACS Nano open-access paper, “Nanotools for Neuroscience and Brain Activity Mapping.”
Traditional neurophysiological approaches record the activities of one neuron or a few neurons at a time. Neurochemical… read more
Meet FastRunner, a bioinspired robot that thinks it’s an ostrich, being built at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. It’s expected to be the world’s fastest robotic biped, at 22 mph.
Impressive, but no Boston Dynamics Cheetah, at 28.3 mph (on a treadmill) — beating out Usain Bolt’s 27.79 mph.
But FastRunner may soon negotiate more complex environments — ones that Cheetah may fear to tread, thanks to… read more
With his 2045 Initiative, Russian Internet mogul Dmitry Itskov is looking for backers for the world’s first immortality research center.
The new venture sells itself: invest in his new research and development interest and the payoff could be immortality, reports Fortune.
A new corporate entity that the Russian multi-millionaire will formally announce at an event in June will allow investors to bankroll research into neuroscience… read more
IBM has announced a materials science breakthrough at the molecular level that could pave the way for a new class of non-volatile memory and logic chips that would use less power than today’s silicon devices.
IBM’s scientists discovered a new way to power chips using tiny ionic currents, which are streams of charged molecules that can mimic the event-driven way in which the human brain operates.
Today’s computers… read more
DARPA has launched a new programming paradigm for managing uncertain information called “Probabilistic Programming for Advanced Machine Learning”(PPAML).
Machine learning — the ability of computers to understand data, manage results, and infer insights from uncertain information — is the force behind many recent revolutions in computing.
Unfortunately, every new machine-learning application requires a Herculean effort. Even a team of specially trained machine learning experts makes only… read more
The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation from the Big Bang — acquired by ESA’s Planck space telescope, has been released, revealing features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe and may require new physics.
EPFL scientists have combined two materials with advantageous electronic properties — graphene and molybdenite — into a flash memory prototype that is promising in terms of superior performance, size, flexibility and energy consumption.
An ideal “energy band”
“For our memory model, we combined the unique electronic properties of molybdenite (MoS2) with graphene’s amazing conductivity,” explains Andras Kis, author of the study and director of… read more
Our understanding of brain activity has traditionally been linked to brain areas — when we speak, the speech area of the brain is active.
New research by an international team of psychologists shows that this view may be wrong. The entire cortex, not just the area responsible for a certain function, is activated when a given task is initiated.
Furthermore, activity occurs in a pattern: waves… read more
HP researchers have developed a glasses-free, multi-directional diffractive backlight technology that allows for rendering of high-resolution, full-parallax 3D images in a zone up to 180° and up to one meter away, HP Innovation blog reports.
In other words: glasses-free 3D for your mobile device.
The display technology forms 3D images by projecting different 2D images into different regions of space. A viewer located near the display… read more
Meet Zoe: a digital talking head. She can express a range of human emotions on demand with “unprecedented realism” and could herald a new era of human-computer interaction, according to researchers at Toshiba’s Cambridge Research Lab and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who created her.
Zoe, or her offspring, could be used as a visible version of Siri, as… read more
EPFL scientists have developed a tiny, portable personal blood testing laboratory: a minuscule device implanted just under the skin provides an immediate analysis of substances in the body, and a radio module transmits the results to a doctor over the cellular phone network.
This feat of miniaturization has many potential applications, including monitoring patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Humans are veritable chemical factories — we manufacture… read more
DARPA has created the Wireless Network Defense program, which aims to develop new protocols that enable military wireless networks to remain operational despite inadvertent misconfigurations or malicious compromise of individual nodes.
“Current security efforts focus on individual radios or nodes, rather than the network, so a single misconfigured or compromised radio could debilitate an entire network,” said Wayne Phoel, DARPA program… read more
In 2009, Dr. Henry Markram conceived of the Human Brain Project, a sprawling and controversial initiative of more than 150 institutions around the world that he hopes will bring scientists together to realize his dream, as The New York Times notes.
In January, the European Union raised the stakes by awarding the project a 10-year grant of up to $1.3 billion — an unheard-of sum… read more
Researchers from MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and a colleague at Georgia Tech have developed a method for applying principles from control theory — which analyzes dynamical systems ranging from robots to power grids — to formal verification, a set of methods for mathematically proving that a computer program does what it’s supposed to do.
The result could help computer scientists expand… read more