Robot Artist Detained

Border agents kept the robot artist Ai-Da in custody for 10 days and debated removing her eyes, which have built-in cameras.

Ai-Da the artist robot with her self-portraits. Photo by Lucy Seal, courtesy the Design Museum and Aidan Meller.

The British artist Ai-Da was looking forward to the opening of her first show in Egypt, until security forces denied her entry into the country. The issue? Officials suspected she was part of an espionage plot—because, you see, Ai-Da is actually a robot.

Ai-Da was held by customs officials for 10 days before her release earlier today. Her work is set to appear in the first contemporary art show ever staged at the Great Pyramid of Giza, opening tomorrow. The extended detention led to something of a diplomatic crisis between Egypt and the U.K.

“The British ambassador has been working through the night to get Ai-Da released, but we’re right up to the wire now,” Aidan Meller, an Oxford art dealer who is both Ai-Da’s creator and representative, told the Guardian before she was cleared by customs. “It’s really stressful.”

Ai-Da’s creators have billed her as the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. But her high-tech capabilities raised the suspicions of border guards, who had concerns about her built-in modem as well as the cameras in her eyes, which Ai-Da uses to draw based on algorithmic responses to her observations. (She can also hold a conversation, thanks to a combination of human inputs and an AI language model.)

Ai-Da with Her Paintings. Photo by Victor Frankowski.

“Let’s be really clear about this. She is not a spy,” Meller said. “People fear robots, I understand that. But the whole situation is ironic, because the goal of Ai-Da was to highlight and warn of the abuse of technological development, and she’s being held because she is technology.” He added: “Ai-Da would appreciate that irony, I think.”  TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST, CLICK HERE...

Idiot

 

Dean Martin

Stone ChambeerTombs

Restorative work reveals the designs painted on the stone-cut tombs' ceilings. (Image credit: Blaundos Archaeological Excavation Project Archive)

Archaeologists in Turkey have discovered 400 rock-cut chamber tombs that date to 1,800 years ago and make up part of one of the largest rock-cut chamber tomb necropolises in the world.

The team found the tombs in the ancient city of Blaundos (also spelled Blaundus), located about 110 miles (180 kilometers) east of the Aegean Sea in what is now Turkey. The city was founded during the time of Alexander the Great and existed through the Roman and Byzantine periods.

The tombs are filled with sarcophagi, many of which contain multiple deceased individuals — a clue that families used these tombs for burials over many generations, said Birol Can, an archaeologist at Uşak University in Turkey and head of the Blaundos Excavation Project.

"We think that the Blaundos rock-cut tomb chambers, in which there are many sarcophagi, were used as family tombs, and that the tombs were reopened for each deceased family member, and a burial ceremony was held and closed again," Can told Live Science in an email.

The city of Blaundos sits on a hill surrounded by a valley, which is actually a branch of the vast Uşak canyons, one of the longest canyon systems in the world, Can said. The people of Blaundos built the necropolis into the slopes of the canyon. "Due to the rocky nature of the slopes surrounding the city, the most preferred burial technique was the chamber-shaped tombs carved into the solid rocks," he said.  READ MORE...

Classic Sunday Newspaper Cartoons

 

Photosynthesis

The injected green algae (green) sit inside the blood vessels (magenta) like a string of pearls. Credit: Özugur et al./iScience

Photosynthesizing algae injected into the blood vessels of tadpoles supply oxygen to their brains.

Leading a double life in water and on land, frogs have many breathing techniques – through the gills, lungs, and skin – over the course of their lifetime. Now German scientists have developed another method that allows tadpoles to “breathe” by introducing algae into their bloodstream to supply oxygen. The method developed, presented October 13 in the journal iScience, provided enough oxygen to effectively rescue neurons in the brains of oxygen-deprived tadpoles.

“The algae actually produced so much oxygen that they could bring the nerve cells back to life, if you will,” says senior author Hans Straka of Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. “For many people, it sounds like science fiction, but after all, it’s just the right combination of biological schemes and biological principles.”

Straka was studying oxygen consumption in tadpole brains of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) when a lunch conversation with a botanist sparked an idea to combine plant physiology with neuroscience: harnessing the power of photosynthesis to supply nerve cells with oxygen. The idea didn’t seem far-fetched. In nature, algae live harmoniously in sponges, corals, and anemones, providing them with oxygen and even nutrients. Why not in vertebrates like frogs?  READ MORE...

Bye-bye...

 

Where Flight Attendants Rest

Airlines are constantly raising the bar when it comes to luxury and comfort for passengers, as airliners are flying farther than ever before.

An Airbus A350-1000 XWB aircraft. Andreas Zeitler/Shutterstock.com


But while passengers reap the benefit of glitzy lie-flat business-class seats and even couches in economy on some airlines, not all those onboard — namely flight attendants — get to enjoy the same opulence.

Touring Scandinavian Airlines' Airbus A350-900 XWB. Thomas Pallini/Insider


Hidden in the back of wide-body aircraft are the small compartments in which flight attendants spend their downtime. They're aptly named crew rest areas and are where flight attendants will go when they have a break from service or their other responsibilities.

The crew rest area on an Airbus A350-900 XWB aircraft. Thomas Pallini/Insider

The areas are off-limits to passengers, and even their entryways are discreetly embedded into an aircraft's architecture to help protect against unwanted visitors.  READ MORE...

The Three Little Bears

 

Have a Little Faith

 

Planned???

 

Foods of a Nutritionalist

Francesco Carta Fotografo | Getty


As a dietitian, I always tell people to think of the brain as the mastermind behind almost everything — our thoughts, memory, focus, movements, breathing, heartbeat — and that certain foods can help make it stronger, sharper and smarter.

Our brain and diet also play a key role in longevity. According to the National Institute on Aging, what we eat can directly impact inflammation and oxidative stress in our bodies — both of which can affect our risk of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

I spoke with Dr. Uma Naidoo, a nutritional psychiatrist, faculty member at Harvard Medical School and author of “This Is Your Brain on Food,” about what she eats to sharpen her memory, focus and overall brain health:

1. Extra dark chocolate

Chopped dark chocolate
Julia Malynovska | Twenty20


“Extra dark chocolate is full of antioxidants and cacao flavanols that help preserve the health of brain cells,” Naidoo tells CNBC Make It. “It also contains fiber to help reduce brain inflammation and prevent cognitive decline.”

A 2020 study looked at how dark chocolate and white chocolate can affect the memory of healthy young adults. Participants who were given dark chocolate had better verbal memory performances two hours after consuming the chocolate, compared to the group that received white chocolate.  TO FIND OUT ABOUT HER OTHER FOODS, CLICK HERE...

Sunset Waves

 

Quantum Artificial Intelligence

A novel proof that certain quantum convolutional networks can be guaranteed to be trained clears the way for quantum artificial intelligence to aid in materials discovery and many other applications. Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

Convolutional neural networks running on quantum computers have generated significant buzz for their potential to analyze quantum data better than classical computers can. While a fundamental solvability problem known as "barren plateaus" has limited the application of these neural networks for large data sets, new research overcomes that Achilles heel with a rigorous proof that guarantees scalability.


"The way you construct a quantum neural network can lead to a barren plateau—or not," said Marco Cerezo, co-author of the paper titled "Absence of Barren Plateaus in Quantum Convolutional Neural Networks," published today by a Los Alamos National Laboratory team in Physical Review X. Cerezo is a physicist specializing in quantum computing, quantum machine learning, and quantum information at Los Alamos. "We proved the absence of barren plateaus for a special type of quantum neural network. Our work provides trainability guarantees for this architecture, meaning that one can generically train its parameters."

As an artificial intelligence (AI) methodology, quantum convolutional neural networks are inspired by the visual cortex. As such, they involve a series of convolutional layers, or filters, interleaved with pooling layers that reduce the dimension of the data while keeping important features of a data set.

These neural networks can be used to solve a range of problems, from image recognition to materials discovery. Overcoming barren plateaus is key to extracting the full potential of quantum computers in AI applications and demonstrating their superiority over classical computers.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Tiny Cat

 

Wanting out Attention

The energetic phenomena known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are one of the greatest cosmic mysteries today. These mysterious flashes of light are visible in the radio wave part of the spectrum and usually last only a few milliseconds before fading away forever. 

Since the first FRB was observed in 2007, astronomers have looked forward to the day when instruments of sufficient sensitivity would be able to detect them regularly.

That day has arrived with the completion of the 500-Meter FAST Radio Telescope (aka. Tianyan, “Eye of Heaven”). Since it commenced operations, this observatory has vastly expanded the number of detected FRBs. 

In fact, according to research led by the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAO/CAS), the observatory detected a total of 1,652 independent bursts from a single source in 47 days.

The research, which recently appeared in the journal Science, was conducted by researchers from the Commensal Radio Astronomy FAST Survey (CRAFTS) project. 

CRAFTS includes researchers from the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and multiple universities in China, Australia, and the U.S.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Fish Out of Water

 

Swing Bones

Did Native Americans Originate from Japan?

The biological evidence "simply does not match up" 

with archeological finds.

Native Americans may not have originated in Japan as previous archaeological evidence has suggested, according to a new study of ancient teeth.

For years, archaeologists had predicted that the first people to live in North America descended directly from a group called the Jomon, who occupied ancient Japan about 15,000 years ago, the same time people arrived in North America around 15,000 years ago via the Bering Land Bridge, a strip of land that previously connected Russia to North America before sea levels rose above it. This theory is based on archaeological similarities in stone tools, especially projectile weapons, found in Native American and Jomon settlements.

However, the authors of the new study say this scenario is highly unlikely because the biological evidence "simply does not match up" with the archaeological findings, according to a statement from the researchers.

"The Jomon were not directly ancestral to Native Americans," lead author G. Richard Scott, an anthropologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, told Live Science. "They [the Jomon] are more aligned with Southeast Asian and Pacific groups than with East Asian and Native American groups."

Instead, the researchers suspect that Native Americans descended from a different group living somewhere in East Asia, although a lot of uncertainty remains about exactly where and when those ancestors lived.

An archaeological theory

Scott and his colleagues began their study because they were unconvinced by the main argument linking Native Americans with the Jomon — the stone tool similarities, they said.

"The artifact similarities between ancient Jomon and at least some of the earliest known Native American sites lie in the stemmed projectile points," co-author John Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science. These similarities led previous researchers to suspect that the knowledge to make those tools had been passed down from one culture to the other, he added.  READ MORE...

Noses