Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist

Watch a swarm of 1000 mini-robots assemble into shapes - tech - 14 August 2014 - New Scientist: To do the assembling, the desired end shape is first transmitted to all the robots and then four stationary robots are positioned by hand to mark the shape's starting point. Next, some of the robots start to shuffle until they reach a place-holding robot and then fan out from that point to stop in the right place. Each robot can only communicate with the others nearby. Successive robots build up the shape by stopping near the robots already in place. It can take about 12 hours for 1000 robots to fill in a pattern.

The Curious Evolution of Artificial Life | MIT Technology Review

The Curious Evolution of Artificial Life | MIT Technology Review: He divides the history of Web-based artificial life into two periods: before and after 2005, a characterization that corresponds roughly with the emergence of Web 2.0 and the collaborative behaviors that it allows.

How bird flocks are like liquid helium | Science/AAAS | News

How bird flocks are like liquid helium | Science/AAAS | News: Using tracking software on the recorded video, the team could pinpoint when and where individuals decide to turn, information that enabled them to follow how the decision sweeps through the flock. The tracking data showed that the message to turn started from a handful of birds and swept through the flock at a constant speed between 20 and 40 meters per second. That means that for a group of 400 birds, it takes just a little more than a half-second for the whole flock to turn...

The team proposes that instead of copying the direction in which a neighbor flies, a bird copies how sharply a neighbor turns...

Interestingly, Cavagna adds, the new model is mathematically identical to the equations that describe superfluid helium.

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy - life - 16 July 2014 - New Scientist

Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy - life - 16 July 2014 - New Scientist: Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form – naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals...

First they measure the natural voltage across the sediment, before applying a slightly different one. A slightly higher voltage offers an excess of electrons; a slightly lower voltage means the electrode will readily accept electrons from anything willing to pass them off. Bugs in the sediments can either "eat" electrons from the higher voltage, or "breathe" electrons on to the lower-voltage electrode, generating a current. That current is picked up by the researchers as a signal of the type of life they have captured...

"This is huge. What it means is that there's a whole part of the microbial world that we don't know about..."

Is time moving forward or backward? Computers learn to spot the difference | Science/AAAS | News

Is time moving forward or backward? Computers learn to spot the difference | Science/AAAS | News: To find out, she and her collaborators broke down 180 YouTube videos into square patches of a few hundred pixels, which they further divided into four-by-four grids. Combining standard techniques for discovering objects in still photographs with motion detection algorithms, the researchers identified 4000 typical patterns of motion, or “flow words,” across a grid’s 16 cells. The gentle downward drifting of snowflakes, for example, would be one flow word. From those patterns, the team created flow word descriptions of each video along with three other versions—a time-reversed version, a mirror-image version, and a mirror-image and time-reversed version. Then, they made a computer program watch 120 of these clips, training it to identify which flow words best revealed whether a video ran forward or backward.

When they tested their program on the remaining 60 videos, the trained computers could correctly determine whether a video ran forward or backward 80% of the time...  A closer analysis found that flow words associated with divergence (water splashing outward as someone dives into a pool) or dissipation (a steam train’s exhaust spreading out in air) were especially good indicators of the direction in which time was moving.

Equations reveal the rebellious rhythms at the heart of nature

Equations reveal the rebellious rhythms at the heart of nature: Physicists Dmytro Iatsenko , Professor Peter McClintock, and Professor Aneta Stefanovska, have reported a far more general solution of the Kuramoto equations than anyone has achieved previously, with some quite unexpected results.

One surprise is that the oscillators can form "glassy" states, where they adjust the tempos of their rhythms but otherwise remain uncoordinated with each other, thus giving birth to some kind of "synchronous disorder" rather like the disordered molecular structure of window glass. Furthermore and even more astonishingly, under certain circumstances the oscillators can behave in a totally independent manner despite being tightly coupled together, the phenomenon the authors call "super-relaxation".

If Spacetime Were a Superfluid, Would It Unify Physics—or Is the Theory All Wet? - Scientific American

If Spacetime Were a Superfluid, Would It Unify Physics—or Is the Theory All Wet? - Scientific American: If it is true that spacetime is a superfluid and that photons of different energies travel at different speeds or dissipate over time, that means relativity does not hold in all situations. One of the main tenets of relativity, the Lorentz invariance, states that the speed of light is unchanging, regardless of an observer’s frame of reference. “The possibility that spacetime as we know it emerges from something that violates relativity is a fairly radical one,” Jacobson says. It does, however, clear a potential pathway toward rectifying some of the problems that arise when trying to combine relativity and quantum mechanics. “Violating relativity would open up the possibility of eliminating infinite quantities that arise in present theory and which seem to some unlikely to be physically correct.”

Synchronized brain waves enable rapid learning | MIT News Office

Synchronized brain waves enable rapid learning | MIT News Office:  Brain waves known as “beta bands,” produced independently by the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, began to synchronize with each other. This suggests that a communication circuit is forming between the two regions, Miller says.

“There is some unknown mechanism that allows these resonance patterns to form, and these circuits start humming together,” he says. “That humming may then foster subsequent long-term plasticity changes in the brain, so real anatomical circuits can form. But the first thing that happens is they start humming together..."

Previous studies have shown that during cognitively demanding tasks, there is increased synchrony between the frontal cortex and visual cortex, but Miller’s lab is the first to show specific patterns of synchrony linked to specific thoughts.

The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net

The Flaw Lurking In Every Deep Neural Net: "For all the networks we studied, for each sample, we always manage to generate very close, visually indistinguishable, adversarial examples that are misclassified by the original network."
To be clear, the adversarial examples looked to a human like the original, but the network misclassified them. You can have two photos that look not only like a cat but the same cat, indeed the same photo, to a human, but the machine gets one right and the other wrong.

Genetic algorithm used to design broadband metamaterial | KurzweilAI

Genetic algorithm used to design broadband metamaterial | KurzweilAI: "...this is the first that can cover a super-octave [more than doubling] bandwidth in the infrared spectrum...”

The new metamaterial is actually made of layers on a silicon substrate or base. The first layer is palladium, followed by a polyimide (plastic) layer and a palladium screen layer on top. The screen has elaborate, complicated cutouts — sub-wavelength geometry — that serve to block the various wavelengths. A polyimide layer caps the whole absorber...

This evolved metamaterial can be easily manufactured because it is simply layers of metal or plastic that do not need complex alignment. The clear cap of polyimide serves to protect the screen, but also helps reduce any impedance mismatch that might occur when the wave moves from the air into the device...

Physicists use magnetism simulation software to model US presidential elections

Physicists use magnetism simulation software to model US presidential elections: A team of physicists working at IFISC in Palma de Mallorca, Spain has used a computer simulation originally designed to model the transition of iron between magnetized states to create a model to do something similar for voting patterns in the United States...

What is possible though is modeling human behavior as it relates to voter patterns. One such behavior is the tendency of voters to be impacted by the opinions of others, whether those of people that live near them, or those that commute to places where they work...

Doing so revealed previously unknown correlations between regions that actually existed in the real world of vote casting and graphically illustrated the influence that voters have on one another. One striking example was the county to county variability displayed, indicating the percentage of votes going to either party—showing that the national mean changes from election to election, but not the degree of fluctuation between counties.

Hypnotic Art Shows How Patterns Emerge From Randomness in Nature | Science | WIRED

Hypnotic Art Shows How Patterns Emerge From Randomness in Nature | Science | WIRED: Turing called this the reaction-diffusion process, meaning that it’s driven by reactive molecules that can diffuse between cells. He called these molecules “morphogens”...

...a team of scientists based at Brandeis University reproduced the system Turing envisioned...

If Turing’s theory was right, then the population of cells would ultimately assume one of six different patterns...

In fact, this is mostly what the team found — they saw five of the six predicted patterns; but they also found a seventh pattern that Turing had not predicted....

Zuckerberg, Musk, and Kutcher Want to Build You a New Brain | Enterprise | WIRED

Zuckerberg, Musk, and Kutcher Want to Build You a New Brain | Enterprise | WIRED: ...a $40 million investment in a new kind of artificial intelligence called Vicarious...

Vicarious co-founder Dileep George previously built a similar company called Numenta...

This is the second big funding round for Vicarious, and it was lead by venture capital outfit Formation 8. The first $15 million round included investments by Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz; former Facebook CTO and Quora founder Adam D’Angelo; PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel; and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale.

Robot elephant trunk learns motor skills like a baby - tech - 13 March 2014 - New Scientist

Robot elephant trunk learns motor skills like a baby - tech - 13 March 2014 - New Scientist: The design showed that a trunk formed of 3D-printed segments can be controlled by an array of pneumatic artificial muscles...

They used a process called "goal babbling"... the robot remembers what happens to the trunk's position when tiny changes are made to the pressure in the thin pneumatic tubes feeding the artificial muscles. This creates a map that relates the trunk's precise position to the pressures in each tube.

The trunk can now be manually forced into a series of positions and learn to adopt them on command...

Fire ants writhe to make unsinkable rafts - life - 26 November 2013 - New Scientist

Fire ants writhe to make unsinkable rafts - life - 26 November 2013 - New Scientist: A raft of live fire ants, on the other hand, resists and dissipates external forces equally well on all scales. The ants can act as tiny, resistive springs by flexing and extending their legs, and they break and reform connections with their neighbours to create a flow around external forces, like being prodded with sticks. Importantly, rafts of live ants are significantly more elastic than those made of flash-frozen dead ants.

Stem cells mimic human brain : Nature News & Comment

Stem cells mimic human brain : Nature News & Comment: ...in the latest advance, scientists developed bigger and more complex neural-tissue clumps by first growing the stem cells on a synthetic gel that resembled natural connective tissues found in the brain and elsewhere in the body. Then, they plopped the nascent clumps into a spinning bath to infuse the tissue with nutrients and oxygen...

Under a microscope, researchers saw discrete brain regions that seemed to interact with one another. But the overall arrangement of the different proto-brain areas varied randomly across tissue samples — amounting to no recognizable physiological structure.

“The entire structure is not like one brain,” says Knoblich, adding that normal brain maturation in an intact embryo is probably guided by growth signals from other parts of the body. The tissue balls also lacked blood vessels, which could be one reason that their size was limited to 3–4 millimetres in diameter, even after growing for 10 months or more.

Robot face lets slime mould show its emotional side - tech - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist

Robot face lets slime mould show its emotional side - tech - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist: Gale placed slime mould on a forest of 64 micro electrodes, along with some oat flakes. As the mould moved across the electrodes towards the food, it produced electrical signals, which Gale converted into sound frequencies...

Using a popular psychological model, the team was then able to assign each sound chunk an emotion...

Super-accurate atomic clock doubles up as quantum sim - physics-math - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist

Super-accurate atomic clock doubles up as quantum sim - physics-math - 08 August 2013 - New Scientist: Electrons' behaviour inside solids can be physically modelled using networks of atoms cooled to trillionths of a degree above absolute zero...

...she and her colleagues have stumbled upon a way to mimic quantum behaviour in a system several orders of magnitude warmer: an atomic clock...

Rey says that the strontium atoms in the ground state can be used to simulate spin-down electrons, and the excited atoms, spin-up electrons. Tracking the emergence and details of the interactions between the atoms could then shed light on the nature of the quantum interactions between electrons in magnets.

The Hunt for the Magnetic Monopole - IEEE Spectrum

The Hunt for the Magnetic Monopole - IEEE Spectrum: The team proposed looking for these trapped monopoles at temperatures close to absolute zero in spin ice, a peculiar class of materials with ions arranged in four-sided pyramids called tetrahedra. These tetrahedra are stacked together to make a crystal called a pyrochlore.

The atoms at each corner of the pyramids in a pyrochlore are magnetic dipoles. Just like a bar magnet, they have a magnetic field that emerges from one side (what physicists tend to call “north” by convention) and curves around the atom so that it eventually enters the opposite end (“south”)....

When the temperature of the crystalline material is relatively high, the forces that try to align the spins are easily overwhelmed by thermal fluctuations. The spins are oriented at random and can easily change direction. When the material is cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero, the forces between spins begin to dominate...

In the case where ice rules are obeyed, the two north poles and two south poles cancel each other out. But here’s where it gets interesting: When the ice rules are not obeyed—if, for example, there are three spins pointing inward and one pointing outward—then the three north poles and one south pole in the center will give rise to a single, north magnetic pole.

A Mind-Blowing Dome Made by 6,500 Computer-Guided Silkworms | Wired Design | Wired.com

A Mind-Blowing Dome Made by 6,500 Computer-Guided Silkworms | Wired Design | Wired.com: An aluminum scaffold was constructed and a CNC robot was used to string a lattice of silk starter threads across it in patterns that would provide a base for the worms to operate. The aluminum and string frame was hung in an atrium at MIT and thousands of silkworms were released on it...
The project is a unique hybrid of structural and biological engineering. Using her custom-developed CAD tools, Oxman was able to control the material properties of the pavilion in much the same way an architect would specify a certain type of steel to use in a building. The density of the starter strings determined the opacity of a given panel. The structure’s integrity arose from their orientation. The output can’t be fully controlled, but the emergent behavior of the worms can lead to unexpected textures and features that would be impossible to plan.