Illustration For The Current Issue Of @wireduk, In Which Jürgen Schmidhuber Explains Why Human-level

Stealth Hounds

Japanese Virtual Reality arcade VR-Zone Shinjuku is hosting a Field VR multiplayer experience based on Ghost In The Shell:

As a rookie of the special force team created by Motoko Kusanagi, join in the fight against the terrorist organization.

Employ iconic, powerful technology from Ghost in the Shell such as optical camouflage, prosthetic body, cyberbrain, etc. Become fully immersed and experience futuristic warfare for yourself. 

More Here

StructurePro

In-development app from URCV turns an ARKit-enabled iPhone into a 3D scanner:

StructurePro combines the rich sensor data available from Apple’s ARKit with the 3d reconstruction capabilities of the industry leading mobile phone 3d reconstruction pipeline from URC Ventures.  StucturePro enables software companies to build applications that can be used by construction workers, building inspectors, or insurance claims adjusters to successfully model buildings from iPhone imagery.

… By integrating the advanced sensor data from ARKit, the URC Ventures image processing pipeline is now able to successfully handle the extreme rotations introduced by average end users, textureless surfaces such as large solid color walls, and repetitive structures such as ceiling tiles.

More Here

CAN 2017 – Highlights and Favourites

The always-fantastic Art & Tech resource Creative Applications have put together their list of highlights from the year:

As 2017 comes to a close, we take a moment to look back at the outstanding work done this year. From spectacular performances, large scale installations, devices and tools to the new virtual spaces for artistic exploration – so many great projects are being added to the CAN archive! Here are a just few, 25 in total, that we and you enjoyed the most this year.

Have a look for yourself here

Holographic Cortana Appliance

What's Inside SOFIA? High Flying Instruments

Our flying observatory, called SOFIA, carries a 100-inch telescope inside a Boeing 747SP aircraft. Having an airborne observatory provides many benefits.

It flies at 38,000-45,000 feet – above 99% of the water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere that blocks infrared light from reaching the ground! 

It is also mobile! We can fly to the best vantage point for viewing the cosmos. We go to Christchurch, New Zealand, nearly every year to study objects best observed from the Southern Hemisphere. And last year we went to Daytona Beach, FL, to study the atmosphere of Neptune’s moon Triton while flying over the Atlantic Ocean.

SOFIA’s telescope has a large primary mirror – about the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s mirror. Large telescopes let us gather a lot of light to make high-resolution images!

But unlike a space-based observatory, SOFIA returns to our base every morning.

Which means that we can change the instruments we use to analyze the light from the telescope to make many different types of scientific observations. We currently have seven instruments, and new ones are now being developed to incorporate new technologies.

So what is inside SOFIA? The existing instruments include:

Infrared cameras that can peer inside celestial clouds of dust and gas to see stars forming inside. They can also study molecules in a nebula that may offer clues to the building blocks of life…

…A polarimeter, a device that measures the alignment of incoming light waves, that we use to study magnetic fields. The left image reveals that hot dust in the starburst galaxy M82 is magnetically aligned with the gas flowing out of it, shown in blue on the right image from our Chandra X-ray Observatory. This can help us understand how magnetic fields affect how stars form.

…A tracking camera that we used to study New Horizon’s post-Pluto flyby target and found that it may have its own moon…

…A spectrograph that spreads light into its component colors. We’re using one to search for signs of water plumes on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and to search for signs of water on Venus to learn about how it lost its oceans…

…An instrument that studies high energy terahertz radiation with 14 detectors. It’s so efficient that we made this map of Orion’s Horsehead Nebula in only four hours! The map is made of 100 separate views of the nebula, each mapping carbon atoms at different velocities.

…And we have an instrument under construction that will soon let us study how water vapor, ice and oxygen combine at different times during planet formation, to better understand how these elements combine with dust to form a mass that can become a planet.

Our airborne telescope has already revealed so much about the universe around us! Now we’re looking for the next idea to help us use SOFIA in even more new ways. 

Discover more about our SOFIA flying observatory HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Kavya Kopparapu, 16, invented an app and lens to diagnose the leading cause of preventable blindness

A teenager managed to develop an app that can help diagnose a diabetes-related condition affecting her grandfather.

Kavya Kopparapu’s grandfather lives in India, where there aren’t enough ophthalmologists to help diagnose all of those who could be affected by diabetic retinopathy.

DR is the world’s leading cause of vision loss in people age 20 to 65, according to the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness, which estimated that 50% of people with diabetes are undiagnosed.

But in the absence of proper doctors, “computers could be used in their place,” Kopparapu, 16, said in a TEDx talk on artificial intelligence.

Alongside her brother and another classmate, she invented Eyeagnosis, a smartphone app that can photograph patients’ eyes and match them to a database of 34,000 retinal scans collected from the National Institute of Health. Read more (8/8/17)

follow @the-future-now

This skeleton robot salamander just wiggled its way into my heart.

Vimeo pitch of the founders of Ethereum, who want to use the Bitcoin architecture to reinvent the rest of our political economy—smart contracts, distributed corporations, and even decentralized political parties

Polish website just used a screenshot of Avina in an article about AI. I’m dying.