October Ideas and Innovation

Read the articles selected in October 2016

Barack Obama, neural nets, self-driving cars, and the future of the world

by Scott Dadich

Source: Wired

In the common opinion, AI has become more than just a computer science problem. We have to think after we have entrusted it innumerable tasks, who shall take moral decisions for us. Governments have the responsibility to embed social values in these technologies and have to make that everybody has access to research

Program good ethics into artificial intelligence

by Daniel Thompson

Source: Nature, 19 Ottobre

The fear of super-intelligent machines distorts public debate from real problems. It seems that consciousness would naturally come with super intelligence, but however, we define consciousness and its link with morality and human empathy, we should put more effort into programming goals, values, and ethical codes.

Triumph or disaster?

Source: The Economist, 22 October

The mission Exomars, the joint mission of Europe’s and Russia’s space agencies, despite the disappointment for the Schiaparelli’s result has not failed. The Trace Gas Orbiter, its most important research vehicle, will do the most important job of the mission: looking for methane, a sign of biological life.

Arctic cities crumble as climate change thaws permafrost

by Alec Luhn

Source: Wired, 20 October

Climate change is a technogenic factor that engineers and geologists have to consider for the human settlements above the Arctic circle: in the cities of northern Russia, cracking and collapsing buildings are the result of pawing permafrost, as much as the oil-drilling and military activity.

Lost in the citation valley

by Gerard Pasterkamp, Imo Hoefer & Berent Prakken

Source: Nature, 11 October

The academic reward system needs changing: before the dwindling funding for science and the high competitiveness of research, researchers are required also to translate scientific excellence in clinical medicine, since a scientific project may take decades to reach the clinical application.

Trekkie-ok, and President-Barack Obama on Why Star Treck is so important

by Charley Locke

Source: Wired, 12 October

After President Obama, behind the technology of the starships and their intergalactic routes, what made Star Treck great are its team values and the celebrated sense of human relationships that makes the spirit of adventure go so far.

New techniques could target more exotic dark matter

by Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Source: Scientific American, 13 October

After spending years in searching dark matter through the so-called “weakly interactive massive particles”, scientists are looking for alternatives, lighter particles supposed to interact with the regular, known matter through some yet-undefined dark force.

A radical revision of human genetics

by Erika Check Hayden

Source: Nature, 12 October

ExAC is one of the largest genetic studies ever conducted, that explains how it is possible that a genetic diagnosis that seems a death sentence can end well, without the manifestation of the foreseen disease. This is a new, promising way of investigating diseases and studying genetics.

Nanoscale machines snag the Nobel Prize in Chemistry

by Nick Stockton

Source: Wired, 5 October

The construction of molecular chains through atomical attractions and cohesion has brought machines that work in the nano-scale world. These discoveries can be used to repair damaged DNA, the molecular long chain that is our chemical imprint, and so exposed to environmental mutagens.

Can we open the black box of AI?

by Davide Castelvecchi

Source: Nature, 5 October

The deep learning, the technology created to act as a neural network, ubiquitous in today’s machines and promising to help science managing immense amounts of data, has turned out to be as opaque as the brain in the way it stores digital memory and diffuses information.

Warning to forest destroyers: this scientist will catch you

by Gabriel Popkin

Source: Nature, 4 October

An electrical engineer with a passion for forests has developed a programme that uses satellite data to create high-resolution, open-access maps of vegetation over the world, to monitor deforestation and how well countries are complying with their commitments on climate change.

Meet Noto, Google’s free font for more than 800 languages

by Liz Stinson

Source: Wired, 6 October

Google’s Internationalisation department has created Noto, a pan-language set of fonts that covers 800 languages, bound together in a cohesive visual language, tuning together rich typographic traditions in a uniform, underestandable calligraphy.

The world is not enough

Source: The Economist, 1 October

Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and Solar City, has set up SpaceX, a rocketry firm with the goal to make trips to Mars possible and affordable, and the dream to make there a permanent human colony. Many people wonder about the utility and the sensibleness of such an enterprise: why shall we do cross the Pillars of Hercules?

Elon Musk’s path to Mars begins with Red Dragon –but what science will it do?

by Sid Perkins

Source: Science, 27 September

Red Dragon, the mission to Mars announced at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, will reuse expended rockets and will be funded by the personal fortune of Elon Musk, who has flipped the usual rapport of this kind of enterprises with NASA, that only will give technical support.

UK bioethicists eye designer babies and CRISPR cows

by Heidi Ledford

Source: Nature, 30 September

Several groups of ethicists around the world are studying the implications of human applications of genome editing with CRISPR-methods, trying to distinguish medical and eugenic uses. In the livestock, the concerns include labeling, since editing techniques might leave no molecular trace.

Nasa finds more evidence of water plumes on Jupiter’s moon Europa

by Emma Grey Ellis

Source: Wired, 26 September

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope found on Jupiter’s moon Europa water bursting out from ice. So this moon is an incubator for life, and even if this discovery doesn’t mean that there is extraterrestrial life, what changes is to think that at that distance from the Sun there can be places that could support life.

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Pubblicato il : 20/12/2017
Modificato il : 04/04/2019

October Ideas and Innovation

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