Month: June 2017

Artificial Intelligence’s Great Promise Comes With Inherent Risks

In the last few years, artificial intelligence and machine learning has taken a big leap in sophistication.  AI-powered technologies already run many things we take for granted, from GPS navigating apps to financial trading.  Many of the largest tech companies like Google and  IBM are pouring billions of dollars in AI and machine learning research.  According to the latest data from the International Data Corp (IDC) projects, worldwide spending on AI systems will hit $12.5 billion in 2017, an increase of nearly 60% from 2016. IDC projects this global spending to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 54.4%...

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Manufacturing large-scale synthesis of ‘God’ Janus particles

  An article entitled “A general strategy to synthesize chemically and topologically anisotropic Janus particles” was recently published in the journal Science Advances.  Researchers from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently developed a general emulsion interfacial polymerization approach to synthesizing a large variety of Janus particles with controllable topological and chemical anisotropy.   With this technique the researchers produced a particle nucleus inside oil droplets and the particle nucleus naturally moves toward the oil/water interface.  The  general emulsion interfacial polymerization approach, overcomes the limitation of surface tension.  Surface tension usually leads to the...

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A disruptive breakthrough advancement for photonic quantum applications

INRS university researchers have achieved a breakthrough in a light-weight photonic system created using on-chip devices and off-the-shelf telecommunications components.  Previous advances in established technologies for the telecommunications sector were targeted for the manipulation of classical signals. This research is a game-changer in that is can be applied and immediately  enable fundamental investigations of high-dimensional quantum state characteristics, applications in large-alphabet fibre-based quantum communications, and the future development of frequency-domain, high-dimensional quantum logic gates and other applications.   In the very near future, researchers around the world will be able to incorporate and move this technology forward, enabling a leap...

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Astronomers confirm that pair of supermassive black holes are orbiting each other

In a discovery more than a decade in the making  astronomers have directly observed a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting one another.   Using the powerful radio “vision” of the National Science Foundation’s very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers have made the first detection of orbital motion in a pair of supermassive black holes in a galaxy some 750 million light-years from Earth. If confirmed with follow-up research, this will be the first time two black holes have ever been seen moving in relation to one another. University of New Mexico Department of Physics & Astronomy graduate student Karishma...

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New Behavior in Light Revealed by Laser That’s a Billion Times Brighter Than the Sun

A group of physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Extreme Light Laboratory announced Monday that they have created the brightest light ever produced on Earth.   An ultra-high-intensity laser system, DIOCLES, was built at UNL to study the interactions of light with matter at the highest attainable field strengths, and has produced the most intense light ever made on Earth – one billion times brighter than the surface of the sun. The findings  published in the journal Nature Photonics, revealed that the focused beam essentially knocks the electrons out of their usual alignment, scattering light in a fundamentally different way....

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