Russia to build 6th-Generation Fighter Jet which features Swarms of Protector Drones To fly with it

Russia is set to build a sixth-generation fighter jet will operate in conjunction with drone swarms armed with electromagnetic cannons, an official said.


Though It may still be 10 years from today before Russia’s sixth-generation fighter jet will be ready but officials say that the aircraft will have its own swarm of drones flying beside it.

Vladimir Mikheev, an adviser to the deputy head of Radioelectronic Technologies Concern — part of the Moscow-based state corporation Rostec — said the fighter jet will be unveiled in 2025.

With a supersonic speed of about 4-5 Mach, the unmanned aircraft will be able to enter near space and reenter the atmosphere in a designated spot, hundreds of kilometers away from the place of the original entry.

The real fact is that Pilots will be assigned a drone to command depending on their rank. “Depending on the status, he [the pilot] is given several subordinate drones,” Mikheev says. “They, in their turn, understand –– they must protect, for example, lieutenant Petrov. But if colonel Ivanov is in the cockpit, the number of subordinate drones should be more, and so forth.”

The drone aircraft will also be equipped with high-frequency electromagnetic cannons — too powerful for manned aircraft to operate without hurting pilots — designed to knock out enemy radio signals from a distance of about six miles.



And meanwhile The U.S., , is also working on sixth-generation fighter designs after the introduction of the Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fifth-generation aircraft, the latter of which is still in development.

But rather than create a single sixth-gen platform capable of overcoming today’s threats — cyber, electronic attack, anti-satellite, surface-to-air — the Air Force has signaled an interest in trying to develop new weapons such as directed energy and hypersonic missiles that can be installed on updated aircraft.

Here comes the World’s First 3D Printing Restaurant to Open in London

Food Ink, the world's first 3D printing restaurant will open in London at the end of July to serve 3D printed meals, in 3D style – but only for three days.

"Food Ink" which is the name of the restaurant promises a food revolution on the 25th, 26th, and 27th of July with a pop-up restaurant serving 3D printed culinary creations. The restaurant promises the evening to be a “one-of-a-kind gourmet experience…where fine cuisine meets art, philosophy and tomorrow’s technologies.”

The 3D dining experience will set you back £250 or about $330 for nine courses. The whole experience will be live streamed online so people at home can watch diners chow down on 3D printed dishes.

Not only will the food all be 3D printed but the cutlery, tables, and chairs will be similarly created.


Top chefs Antony Dobrzensky and Marcio Barradas from the famous La Boscana restaurant will be in charge of the creating the menu, and they hinted that the first course is said to be paired with virtual reality headsets to provide “an immersive and thrilling glimpse of the future.”

Convinced you have to take part of this futuristic dining experience? Well, you have to hurry. There will only be 10 tickets each evening and they will become available on Friday 15 July.

The pop-up restaurant will at 8 Dray Walk, E1 6NJ. Dinner will be served from 7:30pm each evening.

An Artificial Intelligence Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next.

An AI Watched 600 Hours of TV and Started to Accurately Predict What Happens Next.


MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory developed an algorithm that uses deep learning, which enables artificial intelligence (AI) to use patterns of human interaction to predict what will happen next. Researchers fed the program with videos featuring human social interactions and tested it to see if it “learned” well enough to be able to predict them.

The researchers’ weapons of choice? 600 hours of Youtube videos and sitcoms, including The Office, Desperate Housewives, and Scrubs. While this lineup may seem questionable, MIT doctoral candidate and project researcher Carl Vondrick reasons out that accessibility and realism were part of the criteria.

“We just wanted to use random videos from YouTube,” Vondrick said. “The reason for television is that it’s easy for us to get access to that data, and it’s somewhat realistic in terms of describing everyday situations.”Said Carl

They (the scientists) showed the computer videos of people who are one second away from doing one of these four Human emotional actions like hugging, kissing, high-fiving and handshaking. The AI was able to guess correctly 43% of the time compared to humans, who were right 71% of the time.


Giving AI the ability to understand visuals the way humans can could be an indicator to what would be efficient home assistants, as well as intelligent security cameras that could call an ambulance or the police ahead of time.

While this isn’t the first attempt at video prediction, it is the most accurate thus far. The reason is that, first, the new algorithm deviates from previous attempts at video predicting, wherein pixel-by-pixel representations were a priority. It predicts using abstract representation and focuses on the important signs: it learns on its own and uses “visual representations” to discriminate between visual cues that are important in social interactions from those that are not. It’s something that comes naturally to humans, but is far more complicated in AI.

“It’s not hugely different from some other things that people have done, but they’ve gotten substantially better results out of it than people have in this area before,” says Pedro Domingos, a machine learning expert and professor at the University of Washington.

Rats to become Super Sniffers as Scientists mutates their genes for that purpose.

Scientists are trying to create a new generation of rodents that can sniff out drugs or explosives which means that K-9 dogs might soon have some competition. U.S. scientists have mutated mice so that they are “super sniffers” for drugs and explosives.

This new generation of rodents was genetically altered to track down certain scents, according to a report at scientific journal Cell Reports.
“What we think we can do is make ‘super sniffers’ for particular odors,” said co-researcher Dr.Paul Feinstein. “We trick the animals to want to pay attention to one odor over many others.”
The mutated mice were exposed to two known odors – a chemical that has a sweet smell similar to jasmine and another that smells like peppermint. It turns out they can detect lower doses of these odors than non-mutated mice.
Scientists say the next step is to apply this research to detecting drugs or explosives.
“We want to create an explosive-detecting rat or mouse – and we could also do this for narcotics such as cocaine, for example,” said lead researcher Dr.Charlotte D’Hulst. “If we can find the receptor that is activated by cocaine, we could create ‘super-sniffing’ cocaine rodents.”

Researchers said they see the application of their study in a number of areas.

It could be used in military and defense, where the mutated rats could sniffing out TNT, the main explosive component of landmines.

The fragrance and flavour industry can also benefit from mice that are bred with human receptors for smelling particular odours by utilizing the same method for unique super rodents!

The mutated rodents could also be implanted with some sort of “bio-reactor” made up of nerve cells to sniff out human diseases from the chemical signatures they give off in blood or sweat.

As with any groundbreaking study, it will still take time before scientists could come out and give humans the mutated rat that they need. One could only remain hopeful.

137 Million Southeast Asian Workers Could Lose Their Jobs to Automation in the Next 20 Years.

137 million workers from five Southeast Asian countries are in danger of being replaced by automated systems in the next 20 years. The International Labour Organisation says that laborers working in the manufacturing industry, the garment industry most of all, are at the highest risk.
A study conducted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that in the next 20 years, more than half of the workers in five Southeast Asian countries are highly likely to lose their jobs to automation—most specifically in the garment industry.

The countries on the danger list are Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam, where 137 million workers are at high risk of being laid off in favor of technology. This number constitutes 56% of these countries’ salaried labor force, with workers in textiles, clothing, and footwear sectors being at the highest risk of being replaced by automated machines.

Sadly, as automation starts to become dominant, certain skills become obsolete, even when their costs were supposedly low enough. “Countries that compete on low-wage labour need to reposition themselves—price advantage is no longer enough,” said Deborah France-Massin, director for the ILO’s bureau for employers’ activities.

“Robots are becoming better at assembly, cheaper and increasingly able to collaborate with people,” the ILO said.

DNA on the verge on becoming the most trusted mode of Data Storage

DNA storage is moving forward in the race for data storage in a world that is moving to files that consistently grow larger. Microsoft has announced that it has successfully packed 200MB of data into DNA all at once—a first in history.


DNA STORAGE GETTING CLOSER

As reported earlier, Microsoft has been looking to biological resources for potential data storage solutions, and they bought ten million strands of synthetic DNA from Twist Bioscience because they believe that DNA is a high-capacity, highly efficient, long-term storage option that can safely store 1,000,000,000 TB per gram.

And now, it looks like DNA is moving forward as one of the top contenders in the battle for data storage. Microsoft has announced that they have successfully packed 200 MB of data into DNA all at once—a feat that no one has done before.


THE INCOMING FLOOD OF DATA

The cost is the greatest challenge for DNA storage. “For people to really pick it up, you need to store something cheaper than on tape, and that’s going to be hard,” says UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Reinhard Heckel.

While the current process is expensive (how expensive remains undisclosed) and delicate, they believe that developments in the biotech industry will eventually drive these costs down and help them cultivate an easier process, making DNA an eligible replacement to the current magnetic tape storage standard which they deem insufficient and stagnant.

“If you look at current projections, we can’t store all the information we want with devices at the cost that they are,” says Karin Strauss, Microsoft’s lead researcher on the project.

A flood of data is predicted to reach 16 trillion gigabytes by next year, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). That is equal to 100 giant data centers, a necessity of enterprise-proportions. The research aims to find an alternative that could match this necessity when the time comes.

“The company is interested in learning whether we can create an end-to-end system that can store information, that’s automated, and can be used for enterprise storage, based on DNA,” says Strauss.

Strauss approximates that a shoebox of DNA could hold all the 16 trillion gigabytes of data flawlessly.

Food Scientists Have Discovered a Way to Turn Off Junk Food Cravings

A new supplement has been developed that can reportedly switch off cravings for high-calorie foods and leave the healthy appetite alone.


CRAVING LESS

Obesity is a growing global disease, and some are coming up with pretty unique ways to beat it using tech. Elsewhere, hope is being pinned on internal medical science, where nutritionists are trying to find substances that make people eat less.

UK scientists may have found a food supplement that selectively switches off cravings, removing the desire for high-calorie fatty foods while leaving the healthy appetite unaffected. The supplement is inulin-propionate ester, developed by researchers at Imperial College London. In a test with 20 volunteers, the researchers found that the supplement results in both less cravings for junk food, and eating smaller portions.


This test involved volunteers drinking either a milkshake containing 10 grams of inulin propionate ester, or inulin on its own, which acted as the control. Participants were then strapped to an MRI machine, and shown various pictures of low or high calorie foods. The scans show that those who had the supplement had less activity in the reward regions of their brain—but only when looking at high-calorie foods. They also found that the pictures looked less appealing. The volunteers were then given a bowl of pasta with tomato sauce and told to eat as much as they liked. The supplement group ate 10% less than the control.

FOOLING THE BRAIN

The supplement is based on the molecule propionate produced by gut bacteria that tells the brain when you’ve eaten enough. It originated from earlier findings that the fiber inulin can increase the production of propionate in the intestine. Therefore, by modifying inulin to contain propionate, gut bacteria is triggered to produce as much as 2.5 times more propionate. The molecule works by decreasing activity in brain areas associated with food reward.

The study was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.w

Google and NHS develops an Artificial Intelligence named "DeepMind" that can scan a Million Eyes to Fight Blindness.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO CURE EYE CONDITIONS

Google DeepMind and the NHS are developing a machine learning system with Moorfields Eye Hospital that can recognize sight-threatening conditions from just a digital scan of the eye.

Mustafa Suleyman, Deepmind’s co-founder, says this is the company’s first foray into a purely medical research. In this new collaboration with Moorfields, an algorithm will be trained using one million anonymized eye scans to train to identify early signs of degenerative eye conditions such as wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy.

“If you have diabetes you’re 25 times more likely to go blind. If we can detect this, and get in there as early as possible, then 98% of the most severe visual loss might be prevented,” says Suleyman.

By training a neural network to do the assessment of eye scans, it could greatly increase both the speed and accuracy of diagnosis, which can potentially save the sight of thousands of people.


Image source: Tim Mainiero / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
NO PRIVACY BREACH

Since the Moorfields collaboration involves anonymized information, Google has been given permission for access through a research collaboration agreement with the hospital, and has published a research protocol, as is standard practice for medical trials.

The scans can show details down to the cellular level, which is extremely useful. But if there are a million of these scans, it may take some time for doctors to process them manually, which is where Deepmind comes in.

It will probably take some time before any real results could be released, but if the research becomes successful, it could potentially help millions worldwide who are at risk of degenerative eye conditions.

Scientists Claim They’ve Developed Aspirin that Crosses the Blood-Brain Barrier

TRULY SOLUBLE

Scientists claim that have developed a truly soluble liquid aspirin that can reach the brain and kill glioblastoma cells—one of the most aggressive types of brain tumor— without causing any damage to healthy brain cells. Well, in the laboratory at least.


The study is not published and peer-reviewed yet, but it has been presented in the Brain Tumors 2016 conference in Poland by researchers from the Brain Tumour Research Centre at the Univerity of Portsmouth in the UK.

The blood-brain barrier keeps pathogens from invading the brain’s blood supply. It only allows water and some substances to pass through. It is a great shield from substances that may harm the brain but it is also a big hindrance for the success of operations where doctors need to deliver drugs directly to the brain. This mechanism is actually a reason why brain tumors cause high mortality rates.

Last year, scientists announced that they were able to get chemotherapy drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier for the first time by utilizing ultrasound to part the barrier effectively. And now, the team from UK claims to have created aspirin that can travel directly into the brain.

GOODBYE BRAIN TUMOR?

The aspirin was created by reformulating aspirin with two more ingredients, that are not revealed yet, into soluble form. The final product is called  ‘IP1867B’. It showed promising results when different formulations of the drug were tested with glioblastoma cells extracted from patients with brain tumors.

Regardless of how the ingredients were combined, it is still more effective when compared to treatments available at the present. It is also important to note that the drug did not affect normal brain cells. The drug is soon to be tested on experimental models.

Do you want Your Steak to Taste Better? Cloning Cattle Might be the Answer

Still drooling over the best steak you’ve ever had? Researchers from Texas are working to make high-quality beef more accessible with the use of cloning technology. Their aim is to use this technology to improve the yield and quality of beef cattle.

Dr.Ty Lawrence, director of the University Meat Laboratory at the West Texas A&M University, discussed the study he conducted regarding cloning in an interview with Texas Standard. Lawrence teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate courses at the university which focus on the science of meat. They conclude that combining cloning technology with breeding could help farmers improve beef yield and quality per steer.



High-quality meat served in high-end restaurants are usually low-yielding. These meat products are usually accompanied by fats that just go to waste. Coveted Japanese beef such as Kobe or Waygu requires a strict set of rules and procedures to produce. According to Lawrence, the cloning process will improve the taste fat (“marbling“), without the wasteful trim fat.

The team starts the process with the carcass of a desirable steer. “We’ve used cloning to recapture that carcass into a live animal, and then we’ve crossbred those live animals to get those calves, to see if we’re successful or not, thus far,” said Lawrence.  After an evaluation of the first seven steer produced from their technique, the cloned cattle are worth on average $140 more per animal than the natural-grown cattle.

Lawrence also made it clear that although the genetic original of the animal is cloned, the beef that arrives at grocery stores are not. “The meat that would arrive at a grocery store is not cloned,” he says. “The genetic original from that animal may have been cloned, but that’s the case already.”

NASA’s Juno Spacecraft to Arrive at Jupiter Today

THE CULMINATION OF A FIVE-YEAR JOURNEY


A model of the Juno spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA.  Photo Credit: (NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)
Today, after an almost five-year journey, NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft will arrive at Jupiter. This evening, Juno will perform an orbit insertion maneuver, a 35-minute burn of its main engine, to slow the spacecraft by about 542 meters per second (1,212 miles per hour) so it can be captured into the gas giant’s orbit.

So, what if something goes wrong? The Juno mission team is definitely prepared. They’ve programmed the spacecraft with ways to restart itself if something stops the engine burn. That’s good, because NASA really won’t be in a position to help the spacecraft if any problems arise. It takes about 48 minutes to send a radio signal to Jupiter, and 48 minutes to send one back. If there is an issue, NASA will hear about it an hour later, and by that time it will be way too late for the space agency to send any corrective signals from Earth.

Interested in live coverage of the event?

NASA TV coverage of orbital insertion begins tonight at 10:30 p.m. EDT. Or check out NASA’s “Eyes on the Solar System” app that lets you fly along with Juno during Jupiter orbit insertion.

“WE ARE READY”

Once in Jupiter’s orbit, the spacecraft will circle the Jovian world 37 times during 20 months, skimming to within 5,000 km (3,100 miles) above the cloud tops. This is the first time a spacecraft will orbit the poles of Jupiter, providing new answers to ongoing mysteries about the planet’s core, composition and magnetic fields.

“We are ready,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The science team is incredibly excited to be arriving at Jupiter.  The engineers and mission controllers are performing at an Olympic level getting Juno successfully into orbit. As Juno barrels down on Jupiter, the scientists are busy looking at the amazing approach science the spacecraft has already returned to Earth.  Jupiter is spectacular from afar and will be absolutely breathtaking from close up.”

Not quite ready for your closeup, Jupiter? Don’t worry. Juno won’t begin taking hi-def photos and videos until its first flyby on August 27. After waiting five years, another month shouldn’t be too bad for the Juno team.

MIT Confirms the Ozone Hole is Healing

MIT Confirms the Ozone Hole is Healing

PROTECTING THE PROTECTOR

The Montreal Protocol of 1987 called upon the world to control the production and use of ozone-depleting substances (ODS) in order to protect the ozone layer—which is our very own protection from high levels of ultraviolet rays from the sun.

Nearly 30 years after the whole world joined forces to address the threat brought about by the thinning ozone layer, scientists at MIT confirm that the hole over Antarctica is starting to heal.

“We can now be confident that the things we’ve done have put the planet on a path to heal,” said MIT lead researcher Susan Solomon, who also happens to be the first to distinguish the conditions of temperature and sunlight under which chlorine could eat away at the ozone layer, back in 1986.



They found evidence that the September ozone hole has shrunken by over 4 million square kilometers since. The world’s efforts to reverse the damage are showing promising results, and that is despite some setbacks caused by sulfur dioxide from volcanic eruptions.

In 2015, the hole reached a record size, which had scientists puzzled. This paper analyzed and made sense of the factors that contributed to that incident.

“Why I like this paper so much is, nature threw us a curveball in 2015,” says Ross Salawitch, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Maryland. “People thought we set a record for the depth of the ozone hole in October 2015. The Solomon paper explains it was due to a specific volcanic eruption. So without this paper, if all we had was the data, we would be scratching our heads — what was going on in 2015?”

The team measured “fingerprints” and found a substantial decline in atmospheric chlorine from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which are ozone-depleting substances emitted through old dry cleaning methods, refrigerators, and aerosols.


Aerosol sprays contain CFCs.
“It showed we can actually see a chemical fingerprint, which is sensitive to the levels of chlorine, finally emerging as a sign of recovery,” said one of the researchers, Diane Ivy.

NOT A TIME FOR COMPLACENCY

“This is a reminder that when the world gets together, we really can solve environmental problems,” Solomon said. “I think we should all congratulate ourselves on a job well done.”

The hole is estimated to be completely and permanently closed by 2050, provided the world keeps progress steady.i

A 60Tbps “FASTER” Undersea Optic Cable Connecting Japan and the US is Now Live

FASTER, the aptly named 9,000-kilometer fibre optic cable connecting Japan and the US goes live today. It is considered the highest capacity undersea fibre optic cable ever built and will be delivering 60 Terabits per second (Tbps) of bandwidth across the Pacific.
9,000 KILOMETERS, 60TBPS (Terabytes per second)

The undersea optic cable connecting Japan and the US running 9,000 kilometers from Oregon all the way to the east coast of Japan is now live!

The project, which was first announced in 2014, is the highest capacity underwater fibre optic cable ever built. It has appropriately been named “FASTER,” and rightly so—the cable will be delivering data across the Pacific at speeds of up to 60 Terabits per second (Tbps). “From the very beginning of the project, we repeatedly said to each other, ‘faster, Faster and FASTER’, and at one point it became the project name, and today it becomes a reality,” said Hiromitsu Todokoro, chairman of the FASTER management committee.

Google is being allocated 10Tbps of this bandwidth. “This is especially exciting, as we prepare to launch a new Google Cloud Platform East Asia region in Tokyo later this year,” Google’s Alan Chin-Lun Cheung wrote. “Dedicated bandwidth to this region results in faster data transfers and reduced latency as GCP customers deliver their applications and information to customers around the globe.”

Watch how FASTER was laid out across the Pacific in this video:


PREPARING FOR THE DATA-HEAVY FUTURE

FASTER hopes to address the increasing broadband traffic between the two continents, which is estimated to get heavier in the future, and also aims to cater to other service providers in Asia. It took six companies to make this feat possible: Google, Global Transit, China Telecom Global, Singtel, China Mobile International, and KDDI. Building the cable itself required the services of another party, Japanese IT company NEC Corporation. “The cable system … will help spur innovation on both sides of the Pacific to simulate the growth of the digital economy,” said Singtel vice president Ooi Seng Keat.

Long-range undersea cables seem to be turning into the new common and are stretching farther and farther with ever-competing bandwidths, with the recent construction of Facebook and Microsoft’s 4,000-mile cable across the Atlantic, and another two by…yep, Google again.

And at the dawn of the quantum computer age, it seems only fitting that internet service providers get a head start.

Single-Molecule Switch Brings Super-Fast, Light-Based Computers Closer to Reality

THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT



In case you aren’t aware, light is faster than electricity, which means that computing with light would be preferable, as it will be far faster. Moreover, by deceasing the size of components, we are also able to increase computing speed.

So what if you combine the two?

Chinese researchers are making headway in doing just that, and to that end, they may have just vastly accelerated the development of light-based computers.

Researchers from the Peking University of Beijing created a switch that can be turned on or off by just a single photon. Ultimately, this paves the way for remarkably small systems (think: microscopic) that work using light. Indeed, the team asserts that this could be useful in systems like solar panels, light sensors, and could even be applicable in biomedical technology.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

To break down the work, molecular electronics involve the development of electronic circuits from just a single molecule. Previous studies utilized diarylethene and gold electrodes. Another study used graphene and carbon nanotubes electrodes. Both methods did not work.

Additionally, previous attempts with similar projects encountered problems such as the switch getting stuck in the “on” position and some types of light not being capable of activating the component. The researchers used different materials that allow the component to stabilize in any of the binary positions and that could actually be activated by light.

But perhaps most notably, earlier versions of the switch only had short self-lives, while this one can last up to a year. According to Ioan Bâldea of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, as told to Scientific American,  “In many cases, molecular junctions have lives of minutes, hours, or in fortunate cases days.” To that end, a system that can last a year is a vast, vast improvement.

While this component will not be available for commercial use just yet, this development is a major step forward in building microscopic-scale components for our computers and electronics.

Sony Announces the creation of a robot that can form Emotional bond with people

Sony has announced plans to develop a robot “capable of forming an emotional bond with customers.”

Sony’s chief executive Kazuo Hirai did not disclose specific details about the robots, but says it will propose new business models that integrate hardware and services to provide emotionally compelling experiences.

Sony is re-entering the consumer robotics game after increased competition in the Asian markets led to massive cost cutting in 2006. It has, however, launched Aibo, its canine-modelled artificial intelligence robot. Alongside its popularity as a consumer robot, the robots were used by researchers for a number of areas, including a robotic football tournament in 2005.



FOLLOWING AIBO’S PAWSTEPS

A decade later, it seems that a lot of tech companies are finding ways to make the human-robot interaction as warm and fuzzy as possible. Japanese telecoms company SoftBank made similar “emotional” claims about its Pepper companion robot, while Boston Dynamics has unveiled earlier the SpotMini, a robot with a sense of humor.

It’s not surprisingly that Sony would want to get back in the game after it had made great strides a decade ago with AIBO dogs, which some users have gone as far as to hold funerals for.

Hirai also announced that virtual reality will be another future area of growth for Sony. The PlayStation VR system is set to launch in October, and Sony believes it’s well-placed to take advantage of the technology in areas like entertainment and digital imaging as well as gaming. The company also says it’s considering “cultivating [VR] as a new business domain.”

All in all, Sony has a lot in store for the newest generation of techies.