Robots Beat Korean National Curling Twam

A robot named Curly just mastered the sport of curling, beating two Korean national teams. Building a robot to fire stones down a length of ice might sound eccentric, I’ll grant that, but rather than simply paving the way to the All Robot Winter Olympics of 2026, Curly is actually a big achievement in machine intelligence, one that could have implications for robotics beyond the rink. The physicality of curling lies in the incredible precision required to set a stone on its course before releasing it at the hogline, giving it a spin to make it hook left or right while putting enough force behind it to land it in the house. The strategy comes from making sure your opponent doesn’t instead get their stones closest to the center of the house. For instance, a team can give a stone enough oomph to both bump out one of the other team’s stones, and with that collision halt their own stone on the target. 

The researchers couldn’t just put Curly out on the rink and have it experiment with different throws, like a human would do to master the sport. This is, in general, a massive problem in robotics: It takes way too long for a machine to learn by trial and error in the real world, and it’s liable to hurt itself by trying some far-fetched maneuver and falling over. So instead, the team built a simulation of a curling game for a digital version of Curly to play around in. In this simulation, the researchers approximated the physics of the real world as best they could, but they were also missing some information because of the peculiar physics of curling. As machines grow more advanced and find more real-world applications, they’ll frustrate the heck out of us if they remain as unadaptable and rigid as bread sticks. Just as Curly learns from its practice throws, so too must other robots adapt to the chaos of a home, office, or street, and not just stubbornly try things that no longer work. There’s no Olympic gold medal for property destruction, after all.

Credits:

https://www.wired.com/story/meet-curly-the-curling-robot-that-beats-the-pros/?utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=wiredll

Amazon Ring Now has a Drone for your Home

Ring on Thursday introduced a new product to its growing roster of smart home devices -- the Ring Always Home Cam. Unlike the Amazon company's other security cameras, the Always Home Cam is a flying camera drone that docks when it isn't in use. The Ring Always Home Cam will be available in 2021 for $250. Along with this hardware announcement, Ring says you'll be able to turn on end-to-end encryption in the Ring app's Control Center "later this year" in an effort to improve the security of its devices.

Ring says the Always Home Cam travels on a set path you designate -- it can't be controlled manually -- and you can view the feed live in the Ring app. "The path is entirely determined by the customer ... you actually walk the device around your home and ... train it on that path and can set different waypoints for the camera to fly to," Ring President Leila Rouhi told me over the phone. It has HD live streaming and a 5-minute runtime, and takes about an hour to charge. Rouhi said that short runtime was deliberate, to make it a "purpose-driven security camera." 

Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/news/amazons-new-ring-camera-is-actually-a-flying-drone-for-inside-your-home/

Texas 4th Grader Wins 2020 Google Doodle Contest

Google's annual doodle contest showcases the art of young Americans in their homepage logo, and this year was all about kindness. Fifth grader Sharon Sara was named the winner of the US 2020 Doodle for Google contest, the company announced. Sharon's doodle is featured on Google's homepage Wednesday. This year, doodle submissions had to answer the prompt: "I show kindness by...". Sharon highlighted friendship and inclusion as a way to practice kindness. “I show kindness by sticking together with my friends in tough times. I drew people coming together and not thinking about the outside but being together because of their personality," reads Sharon's statement.

Her entry, titled Together As One, features girls of different shapes, sizes and colors, in different styles of dress, holding hands in friendship. The National Doodle for Google contest began in 2008 and each year receives tens of thousands of entries from schoolkids across the US. This year's finalists included artwork of people caring for the environment and other people, as well as advocating for avoiding negativity on social media. As the national winner, Sharon will see her artwork displayed on Google's home page all day Wednesday and she'll receive a $30,000 college scholarship, some Google hardware and Googley swag. Her school in Frisco, Texas, will also receive a $50,000 technology package.

Credits:
https://www.cnet.com/news/doodle-for-google-2020-winner-finds-kindness-in-friendships-based-on-personality-not-appearance/

Github To Replace "Master" with "Main" on 10/1/2020

Starting next month, all new source code repositories created on GitHub will be named "main" instead of "master" as part of the company's effort to remove unnecessary references to slavery and replace them with more inclusive terms. By default, GitHub uses the term "master" for the primary version of a source code repository. Developers make copies of the "master" on their computers into which they add their own code, and then merge the changes back into the "master" repo.

"On October 1, 2020, any new repositories you create will use main as the default branch, instead of master," the company said. Existing repositories that have "master" set as the default branch will be left as is. "For existing repositories, renaming the default branch today causes a set of challenges," GitHub explained in a support page published earlier this month, such as having to edit settings for pull requests and modifying security policies.

Credits:

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/github-to-replace-master-with-main-starting-next-month/

So Cal School District Suffers Ransomeware Attack

A computer ransomware attack has locked up systems in the Newhall School District, leading to the cancellation of remote classes for at least Tuesday. The district issued a message to students telling them to not log on to the district's distance learning systems or use any district device. The attack came ironically on National Online Learning Day. For students and parents, it's just one more glitch in a year that has been full of unwelcome surprises. The district posted a statement that read in part:

"Newhall School District recently learned of an incident involving a ransomware attack on our systems. After we learned of this incident, we took immediate action to protect the District's system and data. We are working to restore operations and enhance the security of our platforms. A professional third-party forensics firm has been engage to investigate the ransomware incident and determine the scope of the incident. As our investigation continues, we will continue to enhance our security measures to help protect the student and employee data stored on our systems."

Credits:
https://abc7.com/ransomware-attack-newhall-school-district-cyber/6424803/

Could There Be Microbes Above Venus

Something unexpected has been discovered in the cloud decks of our nearest planetary neighbor, Venus. While no one is saying it's aliens just yet, some sort of alien microorganism is on the list of potential explanations for why a chemical that shouldn't be floating around above the planet has been observed there for the first time. The chemical is phosphine, or PH3, a compound made up of phosphorus attached to three hydrogen atoms. On Earth, certain microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments, like at a sewage plant, are believed to produce the chemical. The gas is highly toxic to humans and smells like decaying fish.

It was identified in observations of Venus made with telescopes in Hawaii and Chile in 2017 and 2019. Specifically, phosphine was found about 33 to 39 miles (53 to 62 kilometers) above the surface of Venus, a world that is known for being brutally inhospitable, with both extremely hot temperatures and crushing pressures. Interestingly, however, the altitude where the phosphine was detected is one of the more hospitable areas in the solar system beyond Earth, with temperatures and pressure comparable to the surface of our planet. There is still the problem of the sulfuric acid clouds, however, which would certainly be hostile to much of the life we know, and should also destroy phosphine.

Credits:

https://www.cnet.com/news/life-on-venus-unexplained-discovery-in-the-clouds-has-scientists-buzzing/

World's Largest Camera Takes 3200 MegaPixel Picture

Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park have successfully tested its digital camera that's capable of taking gigantic 3,200-megapixel photos. The images are made possible by 189 individual sensors spread over a two-foot wide focal plane that dwarfs a standard camera's 1.4-inch-wide imaging sensor. Each of the sensors can take 16 megapixel images. The telescope-camera, once complete, is destined for the Rubin Observatory in Chile, where it will periodically take panoramic images of the complete southern sky for a decade. Its data will feed into the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a catalog containing more galaxies than there are living people on Earth.

The camera will be about the size of an SUV once complete, which is expected to happen by mid-2021. he research team has released images taken with the focal plane of the LSST camera, as well as a camera image browser viewer. Current images include the head of a broccoli, the Flammarion engraving, and a collage of the camera team. The images aren't as clear as those that will eventually be possible because they weretaken without a lens. Instead, the SLAC team used a 150-micron sized pinhole to project images onto the focal plane. How much will it cost to assemble this giant LSST camera? A whopping $168 million, according to the telescope's designer, the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

Credits:
https://newatlas.com/photography/worlds-largest-camera-first-3200-megapixel-photo/

Tufts Creates Bio Robots

Imagine miniature self-repairing living robots that could move, carry things, and work together—safely delivering drugs inside the human body or helping with environmental remediation. Even more importantly, imagine using such synthetic creations to teach us how to control the formation of organs for regenerative medicine. Now researchers at Tufts and the University of Vermont report that they have created such living machines, what they call Xenobots, that might one day do just that. 

While most machines are constructed from materials like steel and plastic, which can degrade or break over time and have harmful side effects, living systems made from self-renewing and biocompatible materials would avoid those negative consequences. An important part of creating the self-renewal feature will come from understanding how cells cooperate to create functional organisms in nature, and then using that knowledge to create functional bodies in novel arrangements. The researchers foresee an iterative process in which the synthetic organisms allow them to test theories of body development in nature, which in turn will inform improved robot design. To create the Xenobots, the UVM research team first used computer simulations to help figure out how such living machines would work, testing a variety of shapes and cellular arrangements. The simulations tested different designs to select a desired behavior, allowing failed designs to “die” and successful designs to survive in a virtual world.  

Click here for a video.

Credits:

https//now.tufts.edu/articles/new-living-machines-are-created-lab

College Frosh Creates a Dating Appa

An online dating network that recently launched at Stanford University aims to help students overcome an obstacle many people face when it comes to finding love: the fear of rejection. Unlike Tinder, Bumble or OkCupid, which connect strangers with one another with the help of user profiles, Ishan Gandhi's Link works within a preexisting community. Gandhi hopes to establish his network at 100 colleges and universities across the U.S. and have a quarter-million users this time next year. As of Wednesday afternoon, 2,250 Stanford students were signed up. The rising sophomore's idea for the app came through conversations with friends who had crushes but lacked the confidence to pursue them. Gandhi, a computer science major, started working on Link after classes ended earlier this year while in his hometown of London and rolled out the app earlier this month.

Using their Stanford email address, students can fill out a form with their name and the names of up to three romantic interests once a month. Any two students whose names match up on the app receive an email. (The first round of matches were sent out a week after the app rolled out.) Users also have the option to include their crush's email address, and Link will send that person a message. An algorithm connects students whose names are a match on the app and no human ever looks at the data, Gandhi said. The app comes at a time when more people are spending most of their time at home and itching for social connections. Gandhi has secured a $50,000 investment through the father of a friend he met through the university's BlockChain club that will help pay server costs and build more durable databases. He plans to take a year off from Stanford to expand Link (which he said was an easy decision considering the academic year is kicking off in a nontraditional fashion).

Credits:
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/08/29/around-town-stanford-students-new-dating-app-helps-crushes-connect