The robot, known as BatiPrint3D, uses a special polymer material that should keep the building insulated effectively for a century.

It took BatiPrint3D around 18 days to complete its part of the work on the house – creating hollow walls that were subsequently filled with concrete for insulation.

“Is this the future? It’s a solution and a constructive principle that is interesting because we create the house directly on site and in addition thanks to the robot, we are able to create walls with complex shapes,” said Benoit Furet, a professor who worked on the project.

The 95 square meter (1000 square feet), five-room house will be allocated to a local family which qualifies for social housing, authorities said.

The Y-shaped home is equipped with multiple sensors that monitor air quality, humidity and temperature, as well as equipment to evaluate and analyze the thermal properties of the building.

Researchers believe this technology will enable tenants to save on energy costs.

Authorities in Nantes are planning further 3D-printed building projects, including a public reception building and a housing estate.

Reuters

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The J2 Pro does not have access to the 3G and 4G data networks, although it can be connected to the internet on WiFi networks.

It is also equipped with front and rear cameras and a high-resolution five-inch screen.

The model is targeted at students to avoid exam distractions caused by permanent connection to the network and elderly people who do not use the internet regularly, according to a Samsung statement.

The phone has launched at 1,99,100 won ($185) in South Korea, and with a promotional scheme for students which allows them to exchange it for a high-end model after exams finish.

Tens of thousands of students take the university exams that are usually held in November.

The exams are considered so important that South Korea streamlines public transport and deploys law enforcement agencies during the period.

IANS

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The technique uses attachments that can be inexpensively produced with a 3-D printer, the study said.

“Using deep learning, we set out to bridge the gap in image quality between inexpensive mobile phone-based microscopes and gold-standard bench-top microscopes that use high-end lenses,” said one of the lead researchers Aydogan Ozcan, Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, US.

“We believe that our approach is broadly applicable to other low-cost microscopy systems that use, for example, inexpensive lenses or cameras, and could facilitate the replacement of high-end bench-top microscopes with cost-effective, mobile alternatives,” Ozcan added.

He said the new technique could find numerous applications in global health, telemedicine and diagnostics-related applications.

Cameras on today’s smartphones are designed to photograph people and scenery, not to produce high-resolution microscopic images.

So the researchers developed an attachment that can be placed over the smartphone lens to increase the resolution and the visibility of tiny details of the images they take, down to a scale of approximately one millionth of a metre.

But that only solved part of the challenge, because no attachment would be enough to compensate for the difference in quality between smartphone cameras’ image sensors and lenses and those of high-end lab equipment.

The new technique compensates for the difference by using AI to reproduce the level of resolution and colour details needed for a laboratory analysis.

IANS

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The survey, also known as Tess, is NASA’s next step in the search for exoplanets, including those that could support life.

Once in orbit, Tess will spend about two years surveying 200,000 of the brightest stars near the Sun to search for planets outside our solar system.

Tess will find the most promising exoplanets orbiting relatively nearby stars, giving future researchers a rich set of new targets for more comprehensive follow-up studies, including the potential to assess their capacity to harbour life.

With the help of a gravitational assist from the Moon, the spacecraft will settle into a 13.7-day orbit around Earth, NASA said in an earlier statement.

Sixty days after the launch and following tests of its instruments, the satellite will begin its initial two-year mission. Four wide-field cameras will give Tess a field-of-view that covers 85 per cent of our entire sky.

Within this vast visual perspective, the sky has been divided into 26 sectors that Tess will observe one by one.

The first year of observations will map the 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky, and the second year will map the 13 sectors of the northern sky.

The spacecraft will be looking for a phenomenon known as a transit, where a planet passes in front of its star, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft used the same method to spot more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets, most of them orbiting faint stars 300 to 3,000 light-years away.

IANS

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The system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system.

The signals are fed to a Machine Learning (ML) system that has been trained to correlate particular signals with particular words.

“The motivation for this was to build an IA device—an intelligence-augmentation device,” said Arnav Kapur, graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who led the development of the new system.

“Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?” he added.

Kapur is first author on the paper. Pattie Maes, Professor of Media Arts and Sciences is the senior author and he is joined by Shreyas Kapur, an undergraduate major in electrical engineering and computer science.

The device is part of a complete silent-computing system that lets the user undetectably pose and receive answers to difficult computational problems.

The idea that internal verbalisations have physical correlates has been around since the 19^th century, and it was seriously investigated in the 1950s.

One of the goals of the speed-reading movement of the 1960s was to eliminate internal verbalisation, or subvocalisation, as it’s known.

According to Kapur, the system’s performance should improve with more training data, which could be collected during its ordinary use.

“We’re in the middle of collecting data, and the results look nice,” Kapur said. “I think we’ll achieve full conversation someday.”

The researchers have described their device in a paper presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s “ACM Intelligent User Interface” conference.

IANS

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The two-hour launch window will open at 4 a.m. on July 31, and will be repeated each day (at slightly earlier times) through August 19, the US space agency said in a statement.

After launch, it will orbit directly through the solar atmosphere – the corona – closer to the surface than any human-made object has ever gone

While facing brutal heat and radiation, the mission will reveal fundamental science behind what drives the solar wind, the constant outpouring of material from the Sun that shapes planetary atmospheres and affects space weather near Earth.

At Astrotech Space Operations in Florida, the Parker Solar Probe will continue testing, and eventually undergo final assembly and mating to the third stage of the Delta IV Heavy launch vehicle.

“This is the second most important flight Parker Solar Probe will make, and we’re excited to be safely in Florida and continuing pre-launch work on the spacecraft,” said Andy Driesman, Parker Solar Probe project manager from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

For the next several months, the spacecraft will undergo comprehensive testing; just prior to being fueled, one of the most critical elements of the spacecraft, the thermal protection system (TPS), or heat shield, will be installed.

The TPS is the breakthrough technology that will allow Parker Solar Probe to survive the temperatures in the Sun’s corona, just 3.8 million miles from the surface of our star.

“There are many milestones to come for Parker Solar Probe and the amazing team of men and women who have worked so diligently to make this mission a reality,” Driesman said.

“The installation of the TPS will be our final major step before encapsulation and integration onto the launch vehicle.”

Throughout its seven-year mission, Parker Solar Probe will explore the Sun’s outer atmosphere and make critical observations to answer decades-old questions about the physics of stars.

Its data will also be useful in improving forecasts of major eruptions on the Sun and the subsequent space weather events that impact technology on Earth, as well as satellites and astronauts in space.

IANS

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These microfactories can also turn many types of consumer waste such as glass, plastic and timber into commercial materials and products.

Using technology developed after extensive scientific research at the SMaRT Centre, the e-waste microfactory has the potential to reduce the rapidly growing problem of vast amounts of electronic waste that cause environmental harm and go into landfills.

The microfactories can use e-waste like computer circuit boards to make metal alloys such as copper and tin, while glass and plastic from e-devices can be converted into micromaterials used in industrial-grade ceramics and plastic filaments for 3D printing.

“Our e-waste (microfactory) and another under development for other consumer waste types offer a cost-effective solution to one of the greatest environmental challenges of our age, while delivering new job opportunities to our cities but importantly to our rural and regional areas, too,” said the Mumbai-born Sahajwalla, who did her B.Tech in metallurgical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1986.

“Using our green manufacturing technologies, these microfactories can transform waste where it is stockpiled and created, enabling local businesses and communities to not only tackle local waste problems but develop a commercial opportunity from the valuable materials that are created,” she said.

According to Sahajwalla, microfactories present a solution to burning and burying of waste items that contain materials that can be transformed into value-added substances and products to meet existing and new industry and consumer demands. She termed microfactories a “truly sustainable solution to our growing waste problem while offering economic benefits available to local communities”.

“We have proven you can transform just about anything at the micro-level and transform waste streams into value-added products. For example, instead of looking at plastics as just a nuisance, we’ve shown scientifically that you can generate materials from that waste stream to create smart filaments for 3D printing,” she said.

“These microfactories can transform the manufacturing landscape, especially in remote locations where typically the logistics of having waste transported or processed are prohibitively expensive. This is especially beneficial for the island markets and the remote and regional regions of the country.”

UNSW has developed the technology with support from the Australian Research Council and is now in partnership with a number of businesses and organisations, including e-waste recycler TES, mining manufacturer Moly-Cop, and Dresden which makes spectacles.

UNSW is one of the world’s leading research and teaching universities and is home to more than 52,000 students from nearly 130 countries. UNSW is ranked 45^th in the world, according to QS World University ranking.

Sahajwalla has received numerous awards, including Distinguished Alumnus Award by the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for her outstanding contributions in the field of materials processing for sustainable development (2015), and also the Eureka Prize (2005), Pravasi Bhartiya Samman for outstanding achievement in science (2011).

IANS

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“Our goals are to understand Facebook’s impact on upcoming elections—like Brazil, India, Mexico and the US midterms—and to inform our future product and policy decisions,” Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Communications and Public Policy, and David Ginsberg, Director of Research at Facebook, said in a blog post.

“Facebook will not have any right to review or approve their research findings prior to publication,” they added.

Facebook claimed it has made real progress since Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election in fighting fake news, as well as combating foreign interference, in elections in France, Germany, Alabama and Italy.

”But there is much more to do – and we don’t have all the answers. This initiative will enable Facebook to learn from the advice and analysis of outside experts so we can make better decisions – and faster progress,” the post further read.

Facebook will invite respected academic experts to form a commission which will then develop a research agenda about the impact of social media on society – starting with upcoming elections.

The initial term of the commission will be one year and membership will be determined in the coming weeks.

The commission will exercise its mandate in several ways. This will include prioritisation of research agenda, solicitation of independent research and providing access to information while protecting privacy, among others.

“Facebook and our funding partners recognise the threat presented by the recent misuse of Facebook data, including by an academic associated with Cambridge Analytica,” the blog post noted.

Any proposal submitted through this process must first have been reviewed by a university Institutional Review Board (IRB), or the international equivalent.

“When Facebook data is requested, proposals will be subject to additional review by Facebook’s privacy and research review teams—as well as external privacy experts that the commission identifies,” the post said.

Facebook has said that it will begin connecting with the 87 million users – including 562,455 in India – from Monday if their personal data was “improperly shared” with the British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.

Those affected by the data privacy breach will see a detailed message at the top of their newsfeeds.

A Facebook spokesperson said a possible breach of data of 562,455 users happened after 335 Facebook users in India installed a quiz app, “thisisyourdigitallife” between November 2013 and December 2015.

IANS

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The robot is able to understand and speak 23 languages and is equipped with software that allows it to understand students’ requirements and helps it to encourage learning. In this trial however, it communicates in English, Finnish and German only.

The robot recognizes the pupil’s skill levels and adjusts its questions accordingly. It also gives feedback to teachers about a student’s possible problems.

Some of the human teachers who have worked with the technology see it as a new way to engage children in learning.

“I think in the new curriculum the main idea is to get the kids involved and get them motivated and make them active. I see Elias as one of the tools to get different kinds of practice and different kinds of activities into the classroom,” language teacher Riikka Kolunsarka told Reuters.

“In that sense I think robots and coding the robots and working with them is definitely something that is according to the new curriculum and something that we teachers need to be open minded about.”

Elias the language robot, which stands around a foot tall, is based on SoftBank’s NAO humanoid interactive companion robot, with software developed by Utelias, a developer of educational software for social robots.

The Maths robot – dubbed OVObot – which is a small, blue machine around 25 cm (10 inches) high and resembles an owl, was developed by Finnish AI Robots.

The purpose of the pilot project is to see if these robots can improve the quality of teaching, with one of the Elias robots and three of the OVObots deployed in schools. The OVObots will be trialled for one year, while the school has bought the Elias robot, so its use can continue longer.

Using robots in classrooms is not new – teaching robots have been used in the Middle East, Asia and the United States in recent years, but modern technologies such as cloud services and 3D printing are allowing smaller start-up companies to enter the sector.

“Well, it is fun, interesting and exciting and I’m a bit shocked,” pupil Abisha Jinia told Reuters, giving her verdict on Elias the language robot.

Despite their skills in language and mathematics however, the robots’ inability to maintain discipline amongst a class of primary school children means that, for the time being at least, the human teachers’ jobs are safe.

Reuters

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The latest NASA astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years, revolutionizing one of the newest fields in space science.

NASA expects TESS to detect thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized — no larger than twice as big as our home planet.

Such worlds are believed to stand the greatest chance of having rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the most promising candidates for the evolution of life, as opposed to gas giants similar to Jupiter or Neptune.

Astronomers said they hope to end up with about 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study.

The new probe will take about 60 days to attain its highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit that will loop TESS between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks.

Kepler’s positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, and though scientists found a way to keep it operational it has nearly run out of fuel.

“So it’s perfect timing that we’ll be launching TESS to continue the great activity of looking for planets around stars other than our sun and thinking about what it might mean for life in the universe,” Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, told reporters at a news briefing in Washington on Wednesday.

TESS, roughly the size of a refrigerator with solar-panel wings, is equipped with four special cameras to survey 200,000 stars that are relatively near the sun and thus among the brightest in the sky, seeking out those with planets of their own.

Like Kepler, TESS will use a detection method called transit photometry, which looks for periodic, repetitive dips in the visible light from stars caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of them.

But unlike Kepler, which fixed its glare on stars within a tiny fraction of the sky, TESS will scan the majority of the heavens for shorter periods and focus much of its attention on stars called red dwarfs, which are smaller, cooler and longer-lived than our sun.

One reason is red dwarfs have a high propensity for Earth-sized, presumably rocky planets, making them potentially fertile ground for closer examination, said David Latham, TESS science director for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Also because red dwarfs are so small, and their planets orbit more closely than the Earth does to the sun, the dip in light from a planetary transit of a red dwarf is more pronounced compared with a larger star, Latham said.

“It’s easier to find interesting planets around smaller stars,” he said.

Measuring dips in starlight can determine the exoplanet’s size and orbital path. Further observations from ground telescopes can supply its mass and ultimately the planet’s density and composition — whether largely solid, liquid or gas.

Martin Still, the TESS program scientist for NASA, said more than 50 rocky, Earth- or super-Earth-sized planets have previously been identified, and NASA expects to increase that number through the new mission.

The most favorable discoveries will undergo closer scrutiny by a new generation of larger, more powerful telescopes now under development that will search for telltale signs of water and “the kinds of gases in their atmospheres that on Earth are an indication of life,” Hertz said.

“TESS itself will not be able to find life beyond Earth, but TESS will help us figure out where to point our larger telescopes,” he said.

Reuters

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