Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun — sometimes called the ‘godfathers of AI’ — have been recognized with the $1 million annual prize for their work developing the AI subfield of deep learning. The techniques the trio developed in the 1990s and 2000s enabled huge breakthroughs in tasks like computer vision and speech recognition. Their work underpins the current proliferation of AI technologies, from self-driving cars to automated medical diagnoses.
A new graphene-based brain implant could help provide information about the onset and progression of epileptic seizures and pave the way for next generation brain-computer interfaces.
The new implant, which records electrical activity in the brain over large areas and at frequencies below 0.1Hz, is said to overcome the limitations of electrode arrays that have only been able to detect activity over a certain frequency threshold.
The technology was developed by Graphene Flagship partners at the Barcelona Microelectronics Institute (IMB-CNM, CSIC), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), and ICFO.
Terrestrial organisms stuck on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) have survived 533 days in the vacuum, intense ultraviolet radiation, and extreme temperature variations of space.
You know what that means? It’s not impossible for life to survive on Mars.
Of all the planets in the Solar System, Mars seems like the most likely candidate to host life. But it’s extremely inhospitable — dusty, arid, lower in gravity and oxygen, subject to harsh radiation due to its thinner atmosphere, cold and wracked by dust storms that can plunge the planet into darkness.
More than 1,000 people have been infected with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo since August 2018, according to the World Health Organization. The hemorrhagic fever, which is concentrated in the provinces of North Kivu and Ituri, has killed 629 people as of Sunday. That makes it the second worst Ebola outbreak on record, after the one that began in West Africa in 2014, which infected more than 26,000 and killed an estimated 11,300 people over the course of two years.
Here’s what you need to know:
Ebola is actually a group of viruses that appear to be spread by bats to humans and other primates such as apes and chimpanzees. It is transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, poop, vomit, urine, breast milk, and semen. It can enter a person’s body through cuts in the skin, or through mucous membranes—tissues that line the eyes, nose, mouth, urethra, and vagina. At first, Ebola may seem like the common flu. Symptoms include exhaustion, aches and pains, vision problems, and stomach pain. But in most patients, Ebola quickly escalates to a full-blown hemorrhagic fever, which leads to bleeding, organ failure, and in many cases, death.
Stimulation with ultrafast light pulses can realize and manipulate states of matter with emergent structural, electronic and magnetic phenomena. According to a new study, published in the journal Nature Materials, an ultrafast laser pulse plus ‘frustration’ resulted in a new state of matter — a ‘supercrystal.’
It was a way for machines to see the world around them, recognize sounds and even understand natural language. But scientists had spent more than 50 years working on the concept of neural networks, and machines couldn’t really do any of that.
Backed by the Canadian government, Dr. Hinton, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto, organized a new research community with several academics who also tackled the concept. They included Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, and Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal.
On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that Drs. Hinton, LeCun and Bengio had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on neural networks. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the three scientists will share.
