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September 02, 2021

 "WE SEE THIS AS A TOOL FOR MULTIPLY PROGRAMMERS," 



Work that is arduous

Elon Musk's AI research business, OpenAI, has just released a new algorithm dubbed Codex that can comprehend orders written in English and turn them into pieces of useful code.

Codex is said to be able to take instructions and turn them into tangible software like rudimentary games or webpages, either as a technique to ease programming labour for expert coders or as a tool to assist newcomers learn. According to The Verge, a user might explain the basic appearance or functionality of a website they wish to construct in daily English, including things like menu arrangement and text box positioning, and Codex would create a minimal design depending on how it interpreted the request.

Assistant with Artificial Intelligence

The goal isn't to put AI in charge of programming entirely. Instead, Codex functions as a programmer's assistant or deputy, taking conceptual ideas and attempting to implement them through code.

OpenAI CTO and co-founder Greg Brockman told The Verge, "We see this as a tool to multiply programmers." “You have to ‘think hard about an issue and try to comprehend it,' and then ‘map those small pieces to existing code, whether it's a library, a function, or an API.'”

Humans find the second half monotonous, but Codex thrives at it, according to Brockman: “It takes folks who are already programmers and takes away the tedium.”

GPT-3, OpenAI's infamous text-generating algorithm that was trained on massive sections of the written internet, is the foundation of Open Source Codex. The extra sourcing for Codex, though, may annoy the existing open-source programming community, according to The Verge. That's because Codex is based on data gathered from open-source code repositories that programmers created and shared with the rest of the world.

Technically, Codex might be viewed as a more efficient way of accomplishing this, and OpenAI informed The Verge that it is not infringing on any copyright restrictions. However, by constructing such a powerful tool on the backs of volunteers, OpenAI risks being accused of profiteering from a collaborative community's free work, so it will be interesting to see how programmers react to the new tool.


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August 16, 2021



WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY BATTERIES ARE REALLY RECYCLED.

Batteries Can Be Recycled

Tesla claims in its 2020 Impact Report that it can now recycle up to 92 percent of the raw materials used in its battery cells, a method that the company's facilities have already started to apply.

The procedure could have a significant impact on the environmental cost of producing electric vehicle battery packs. Not only is the process energy-intensive, but Tesla's current battery lineup also requires cobalt, a rare element linked to controversial mining practises in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, and elsewhere.

Long-term planning

Tesla, for example, did not provide any particular numbers on how many battery packs it recycled last year.

Tesla battery packs recycled 1,300 tonnes of nickel, 400 tonnes of copper, and 80 tonnes of cobalt in 2020, according to the company's calculations.

According to the study, “a Tesla battery pack is meant to outlast the vehicle itself.” “As a result, just a handful customer Tesla batteries have been retired to date, including those from our nearly nine-year-old Model S cars.”

According to InsideEVs, Tesla has been working with third-parties on the process for more than two years, but has remained tight-lipped about any details.

The study states, "The modest number of post-consumer batteries that we acquire are mostly generated from our fleet of on-the-road cars, predominantly taxi-like vehicles."

Because the Model S has only been in production for nine years, it will “likely be some time before we start getting back batteries in bigger volumes,” according to the business.

Tesla is keen on creating its own nickel, cobalt, and copper from recovered batteries, thus it makes sense for the company to invest in improving its recycling procedures.

Fortunately, this could also be beneficial to the environment.


This article is originally published in - futurism


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June 28, 2021



Scientists have revealed a fascinating new design for an incredibly tiny, inflatable spinal cord implant, suited for treating severe chronic back pain that doesn't respond to medication.

The inflatable electronic device is part of a spinal cord stimulator (SCS) setup, a type of well-established therapy that delivers mild electric currents to a person's spinal cord via implanted electrodes. That current is sent by a small, implanted pulse generator device, and the whole thing reduces pain because the electrical pulses help to mask pain signals traveling to the brain via the spinal cord.

If that all sounds rather invasive, that's because it is. But this new device, designed by a team led by scientists from the University of Cambridge in the UK, could help to change that - with less invasive surgery requirements.

"Spinal cord stimulation is a treatment of last resort, for those whose pain has become so severe that it prevents them from carrying out everyday activities," says University of Cambridge clinical neuroscientist Damiano Barone.

"An effective device that doesn't require invasive surgery could bring relief to so many people."

The trickiest aspect of currently available SCS devices is the part where you have to stick electrodes into a person's spinal column, laying them across the dura, the fibrous outer layer that wraps around the nerve cells within.

While these electrode implants are tiny - just a few millimeters across - getting to the spinal column through our bony, protective vertebra is no easy task. To implant the most effective devices currently available (shaped like tiny paddles), surgeons have to remove a small piece of a vertebra and thread it through.

vertebra opening lamination implant

Schematic of a typical paddle implant route. (Kumar et al., Neuromodulation, 2009)

Alternatively, there are smaller devices available which can be inserted with a large needle, but these have proven to be less effective at actually managing pain, possibly because they tend to control fewer electrodes over a smaller area.

The new inflatable device combines the best of both worlds. Ingeniously, it can be rolled up to a diameter of just 2 millimeters, allowing it to fit inside a standard hollow needle only slightly thicker than the ones typically used for epidural anesthetic.

Once in place, the device is then rolled out into the more effective paddle shape like a teeny tiny air mattress up to 60 micrometers thick, with just a small squirt of air or liquid.

full device with string and needle 2

The full device (top), shown in rolled up and unrolled shape (bottom). (Woodington et al., Sci. Adv., 2021)

This clever application is possible because the research team combined two paradigms in their design - flexible electronics that allow for a device to change its shape after implantation, and the addition of microfluidic channels for inflating it.

"Thin-film electronics aren't new, but incorporating fluid chambers is what makes our device unique – this allows it to be inflated into a paddle-type shape once it is inside the patient," explained engineer Christopher Proctor, also from the University of Cambridge.

The team tested their device in vitro, using a model of a spinal column to see how the electrodes would perform after all that rolling and inflating, and achieved excellent results. They then proceeded to validate the design with implantation surgeries on human cadavers donated to science.

"The intention behind this was to validate the underlying mode of operation for the device and to test its mechanical capability," the team wrote in their study.

Overall, the researchers believe that their design - already patented by the commercialization arm of the University of Cambridge - could not only reduce the need for invasive surgery to deliver life-changing SCS therapy to people living with severe pain, but enhances the availability of such devices for future applications.

"We envisage a device that could cover a much larger area while retaining a small insertion footprint, offering a new paradigm for central nervous system interfaces," they wrote.

The study describing the new design was published in Science Advances.
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January 18, 2020
Einstein's mass-energy equivalence (1905):

E = mc2, equation in German-born physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity that expresses the fact that mass and energy are the same physical entity and can be changed into each other. In the equation, the increased relativistic mass (m) of a body times the speed of light squared (c2) is equal to the kinetic energy (E) of that body.

What does it say?
Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.
In other words ...
Mass is really just a super-condensed form of energy.
What did it teach us?
Because of the size of the constant in the equation (the speed of light squared, an unimaginably huge number) a colossal amount of energy can be released through converting a tiny amount of mass.
But was it practical?
Einstein's most famous equation hinted at the potential for the huge amounts of energy released in nuclear fission, when a large unstable nucleus breaks into two smaller ones. This is because the mass of the two smaller nuclei together is always less than the mass of the original big nucleus – and the missing mass is converted into energy.
The "Fat Man" atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki in Japan on 9 August 1945 converted just one gram of mass to energy, but produced an explosion the equivalent around 20,000 tonnes of TNT.
Einstein himself had signed a letter to US president at the time Franklin Roosevelt recommending the atom bomb be developed – a decision he later regarded as the “one great mistake” of his life.


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January 01, 2020


The Earth's inner core is hot, under immense pressure and snow-capped, according to new research that could help scientists better understand forces that affect the entire planet.
The snow is made of tiny particles of iron -- much heavier than any snowflake on Earth's surface -- that fall from the molten outer core and pile on top of the inner core, creating piles up to 200 miles thick that cover the inner core.
The image may sound like an alien winter wonderland. But the scientists who led the research said it is akin to how rocks form inside volcanoes.
"The Earth's metallic core works like a magma chamber that we know better of in the crust," said Jung-Fu Lin, a professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences at The University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study.
The study is available online and will be published in the print edition of the journal JGR Solid Earth on December 23.
Youjun Zhang, an associate professor at Sichuan University in China, led the study. The other co-authors include Jackson School graduate student Peter Nelson; and Nick Dygert, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who conducted the research during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Jackson School.
The Earth's core can't be sampled, so scientists study it by recording and analyzing signals from seismic waves (a type of energy wave) as they pass through the Earth.
However, aberrations between recent seismic wave data and the values that would be expected based on the current model of the Earth's core have raised questions. The waves move more slowly than expected as they passed through the base of the outer core, and they move faster than expected when moving through the eastern hemisphere of the top inner core.
The study proposes the iron snow-capped core as an explanation for these aberrations. The scientist S.I. Braginkskii proposed in the early 1960s that a slurry layer exists between the inner and outer core, but prevailing knowledge about heat and pressure conditions in the core environment quashed that theory. However, new data from experiments on core-like materials conducted by Zhang and pulled from more recent scientific literature found that crystallization was possible and that about 15% of the lowermost outer core could be made of iron-based crystals that eventually fall down the liquid outer core and settle on top of the solid inner core.
"It's sort of a bizarre thing to think about," Dygert said. "You have crystals within the outer core snowing down onto the inner core over a distance of several hundred kilometers."
The researchers point to the accumulated snow pack as the cause of the seismic aberrations. The slurry-like composition slows the seismic waves. The variation in snow pile size -- thinner in the eastern hemisphere and thicker in the western -- explains the change in speed.
"The inner-core boundary is not a simple and smooth surface, which may affect the thermal conduction and the convections of the core," Zhang said.
The paper compares the snowing of iron particles with a process that happens inside magma chambers closer to the Earth's surface, which involves minerals crystalizing out of the melt and glomming together. In magma chambers, the compaction of the minerals creates what's known as "cumulate rock." In the Earth's core, the compaction of the iron contributes to the growth of the inner core and shrinking of the outer core.
And given the core's influence over phenomena that affects the entire planet, from generating its magnetic field to radiating the heat that drives the movement of tectonic plates, understanding more about its composition and behavior could help in understanding how these larger processes work.
Bruce Buffet, a geosciences professor at the University of California, Berkley who studies planet interiors and who was not involved in the study, said that the research confronts longstanding questions about the Earth's interior and could even help reveal more about how the Earth's core came to be.
"Relating the model predictions to the anomalous observations allows us to draw inferences about the possible compositions of the liquid core and maybe connect this information to the conditions that prevailed at the time the planet was formed," he said. "The starting condition is an important factor in Earth becoming the planet we know."
The research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, the Jackson School of Geosciences, the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.


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