Cassini takes close-up pictures of Saturnian moon’s north pole

Yes, the image above shows the cratered surface of a moon, but it’s not ours — it’s Saturn’s ice-covered satellite, Enceladus. NASA has received the first batch of photos Cassini captured during its flyby close to the celestial body’s north pole on October 14th. This is the first time we’ve seen that part of Enceladus up close, as it always seemed to be engulfed in wintry darkness those previous times the spacecraft passed by. Apparently, NASA expected its surface to be heavily cratered based on the low-res images taken by Voyager decades ago. While it turns out that it is indeed cratered, we now know that it’s also covered in cobwebby cracks. “These thin cracks are ubiquitous on Enceladus,” Cassini imaging team member Paul Helfenstein said, “and now we see that they extend across the northern terrains as well.”

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The October 14th flyby was the first in a series of three — the probe is scheduled to come within 30 miles of the moon’s south pole on October 28. The final encounter will be on December 19th, and it might be the last time Cassini flies close to Enceladus, as it has other missions to accomplish within the remaining two years of its life. We’ve uploaded some of the photos the spacecraft sent back above, but you can see more raw images right here.

[Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute]

Source: NASA

ICYMI: Pig organ donors, 3D-printed car fashion and more

Today on In Case You Missed It: Gene researchers published a paper detailing how they removed DNA sequences from pig cells that are normally harmful to humans, which could eventually lead to pig organs successfully being used in humans. No word on how the pigs feel about that. A clothing line made to synchronize with Audi at a car show put vehicle sensors within the clothing, reacting when people got near. And MIT’s Media Lab continues its work with a kinetic energy machine that can react to people waving a hand over it. It’s half art, half mesmerizing.

On the off chance you are immune to all things Back to the Future, you may have missed that it’s the 30th anniversary. That’s why Universal just unveiled a commercial starring the most annoying brah future kid, peddling an official hoverboard replica. Please hate watch it with me?

If you come across any interesting videos, we’d love to see them. Just tweet us with the #ICYMI hashtag @engadget or @mskerryd.

Stanford researchers make artificial skin that senses touch

A team from Stanford University might have made a breakthrough that could change the lives of people with missing limbs. Researchers have developed an artificial substitute for skin that is capable of sensing when it is being touched and sending that data to the nervous system. It’s hoped that technology like this could be used to build futuristic prostheses that could be wired into the nervous systems of amputees. In addition, not only will these people be able to know if they’re touching something, they’ll also know how much pressure is being used.

Put very simply, the skin is comprised of two layers of rubbery plastic skin with a flexible circuit printed on, courtesy of the folks at Xerox Parc. Sandwiched between the two is a run of carbon nanotubes, which conduct electricity when they’re pushed closer together. The harder the compression, the more current passes between them, which is how the skin can understand differences in pressure.

That, however, isn’t enough, since that data would still have to be transmitted somehow into the user’s brain. In the end, the team opted to harness a field of science called optogenetics, which involves genetically-engineering cells so that they react to specific frequencies of light. By creating optogenetic neurons that are capable of sensing light patterns, the team proved that it’s possible to make this technology work in a person.

Admittedly, we’re still years away from an initial human test, and project leader Professor Zhenan Bao doesn’t believe that optogenetics is a suitable solution. There are also more things that just pressure that human skin can sense, like temperature and friction, all of which would still need to be replicated. Even so, this breakthrough could prove to be enormous in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

[Image Credit: Stanford University Bao Lab]

Via: NBC News

Source: Stanford

You’ll never believe what neural networks can do now

Clickbait headlines are the lowest form of journalism, but could they be written by a machine? After all, the Associated Press is using one to write complete financial articles, terrible as they are. Developer Lars Eidnes figured that “if this sort of writing truly is formulaic and unoriginal, we should be able to produce it automatically.” Rather than building another Upworthy-style headline generator, however, Eidnes took it up a notch by enlisting a so-called recurrent neural network (RNN). That’s the same type of machine learning used by SwiftKey, for one, on its beta SwiftKey Neural word-prediction app.

Eidnes developed algorithms that logically pick words, then trained the system using some “2 million headlines scraped from Buzzfeed, Gawker, Jezebel, Huffington Post and Upworthy.” He dryly noted the titles don’t need to make sense, because “it’s not clear that clickbait needs to have any relation to the real world in order to be successful.” As proof, he cited this gem from Buzzfeed: “22 faces that everyone who has pooped will immediately recognize.”

After crunching the results multiple times on a high-end NVIDIA GTX-980 graphics card, the resulting headlines are surprisingly good. “Most of them are grammatically correct, and a lot of them even make sense,” said Eidnes, citing examples like “Romney camp: ‘I think you are a bad president,’” or “Biden responds to Hillary Clinton’s speech.” (Others are hilarious nonsense, like “This guy thinks his cat was drunk for five years, he gets a sex assault at a home.”)

As final proof of the concept, Eidnes built an entire machine-written clickbait website. His algorithms chooses photos from Wikimedia Commons based on keywords from his clickbait headines. The article body is also seeded with headline words, and the author’s names are picked by his neural network. The glorious result is Click-o-Tron, a site that generates a new article every 20 minutes. “This gives us an infinite source of useless journalism, available at no cost… forcing other producers of useless journalism to produce something else.” We’ll be shocked if that happens next.

Via: The Stack

Source: Lars Eidnes