Curating the Internet: Science and technology micro-summaries for September 2, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago (edited)

IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos; Self-citations make scientific publishing metrics more difficult; A Steem lesson on human anatomy: the support system; Facebook is developing a digital assistant in Minecraft; Hoping to reinvigorate Moore's Law with carbon nanotubes


Straight from my RSS feed	Whatever gets my attention

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

pixabay license: source.

Video Friday: This Robotic Thread Could One Day Travel Inside Your Brain - IEEE Spectrum's weekly selection of awesome robot videos includes an autonomous drone that can fly, dive underwater, or swim on the water's surface; a gripper for marine biologists to study jellyfish; A robotic thread designed for brain surgery; A video showing the construction of NASA's Mars 2020 rover; A contest for children to name the Mars 2020 rover; A robot that juggles; high speed object tracking; an exo-vest that helps professionals who work with their arms overhead; and more...

Here is my favorite:

Some of The World's Most-Cited Scientists Have a Secret That's Just Been Exposed - In a new study from John Ioannidis and his Metrics Center, researchers report that of the top 100,000 most cited authors, at least 250 of the researchers have gained most of their citations from themselves. Ioannidis tells Nature that he thinks self-citation farms are more common than widely believed, and it has the potential to harm the integrity of the science. He notes that self-citation may well be legitimate, but when it appears as a high proportion of an author's citations, closer scrutiny could be in order. This topic has an interesting parallel with Steem's capacity for self-voting.

STEEM Human Anatomy #2 : Support System - In this #steemiteducation post, @tanyaschutte discusses the human support system comprised of the bones, cartilage, and connective tissues (ligaments and tendons). In addition to giving our bodies their shape, the 200+ bones in this system also protect the nervous system and organs like the heart and lungs. The post also notes that our skeleton is an endoskeleton because it is inside of our bodies. The post also offers some suggested questions for teachers, along with embedded youtube videos and links to other resources. (A 10% beneficiary has been assigned to @tanyaschutte for this post.)

Facebook is using Minecraft to build an AI assistant - Facebook researchers posted a paper on arXiv describing their work with an AI virtual assistant in minecraft. The software can be downloaded here. The company is making use of minecraft's 91 million users, its sandboxed environment, and the natural curiosity of minecraft players to give its AI plenty of practice.

The world’s most advanced nanotube computer may keep Moore’s Law alive - Carbon nanotubes are cylinders with walls that are the width of a single carbon atom. Transistors made from this material are faster than silicon, and up to ten times more energy efficient, but there are obstacles to manufacturing them at scale. Publishing in Nature, an MIT team now says they have found ways to overcome some of the biggest road-blocks. The team "has developed a working 16-bit microprocessor built from over 14,000 carbon nanotube transistors" and claims that it is the most complex design ever demonstrated. The manufacturing problem has always been that these nanotubes tend to clump, but the team found a way to remove the clumping by applying a polymer and than cleaning it off again, in stages.


Here is my favorite:

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Beneficiaries

Burn rewards - @null - 5%
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