Katyanna Quach

One of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a pedestrian crossing the road at night because its emergency braking system was turned off, according to an investigation by the US government's National Transport Safety Board. The watchdog's four-page report released on Thursday is a grave reminder that today's autonomous vehicles are …

Scientists have found that the jets of ice and dust wafting from comet 67P are down to the way sunlight beams hits its unique rubber ducky shaped surface. In a paper published in Nature, a group of astronomers studied why the sublimation process was concentrated into jets instead of a homogenous cloud of material. A plume of …

AI Dev Con Intel announced a range of machine learning software tools and hinted at new chips on Wednesday, including its first commercial AI ASIC, the NNP-L1000, launching in 2019. Naveen Rao, head of AI at Intel, kickstarted Chipzilla’s first AI developer conference, AIDevCon, in San Francisco. Rao was CEO and co-founder of Nervana, a …

A trio of physicists reckoned they’ve figured out why some of Saturn’s moons are so oddly shaped, with some looking like giant floating ravioli and others imitating stubby baguettes. Saturn is most well known for its complex ring system and it is estimated that at least 62 moons are hiding amongst the structure so far. NASA’s …

Artificially intelligent software has found the next industry to potentially, as the kids say, disrupt – dentistry. A team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Glidewell Dental Lab have built a generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically generate new designs of dental crowns. GANs have been …

Scientists have discovered the first “interstellar immigrant” living among our Solar System's matter. Unlike Oumuamua, the asteroid that made headlines for appearing to be a gigantic spliff or a potential alien spacecraft, asteroid (514107) 2015 BZ509, affectionately known as Bee-Zed, has been circling the Sun for some 4.5 …

A team of scientists today reported observing beams of antimatter firing from a ferocious hurricane on Earth for the first time. Hurricane Patricia, the second most powerful tropical cyclone recorded so far, ripped through the west coast of Mexico in October 2015 drumming up winds of up to 215 miles per hour. It was the …

Roundup Hello, here's our weekly AI roundup. We have more information on how Google's sentence prediction in Smart Compose for Gmail works, as well as some questions about its Duplex robo-caller system. Also, decision trees to classify the mating calls of frogs and toads to study climate change. Too lazy? Let AI write your emails …

Astronomers have published the largest ultra-violet survey of the local universe, showcasing 50 active galaxies in high resolution using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The project nicknamed LEGUS (Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey) captures a whopping 39 million hot blue stars and about 8,000 star clusters within a 60 million …

Astrophysicists have detected the most distant signal of oxygen yet, in a galaxy more than 13 billion light years away, when the universe was less than 4 per cent of its current age. A paper published in Nature shows that the galaxy, MACS1149-JD1, was surprisingly mature enough to be forming abundant amounts oxygen at such a …

A team of computer scientists have built the smallest completely autonomous nano-drone that can control itself without the need for a human guidance. Although computer vision has improved rapidly thanks to machine learning and AI, it remains difficult to deploy algorithms on devices like drones due to memory, bandwidth and …

Astronomers have spotted the greediest supermassive black hole going through the fastest growth spurt some 12 billion years ago. The humongous hole, codenamed QSO SMSS J215728.21-360215.1, is the staggering size of about 20 billion suns, and grows at a rate of 200 million suns over a million years. It has a voracious appetite …

Hundreds of academics across the world have signed an open letter urging Google to stop working with the US Department of Defense in analysing drone footage using its AI technology for Project Maven. The open letter, which has nearly reached 300 signatures at the time of writing, was started by the International Committee for …

A universe containing life like ours is probably more common in the multiverse than previously thought, according to new theoretical studies. The idea of multiple universes existing in parallel has gained traction in the last few decades and boffins are throwing large chunks of computing power at the problem, testing out …

Roundup Here's a summary of this week's AI news, beyond what we've already covered. Oh no, not another robo caller The internet has been flooded with people raising questions about Google Duplex, an AI system that can supposedly make customer service calls on behalf of its human user. CEO Sundar Pichai announced the new feature on …

Nvidia continued to report strong numbers in its first quarterly results this year, despite failing to supply graphics cards to vendors on time due to a shortage of chips. During an earnings call on Thursday, CEO Jensen Huang, boasted that there was “growth across every platform”, and that the “datacenter business achieved …

Garry Kasparov, a former Soviet world chess champion and one of the greatest players of all time, has changed his tune about AI since he was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue. During a talk at the Train AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, Kasparov traced the steps that convinced him about how humans and machines might one day …

DeepMind researchers have developed a neural network loosely modeled on mammalian brains to craft an artificially intelligent program capable of navigating through mazes. The results were published in a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday. DeepMind seems to think its work lifts the lid on how brains really work. We think …

A team of researchers have developed machine-learning software that can predict how dangerous a particular strain of Salmonella will be, according to a paper published in PLOS Genetics on Tuesday. Salmonella is a nasty type of bacteria shaped like tiny jelly beans, and it causes stomach aches, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, and …

NASA and Uber have signed an agreement to ensure safe development of flying taxis in urban environments. At Uber’s second annual Elevate conference in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the company also revealed it plans to take Uber Air to the skies by 2028. Flying car illustration. Pic by Shutterstock NASA tells The Reg: For crying …

Astronomers have discovered the first exoplanet completely devoid of clouds, according to a paper published on Monday in Nature. WASP-96b described as a “hot Saturn” for its toasty temperature of 1,300 Kelvin (1,027 degrees Celcius or 1,880 degrees Fahrenheit) and a similar mass to Saturn, is located about 980 light years away …

The Sun will shed a large chunk of its mass to turn into a planetary nebula, a gigantic globe of luminous gas, as it nears the end of its life cycle. Low mass stars like the Sun will become red giants and then white dwarves when they die. Now, a paper published in Nature Astronomy predicts that in between those stages, the Sun …

Roundup This week's AI roundup includes an alarming report from California's Department of Motor Vehicles about how shoddy autonomous cars still are, a Waymo self-driving car crash, and some news from Facebook's F8 conference and its new job posting. Uh oh, not another self-driving car crash It’s Waymo’s turn to be involved in a car …

A team of physicists have uncovered evidence that the Moon may have had liquid water on its surface at one point. The team of Japanese and German researchers probed 13 different lunar meteorites using micro-Raman spectrometry, electron microscopy, and synchrotron angle-dispersive x-ray diffraction to work out the different …

The European Space Agency is looking to build a communications satellite to send data securely using quantum key distribution. On Thursday, it signed a contract with SES Techcom S.A, a satellite communications company based in Luxembourg, to develop QUARTZ (Quantum Cryptography Telecommunication System). Quantum entanglement …