Katyanna Quach

Thirsty astronauts living on the Moon may be able to extract water from the barren body, thanks to the power of the solar wind, according to NASA. Scientists have managed to simulate a chemical process that produces water on Earth’s satellite, and all it requires is the steady trickle of energetic radiation particles from the …

Adversarial attacks that trick one machine-learning model can potentially be used to fool other so-called artificially intelligent systems, according to a new study. It's hoped the research will inform and persuade AI developers to make their smart software more robust against these transferable attacks, preventing malicious …

PicAn amateur astronomer has discovered the oldest-known white dwarf star, sitting 145 light years away from Earth in the Capricornus constellation. Melina Thévenot volunteered to help NASA hunt for brown dwarfs by analysing grainy images of candidate stars taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope as part …

Grand Canyon visitors may have been exposed to tiny amounts of bonus radiation from buckets of uranium ore bafflingly placed in the National Park’s museum for nearly 20 years. Elston “Swede” Stephenson – the safety, health, and wellness manager working at the breathtaking American landmark – claims park officials failed to …

RoundupHere's a summary of what's been going on in the world of machine-learning, beyond what we've already covered, to kick start your week... Google ramping up AI chips: It looks like Google have hired a bunch of new chip engineers in India to crank up its efforts for building hardware for AI and mobile phone applications. The …

If you’re living in Earth's southern hemisphere, chances are you may be able to see some of the stars in a newly identified cosmic river that's flowed through the Milky Way for hundreds of millions of years. Astronomers say the freshly discovered gigantic cluster of stars is passing relatively close to our Solar System. The …

Cosmologists need gravitational wave measurements from 50 binary neutron star mergers to work out just how fast our universe is really expanding, according to new research. The cosmos has been ballooning ever since it was birthed from the Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago. Edwin Hubble, an American astronomer, discovered …

NASA’s twin probes studying Earth’s radiation belts are in the last stages of their mission – and will end their lives by nosediving into our planet’s atmosphere, the US space agency announced Thursday. The Sun constantly ejects streams of highly energetic protons and electrons that are deflected by Earth’s magnetic field. The …

AnalysisMost neural networks are like people with savant syndrome: they have extraordinary capabilities in a very narrow range of tasks. Now a new system built by researchers at OpenAI is more of a polymath, and has learned to perform simple language tasks without human supervision nor task-specific training. Modern neural-network …

NASA’s beloved Mars rover, Opportunity, has been officially laid to rest more than seven months after it was engulfed by a gigantic dust storm and fell silent. That planet-wide tempest of sand and debris in June was particularly powerful, leaving Opportunity’s solar panels saturated with material. Starved of sunlight, the poor …

AnalysisNeural networks trained for object recognition tend to identify stuff based on their texture rather than shape, according to this latest research. That means take away or distort the texture of something, and the wheels fall off the software. Artificially intelligence may suck at, for instance, reading and writing, but it can …

Pics, videoScientists believe they may have found a second meteorite impact crater lurking under ice sheets on Greenland. Researchers say they've clocked a hole measuring 22.7 miles (36.5 kilometres) wide caused by an ancient space rock slamming into our home world. The exact historical timing of the cosmic prang isn’t clear, though it …

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday kickstarting the American AI Initiative, a strategic plan to keep the nation ahead of its competitors in artificial intelligence. “Continued American leadership in Artificial Intelligence is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of …

RoundupHere's a quick summary of recent AI news to kickstart your week beyond what we've already reported. DeepMind sets its eyes on a new game: With Go, chess, old Atari games, and StarCraft under its belt, DeepMind is taking on a new challenge: the card game Hanabi. Unlike previous games, Hanabi is a cooperative game and players …

Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer, as the old saying goes. Well it isn’t true, it doesn’t matter what order you down your drinks, you’ll be hungover all the same. Ninety human guinea pigs, who were students of course, aged between 19 to 40 years old agreed to discover this the hard …

Astronomers are scratching their heads after discovering a protostellar disk around a young star containing a whopping amount of salts. Orion SrcI is about 1,500 light years away and is currently classified as a young stellar object. It’s a hefty star – fifteen times heavier than our Sun – and is still nestled in a nurturing …

The common honeybee is clever enough to do simple arithmetic, according to research published on Wednesday. Bio-boffins at RMIT University and Monash University in Australia, and the University of Toulouse, France, claim to have discovered this ability in bees over a series of experiments. Fourteen nectar slurpers were …

Astronomers believe they may have uncovered the first tantalizing evidence of two exoplanets that have smashed into one another, according to new research. Over short timescales, certain planets appear to be stagnant. Scientists have to find signs that they have undergone drastic changes that took place over millions or …

What’s the latest game artificially intelligent software can play, you ask? Well, it’s Pictionary. AI researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), in Seattle, USA, have built Iconary, an “AI-powered drawing and guessing game” inspired by Pictionary. You can play against a bot, AllenAI, with one of you …

NASA has said goodnight to its two experimental CubeSats, sent into space to monitor America's InSight probe as it landed on Mars, after failing to communicate with the gizmo duo since January. Scientists relied on the mini machines, affectionately named Wall-E and Eve after the robots in the Pixar film WALL-E, to relay …

AI is the latest recruit in the ongoing efforts to stamp out the scourge of human trafficking – by helping police figure out which hotels victims are being held. Hundreds of thousands of people are shuttled across borders every year against their will and exploited, most of them young women coerced into prostitution. …

PicNASA’s InSight lander has been revamped to let scientists study the interior of Mars for the first time. The lander’s seismometer was carefully placed on the surface of the Red Planet in December last year, and has now been enclosed in a metallic dome. The cap acts as a shield protecting the sensitive Seismic Experiment for …

RoundupHere's a roundup of this week's other AI news. In short: experts continue to snub Amazon's facial recognition service Rekognition, and there's a new deepfake for you to stare at in horror. China and the US are miles ahead: A study compiled by the UN World Intellectual Property Organization found that China and the US both …

Brainiacs have today revealed how they rejigged instruments aboard NASA’s Martian rover Curiosity to measure changes in the Red Planet's gravity over its surface. "Curiosity, essentially, has a new science instrument, six and a half years into its mission," said Kevin Lewis, lead author of a published paper describing the …

VidHere’s a robot you could take down the pub with you. It won’t bore you to death with politics and sport, nor add to your round, though it will kill time playing Jenga with you. Jenga needs no introduction, other than to say it requires dexterity and spatial awareness. Both of these things are pretty innate in humans but not so …