Could this latest version of OpenAI‘s text generator be so good that it would fool you? And following on that thought could the concomitant reluctance to release the research be real or is it a publicity stunt? Here’s a sample of the text from the GPT2 AI model from a February 15, 2019 article by Mark Fraunfelder for Boing Boing, Recycling is good for the world.NO! YOU COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG!!MODEL COMPLETION (MACHINE-WRITTEN, 25…

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It seems to be to my week for being a day late. Here’s my Valentine Day (February 14, 2019) celebration posting. I’ve got two frog stories, news of a dating app for animals, and a bonus (not a frog story) at the end. Ethiopia For the last few years I’ve been getting stories about new frog species in Central and South America. This one marks a change of geography. From a February 12, 2019 news…

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This is some very intriguing work, “I’ve always felt that robots shouldn’t just be modeled after humans [emphasis mine] or be copies of humans,” he [Guy Hoffman, assistant professor at Cornell University)] said. “We have a lot of interesting relationships with other species. Robots could be thought of as one of those ‘other species,’ not trying to copy what we do but interacting with us with their own language, tapping into our own instincts.” A…

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One February event previously mentioned in my February 4, 2019 posting, ‘Heart & Art—the first Anatomy Night in Canada—February 14, 2019 in Vancouver’, is sold out! If you’re feeling lucky, you could join the waitlist (click on Tickets). I think the University of British Columbia’s Heartfelt images created by medical students will be featured at the event. The image below is from Heartfelt Images 2013, Turbulent Flow; 1st Place Credit: April Lu (VFMP) I love…

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February 11, 2019 was the International Day of Women and Girls in Science but there’s at least one celebratory event that is extended to include February 12. So, I’ll take what I can get and jump on to that bandwagon too. Happy 2019 International Day of Women and Girls in Science—a day late! To make up fr being late to the party, I have two news items to commemorate the event. 21st Edition of the…

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This charming illustration is the only pictorial representation i’ve seen for Kyoto University’s (Japan) proposed periodic table of nanomaterials, (By the way, 2019 is UNESCO’s [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements, an event recognizing the table’s 150th anniversary. See my January 8, 2019 posting for information about more events.) Caption: Molecules interact and align with each other as they self-assemble. This new simulation enables to find…

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How did those German scientists miss an opportunity to mention the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” and Raquel Welch (the bombshell of her day)? For anyone not familiar with the movie it, featured a submarine that the scientists entered before being miniaturized and … Raquel Welch, Stephen Boyd, and Arthur Kennedy in Fantastic Voyage (1966) [It looks like the scientists in thesubmarine are now gazing at some body part or other.]I’m not sure what part of…

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Artist: Robert Aragon. Courtesy: TidalWave Productions It would seem I wasn’t having one of my brighter days today (Feb. 7, 2019) and it took me a while to to decode the messaging about this Stephen Hawking comic book. Briefly, they’ve (TidalWave Productions; Note: The company seems to have more than one name) repackaged an old title (Stephen Hawking: Riddles of Time & Space) and included new material in the form of his life story. After…

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Ravinder Dahiya, Carlos García Núñez, and their colleagues at the University of Glasgow (Scotland) strike again (see my May 10, 2017 posting for their first ‘solar-powered graphene skin’ research announcement). Last time it was all about robots and prosthetics, this time they’ve focused on wearable technology according to a July 18, 2018 news item on phys.org, A new form of solar-powered supercapacitor could help make future wearable technologies lighter and more energy-efficient, scientists say. In a…

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Other that the promotional artwork, cover art and the title, the Backstreet Boys pop band does not seem to have taken science or DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid)/genetics to heart in their latest oeuvre. As for what chickens have to do with it, I I gather this is some sort of humorous nod to a past hit song. Still, I am weirdly fascinated by this January 25, 2019 video news item on Billboard, Having looked at the…

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